The more I re-read and think about this article, the less meaning I find in it. There's a fair bit of lamenting, but it's ultimately difficult to ascertain what

The more I re-read and think about this article, the less meaning I find in it. There's a fair bit of lamenting, but it's ultimately difficult to ascertain what exactly is the issue the cause and the consequences of this great uprooting to any further granularity than: things are different than they used to be and it's never going to be the same. This is true, but to what end. Will we truly end in civil war or anarchy because I don't live on the Italian countryside of the great grandparents I've never met? As far as the metaphor of rootedness: a plant does not wither and die upon being uprooted if it is planted in new soil in a reasonable amount of time (in fact, international houseplant shipping is done bare-rooted due to phytosanitary regulations). Upon replanting, the plant will go into shock and probably have a few weeks/months/years (depending on the size of the plant) of acclimation where you'll see no new growth. Perhaps it will die if the new environment is not offering good conditions. In the right conditions, you don't even need the full plant with original roots, you can just take a cutting off many plants and grow new roots in water or moss, then transplant to soil. In the houseplant community, propagating plants through cuttings in this way is much more common than reproduction by seed.