Kimmerer describes her friendly relationship with her neighbor, Paulie, and their frequent chats about life in general and the management of their rural upstate New York properties. She tells an anecdote about a day when Paulie was waiting for some workers to arrive in order to artificially inseminate her cows. Kimmerer reflects that mosses, unlike cattle, have evolved a wide array of reproductive strategies. Some mosses exhibit high reproductive effort, with much of their energy devoted to reproduction, and others exhibit low reproductive effort. Some repeatedly create huge numbers of “poorly provisioned offspring,” while others delay reproduction, investing their energy in growing stronger and surviving until they are well-established (70). Disturbed or unstable environments favor moss species that show high reproductive effort. Parent plants are always at risk of dying, themselves, and early, frequent reproduction makes sense in this context. It also creates genetic variety among offspring, conferring possible adaptive advantages on the next generation. On the other hand, the random mixture of parents’ genes during sexual reproduction also risks losing beneficial adaptations from generation to generation. For this reason, there are also mosses that utilize clonal expansion to reproduce.