Jargon-Free Gardening

I just did something I love to do: surf the net looking at pictures of beautiful gardens. They’re so inspiring, especially when I look out my window on a late September morning and view my weedy, out of control garden. Next year I’ll plan better and stay on top of things, I like to promise myself.

Ancient Egyptians used "permaculture," too!

There was something off-putting about the surfing this time, however: I noticed all the trendy technical mumbo-jumbo. Perhaps because of my full-time career in academia, I’m sensitive to the over-use of jargon. These garden photos proclaimed their association with big words that actually belie simple origins. For example:

• Permaculture = the way our grandparents gardened
• Bio-integrated = the way our grandparents would turn the chickens into the garden to clear the weeds and eat the bugs
• Polyculture = the way our grandparents gardened because they wanted to have more than one crop to eat throughout the winter
• Regenerative gardening = taking a beat up patch up earth and gardening it the way our grandparents gardened.

It makes it even worse that most of the photos include some 20-something couple with their free-range toddler, their hair unmussed, and their skin clear of dirt even after a day of permaculture gardening in their cute little L.L. Bean Wellies. Sometimes one of them is holding a happy-looking chicken. There is almost always a dog present, a dog that apparently loves to wear bandanas around its neck.

Why does this bug me? Let's face it: I'm jealous of that couple! But a more intellectual reason is because it turns gardening or small-scale farming into a technical, textbook, jargony pursuit that, to me, goes against what’s beautiful about these techniques: that they are letting nature takes its course. Save the multisyllabic words for the GMO industry, please!

Another: because it’s all too trendy. If you tell people to eat better and exercise more to lose weight, that sounds boring and slow and hard - and anyway, that’s what their parents used to tell them and they’re sick of hearing it. Instead, they want a diet with a name and industry behind it: books, websites, expensive packaged goods coming in the mail. Same with gardening. If you tell people to take care of the soil and use mulch and compost to keep it healthy, and to reduce pesticides and herbicides because they’re ultimately polluting and harmful, and to get down on their knees and do some weeding, and to plant some flowers in the garden because they’re pretty and will draw nice insects - all that sounds boring and slow and hard. But tell them that they’re part of the “permaculture revolution” or the “regenerative farming movement” or the “trend toward urban polyculture,” then maybe you’ll grab them (and their money and support and presence at your public lecture).

Unfortunately, trends don’t last. And science and technical stuff are great, but they’ve also gotten us into some trouble when it comes to gardening and farming. What all these fancy names and trends stand for - getting back to nature - is supposed to be the antidote to all that. It’s supposed to be where the relationship between humans and nature becomes easier, clearer, more impulsive, more real.

So surf the web, grab some ideas, appreciate the fresh young beauty of millennial farmers as they stand outside their trendy tiny house. But then go plant something and enjoy watching it grow. Let your hands scoop into the soil. Appreciate the process. And call it something simple, like “gardening.”

The Individual vs. the Species

I recently read an amazing book: American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, by Nate Blakeslee. It tells the story of the release of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, and it follows “characters” in a novelistic style: the wolves themselves, the elk hunters who hate the wolves, the politicians, and the various employees of U.S. Fish & Wildlife who have to balance the science, the wildlife, and the politics. It’s a fascinating read - just the kind of book I would love to write. 

One of the tensions described in the book exists between those who see wolves as a species and those who see wolves as individuals. It is easy to fall in love with the individual wolves as Blakeslee describes their struggles to survive, find mates, protect their young, hunt and feed, and maintain their territory. A wolf life is a hard life, and you can’t help but admire an individual who is particularly good at the game or overcomes enormous obstacles to come out on top. When a hunter kills Oh-Six, a magnificent wolf with an online following from around the world, her loss destroys the pack altogether. Oh-Six’s fans are so enraged that they come together to turn the local anti-wolf political tide.

Wolves chasing bull elk in Yellowstone.
Photo by Doug Smith, Public Domain.

For hunters and many FWS employees, however, the emphasis is on the species. As long as the species is healthy and has sufficient numbers to survive, the loss of individuals cannot matter. Hunters have played a role in maintaining the health of many species, either by promoting habitat or culling overpopulated numbers. To them, the presence of too many wolves lowers the number of elk drastically, meaning that hunters cannot enjoy hunting as many did before. And before you start dismissing these hunters as nothing better than the trophy hunter who killed Cecil the Lion a couple of years ago, remember that many hunters are subsistence hunters, providing meat to their families that would otherwise be unaffordable or because they believe that meat from the factory farming system is unhealthy.

I started reading another book a couple of years ago about scientists trying to figure out bird migration and nest-building patterns among migrating songbirds. They would wreak havoc on individual birds in order to understand the species better. For example, they would kill or relocate males to assess how and when other males would move into their territory. I was so upset that I couldn’t continue reading. I kept thinking: what do those individual birds care about the species? You’re ruining their lives! I feel the same when I hear about efforts to keep nearly-extinct species extant by caging them and raising them in captivity so that maybe they can be released into the wild someday. If we could ask these individuals whether they wish to sacrifice themselves as individuals to save their species, what would they say? And yet how can we sit by and not do everything possible to keep species from going extinct?

Laos Cattle Keeping, photo by ILRI Stevie Mann.
CC NY-BC-SA 2.0

All of this seems to boil down to what “use” we see animals serving. And culture matters here. Those of us who are taught to see animals primarily as pets or as objects to be viewed at a zoo may be more likely to anthropomorphize them, or give them the human qualities that allow us to see them as individuals. Those whose cultural context shapes them to see animals as populations to be studied or managed are able to look at the woods rather than the trees. And then there are those people in the world who live closely with animals as part of their livelihood; they seem able to take both views at once. They have to distance themselves from the animals as individuals in order to herd, transport, or kill and butcher them. And yet, living so closely with them, they come to notice and admire their individual traits and tendencies, what many would insist are their “personalities.”

Who is right? Which attitude is best for the short- and long-term wellbeing of wildlife? It’s hard to say. Maybe we need the combination of perspectives, and the push and pull of debate, to reverse the harm we have done to the world’s wildlife. And Blakeslee's book offers a poignant reminder: we must also try to understand one another and the human experiences that we bring to the debate.