for laurie lange

On Beauty ( the zen garden piece)

Enjoyed this essay on the garden, with it’s mélange of the wild and untrammeled along with the measured planning of garden paths. It’s a subject dear to my heart as a gardener, and so interesting to hear what another gardener thinks and how she sees.

There are some choice quotes here:
“Every garden worth its salt becomes paradise by being both a safe refuge from the madness of the world and a field of action within the cacophony of this very world.”
“Consult the genius of your place in all things and plot paradise with every breath as you garden.”
“Don’t just consider your own joy at the surprise lily fragrance: think of the delight of the ball-headed cabbages as well.” ---I especially like this conceit about the cabbages.

And splendid advice for drylands dwellers:
“If you live in the desert, please don’t replumb paradise and create acres of emerald lawn and sunken water gardens on arid land. “

…a lesson we still need to pay more attention to in New Mexico. Among landscape customers, there’s been rather a surfeit of folks wanting water features in the last decade. Understandable, how do we quench our thirst for the refreshment of water here, its sounds, and those verdant colors not plentiful here that water promotes? I’ve come up with some solutions to that question; we need a lot more to assuage varied tastes.

And I concur with this gardener in her comment that how the garden is marked out and defined is of primary importance. I learned this thoroughly in one of my New Mexico gardens. It was in an old cattle corral, below a windmill and a “dirt tank” (the term ranchers use for a pond by the windmill) that had gone to grasses. There was a distinct layout there already with the enclosure of the corral, but I planted orchard trees outside the corral, and found myself perplexed about where my garden was, until I fenced around the whole, orchard and garden combined. Then the weeds extending in all directions no longer called me to attention. I knew what to tend and what not to; the fence provided a way to delineate where active attention was required and where attention could be of a more contemplative sort, unmoved by any need to perform garden tasks. The end of that confusion was a distinct relief.

There is also a visual energy flow to be mindful of in garden layout. Even if the garden is enclosed, it’s useful to create a visual pathway out, The Way Out. This is where and how the garden joins the world, and how we, in the paradise we’ve carefully nurtured, find spatial reflections of within and beyond, of safety and venture, for all the things we may be musing on when we go to the garden. Here in Albuquerque, I especially try to find this for people with a view of Sandia---and especially for the watermelon moment at sunset when she blushes all-out red.

Farmer in Chief

Michael Pollan hits a lot of nails on the head. He has done so in this letter to Obama. I like the idea of calling the changes we need in fod production solar farming; that relates it to our energy shifts away from fossil fuels and I think suggests forward positive change to people.

The appearance of the White House vegetable garden this past summer had something to do with this open letter. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that the press followed up on it after the announcements that Michelle was putting it in. I kept trying to imagine who and how it was going to be tended---that would have been some good human interest coverage to further promote backyard vegetables.

I hope Pollan's mention of Wes Jackson's work at the Land Institute is the beginning of more press for the efforts underway there. If we can perennialize our major food crops it will save a major amount of energy and water (I thought Pollan could have focused on how much water it takes, and the concept of virtual water, a little more) in food production. Both perennial grain crops and virtual water are pretty new concepts, and publicity for these forward-thinking ideas is good.

Just 2 nails weren't hit quite squarely. Seems to me we need to forego meat on the menu more than just one day a week. One day a week doesn't provide much experience cooking altenatives. The other square hit I believe we need in an open letter is to clarify the thinking that the meat industry produces "waste". It is only waste because we think of it that way. In nature there is no such thing as waste. All manures can be recycled back to the land, where they are one of just 2 major natural sources of nitrogen fertilizer---the other being the legumes fixing nitrogen from the air. So to start thinking sustainably, i.e. in terms of the natural planetary cycles that sustainability is really all about, it's useful to begin identifying manure as a resource rather than as waste.

Polymers are Forever.

A couple years ago I realized for the first time that plastic is a resource. What that means is that, after the impact-intensive process of creating it from petroleum, we should reserve it for things with essential functions, like computing, drilling, sawing and cashier’s drawers, and not for trinkets, disposable water bottles and the merchandise packaging that every year now gets more difficult to pry off the goods, where it’s designed to make the object of our desire look bigger than it really is.

Nurdles are sobering stuff. I knew about the rubber duckies who now float around the world. I wasn’t aware that plastic bits have become food for zooplankton, working their way up through the food chain. Nor was I aware that we can now beautify our skin with plastic exfoliants. Or that there was any such thing as a nurdle, and certainly not that they’re magnets for PCBs and DDT.

Woe on us clever humans. In the book Ishi, Last of his Tribe the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber records in the frontispiece that Ishi, who was captured and went to live in the Anthropology Museum in Berkeley, where he gave demonstrations of how his tribe before annihilation made fire from flintstones---looked on us as children, smart but not wise.

I wrote Precautionary Principle all over this article. Some years ago the city of San Franciso adopted the precautionary principle. Haven’t heard how far they took it. The principle seems to have dropped from significant mention, but we need to bring it back. It posits that instead of organizing the introduction of new substances (eg plastic, DDT) and processes (e.g.AC electricity, wi-fi, neither of which humans were evolved for exposures to) so that the substance/process ends up proven unsafe by harm to those subjected to it, that the burden of proof instead be on those who want to introduce and profit from it---think GMOs, RGBH, and on and on.

In the short term, it appears there is really nothing we can do about all the plastic we’ve released into the environment. I am intrigued, however, with the epochal time frame mentioned at the end of the article. That it took microbes a long time to learn to eat plant lignin and cellulose, and that perhaps microbes will be able in an epoch or two beyond us to learn how to digest plastic. It reminds me of a wild idea I heard this summer from the body-work community: that if we do obliterate the feasibility of human survival on the planet, there is always the possibility that the viruses (swine flu perhaps?) will carry human genes through to start human-like life here again. Not able to immediately check facts here, but isn’t it the case that viruses live by incorporating themselves into our DNA to replicate themselves? A wild idea that may not be so wild from the human perspective if that’s correct.