One Punk’s Guide to Pollinator Conservation By Emma Alice Johnson

Originally ran in Razorcake #134 (June/July 2023)A current runs through poems and memoirs of people finding nature after experiencing trauma. That’s what happened to me a few years ago. Heck, that’s what happened to a lot of us at the start of the pandemic, if the boom in seed sales is any indication. But I also experienced a more acute trauma around the same time, and it hit me so hard it knocked me out of my self, out of my whole life, and left me rolling around screaming until out of desperation I grabbed onto the earth, stuck my hands in the dirt, and held on until I found a new me. That new me is inextricably linked with nature, with the plants and creatures who surround me every day that somehow, in the process of growing up, I had forgotten how to see. As a kid, I saw them. I’d chase beetles and hold somber funerals for the grasshoppers who passed away in my care (’80s kids: remember that bone candy that came in tiny plastic coffins? Perfect for grasshopper interment). On early