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.”

Driving My Dad, Part 2

Last week I wrote of my dad's civil engineering view of nature and the growing belief over his lifetime that nature should be put in service of humans. I was thinking a great deal about his perspective during my recent month-long stay in Beijing, China, and its environs.

Over the last ten years, China has embarked on the world's largest reforestation program, spending as much as $100 billion planting trees. In case that passed by you, let me repeat it: ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS.

China has done this in response to some pretty dire environmental (and economic) concerns: desertification, soil erosion, air pollution, and runoff into waterways. But recent data shows that this effort has been useless at best and disastrous at worst. Non-native, genetically engineered, and ecologically inappropriate trees have been planted where trees previously did not exist. Monocultures of poplar and other tree species have been planted, inviting disease and insect infestation. Mixed-growth forests have been felled and plantations of "economically useful" (such as rubber) trees planted in their place.

A tree-planting program in Hebei Province, glimpsed from a bus.

What was immediately apparent to me in Beijing was the fact that tree-planting programs had been conducted in defiance of basic ecological and biodiversity approaches. I saw rows and rows and rows of one species of tree, each individual exactly the same age and size, planted exactly the same width apart, with no weeds or undergrowth allowed. One recent study showed that biodiversity actually declined when agricultural land was reforested with monoculture plantings in China: bird species took a modest hit and bee species a drastic one.

At the Temple of Heaven, imperial building styles show symmetry and clean lines.

Always thinking like a cultural anthropologist, I immediately wondered if there must be some cultural preference for this kind of planting. Vague notions of “feng shui” came to mind, something about harmony and order. I had noted the perfect symmetry and clean lines of many of the imperial buildings we visited in Beijing, such as the Temple of Heaven. They were surrounded by parks and gardens characterized by these same too-perfect plantings. I remembered feeling oppressed in such places, even as I admired their beauty, because of that carefully constructed perfection. I was also creeped out by the lack of wildlife and insects, other than magpies and a couple of other bird species that I saw again and again.

The symmetry and clean lines continue into the plantings of the Temple of Heaven park.

A bit of research suggests that my assumptions about culture were both right and wrong. Traditional Chinese gardens were, yes, very composed, but in such a way as to fill the human eye with a mixed portrait of trees, flowers, water, rocks, and buildings. Each vista was intended to provide a diverse offering of human-nature interactions brought into harmony and accord. Interaction with the West in the 19th century and beyond brought a new fashion: green grass, neat plantings of trees and flowers, and long views of lawn. It turns out those oppressive parks I saw represent a Western aesthetic taken to a Chinese extreme.

The Purple Bamboo park in Beijing, showing the traditional Chinese garden style.

I think the monoculture tree plantings represent a syncretism: the ancient Chinese love for composing nature for human pleasure, combined with a Western love for taming nature for human control, combined with a contemporary Chinese belief in planning nature through science and technology for human benefit. The scale of Chinese planning is breathtaking. The cities in North China are running out of water, so the Chinese government is rerouting some of the Southern rivers and piping water up to the North. The desert is growing, so the Chinese government is planting acres and acres of eucalyptus trees in hopes of containing it. Beijing has a lot of smog in part because there isn't enough wind to blow it out, so the Chinese government is building tall forests that will reroute the wind to and through Beijing.

I see a lot of Dad's point of view in the way that China is managing nature today. I hear echoes of my father saying, "All the big problems in the world today are engineering problems." But there is something deep within me that rejects the idea that nature can limitlessly serve humans and be addressed primarily through engineering, and I can't help but feel that China's failing reforestation efforts prove me right.

Bake Sales for Crabs

I wrote a blog post for the City Creatures Blog at the Center for Humans and Nature! Please read it by clicking on this link.

Back from the Brink

I was just skimming over my nature notes from this time last year and recalled an amazing week. It was a busy week, and I couldn’t have spent more than 40 minutes total walking outside. But in those 40 minutes walking up and down my country road, I saw three amazing things: a bald eagle, a mink, and an eight-point white-tailed buck deer. Why is that so amazing? Because all three species have been pulled back from the brink of extinction thanks to concerted human effort.

"Bald Eagle Head 2" by Tony Hisgett CC BY 2.0.

The sight of a bald eagle is still a thrill for me because I remember a time when it was such a rare sight. Now the bald eagle is listed as “least concern” and “population increasing” and has been taken off the endangered species list, with over 6,000 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states. Their endangerment was caused by a whole host of factors: habitat encroachment; poisoning by DDT, lead shot, mercury, and other toxins in the prey eagles consumed; and shooting by ranchers and others who considered them a pest. Some of these explanations are considered controversial, as are all claims by environmentalists that threaten an industry or way of life, but what is clear is that a combination of efforts taken over the last decades has worked well. Federal and state agencies and individuals have worked hard to protect habitat, outlaw the shooting of eagles, and reduce use of toxins, and will continue to do so in order to ensure the bald eagle survives.

"An American Mink in Capisic Pond, Portland,
ME" by Chuck Hemler CC BY-SA 3.0

By the early part of the 20^th century, wild mink were in trouble because of the demand for their fur. This conservation story is a mixed-happiness one: the wild population was saved because of the increase in mink farming. Mink farming is not a nice industry, and the animals are subject to a great deal of cruelty. Mink were farmed in the U.S. and then exported to Europe, what was then the U.S.S.R., and South America to fill the high demand worldwide for mink fur coats. Escapees from mink farms outside the US are now an invasive species, out-competing other native small mammals and reducing bird populations through egg predation. In the U.S., mink farm escapees, bred to be smaller and have thicker pelts, are changing the genetics of the wild population, which may have important long-term effects. But for now, this story shows that, when we stop over-hunting a wild population of animals for whatever reason, the population has the potential to rebound quickly and stabilize.

"Whitetail Deer" by Garett Gabriel CC BY-SA 3.0

And the white-tailed deer. It is hard to believe today, but that population was in severe decline by the end of the 19^th century due to hunting for meat and buckskin by Native Americans and settlers of what was then a relatively small population, as well as the removal of food sources through heavy logging in forests. There is historical evidence of concern for deer populations; one New York locale had deer laws as early as 1788 that established a season for deer hunting! Throughout the first half of the 20^th century, feeding of deer combined with limits on both season and numbers brought the population back. The clearing of forests ultimately aided the deer, as it provided edge habitat - the meeting of forest and field - that deer prefer. Now, of course, the white-tailed deer population is too big, and they have become pests: harming agriculture and private gardens, destroying new growth in forests, and decimating the habitat of birds and other animals, not to mention causing car accidents. Now many forest and wildlife conservation efforts include the hunting of white-tailed deer.

"American Bald Eagle" by rightclicks
CC BY-SA 3.0

What seems to me to be the most important common denominator in these stories is a change in culture. Conservation efforts are the nuts and bolts of the rebounding of endangered populations, but most important of all, they change our mentality about the importance of animals. Eagle poaching began to decline in part because of stiff financial penalties, but today I’m certain it is kept in check because people have come to see the bald eagle as a somewhat sacred symbol of our national identity. Trapping of minks, beavers, and other animals have declined as the demand for furs and pelts have declined; even mink farming is on a downward trend. And hunters have become some of the best conservationists over the course of the 20^th century, realizing that animal populations and their habitats must be managed carefully in order to ensure that the sport of hunting can continue. (In fact, I would argue that we need to encourage more of a hunting culture in this country.) Now we must turn this concerted human effort toward other species facing extinction, and that will be the subject of my next blog.

Mowing Up with the Joneses Part II

In Part I, I described some of the historical causes and environmental consequences of the American love for grassy lawns. One of the explanations offered by Ted Steinberg, author of American Green, is prestige: the valorization of a neat, mowed lawn trickled down from the wealthy aristocrats of Britain to the working class of the United States over many decades, as individuals, counties, and homeowners associations came to feel that a neat, green, mowed lawn expressed a certain level of class. I think prestige is an important explanation for this and so many other human behaviors and preferences.

But why a neat, monolithic green lawn rather than something else, say a lawn covered in rose bushes or expensive stones from some far-off land? I think there is another explanation here, which also applies to a great many human behaviors and preferences.

One theory that has been prevalent in cultural anthropology over the last century involves the idea that human cultures are built on binary oppositions that structure relationships between people and things in each culture. For example, male/female is an important binary, and each society will have its own culturally-formed ideas of what are “male” and “female” behaviors, dress, roles, activities, etc. For some anthropologists, such binary oppositions reflect structures in the human brain that force us to think about the world in this way. For others, these are cultural constructions that have no biological or psychological basis. One of the problems with this human tendency to order society around binary oppositions is that one side of the binary is valued more highly than the other. Thus, the theory goes, sexism exists because most or all societies value the masculine over the feminine.

Another important binary seen across societies by anthropologists is nature/culture. The cultural life of most human societies rests on subjugating nature. Religion seeks to tame our natural impulses and instincts. Laws about marriage seek to control our bodily desires and legitimize offspring. Agriculture is all about bringing nature into tune with human rhythms of time and space. And so on. Societies generally value culture over nature, and in some ways nature comes to be seen as the enemy of culture.

This theory may explain in large part why we breathe a sigh of relief when we look out of our windows and see a neat, green lawn. Our lawn mowing and other practices have tamed nature. Rather than a variety of colors, we see a smooth green, accented in a controlled way by flowers we bought at Home Depot, guaranteed to a look a certain perfect way that is a far cry from their wild, original versions. All the scary insects and animals, such as snakes and spiders, don’t have much of a chance in short grass completely exposed to our human eye, especially if we use pesticides on the lawn. Some people even fight to the death against any plant or animal that mars that perfection. Our former neighbor was at war with clover and dandelions, obsessively bringing out the Roundup and re-seeding any little patch in the lawn. (And you don’t want to know what he did to the rabbits and groundhogs.) I always wondered how he felt as he looked across the fence at our messy lawn, with yellow dandelion flowers poking up in spring, white clover flowers in summer, and little bees buzzing all around (at least, that is, until my husband sacrificed them to the blades of the mower).

One of the critiques against the theory of binary oppositions is that they are overstated by the anthropologist, that actual human behaviors and preferences are much more in flow and flux between and around these binary structures. There are certainly groups and societies that value nature as well as culture, and ecologists and anthropologists study small-scale indigenous groups to learn how we can better live in an integrated, sustainable way with nature. Furthermore, critics argue, these binary structures can change over time. So there are people today who are happily living with weedy lawns or planting wildflowers to attract snakes and spiders and all the biodiversity that comes with them, to the yard. In other words, according to this take on the theory, we’re not necessarily naturally inclined to a neat, green lawn; it is something that has been given to us as a preference by history and our circumstances. And prestige. And thus it can be changed. We may always prefer culture over nature, but the content of that relationship can be altered.

In Part III of this series, we’ll take a look at how some individuals and groups are converting lawn into a little slice of wilderness, answering recent calls to forms of prestige that seek to bring a little nature back into the cultural world of our lawns.

The Asphalt Cage

Every morning I have an hour-long commute from rural central Maryland to rural south-central Pennsylvania. This morning I began, as always, with a 10-minute stretch on I-70 East, blinded by the morning sun, battling seemingly angry and demoralized commuters heading to D.C. and Baltimore, before blessedly turning off on back roads, where the mountains and trees soften the sun and the few drivers on the road are a little slower and more relaxed. As I drove past all the familiar forests and pastures and streams and cows and goats and sheep and geese, my body and mind began to relax.

The great German social theorist Max Weber wrote of the “iron cage” of modernity. He was writing in the early 20^th century, trying to envision where Western, capitalist, industrial society was heading. In part, he argued, it was headed toward further and deeper bureaucratization, efficiency, rationalism, and so forth. Where we become social security numbers instead of people, census and poll takers rather than citizens, and people whose time and ability to navigate life are in the hands of low-level state bureaucrats rather than family and community members. Eventually the iron cage will imprison us, Weber argued, taking away our freedom, autonomy, and joy. I think we can all feel that iron cage at times.

But this morning I was thinking of a cage made of asphalt rather than iron. How much of our lives do we spend hurtling down an asphalt road to hell, in danger from the crazy drivers around us, our backs hurting from sitting too long, our only window on nature the little blur of trees and mountains we can see through our windows and windshield? And have you noticed how complex parking lots have become, with divisions and subdivisions and stop signs and arrows marking the direction of traffic? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been trapped in a shopping center parking lot, unable to figure out which of the exit-like turns is actually an exit that will finally allow me out of the shopping center!

But this morning I was concerned even more with how much of nature is now carved up by asphalt. Take a look at how wide some of our multi-lane roads are now: much too wide for most birds to traverse, too dangerous for deer and other mammals to cross, and effectively cutting an ecosystem into pieces. I just googled some best guesses as to how much of the U.S.’s land surface is paved, and it’s probably around 61,000 square miles: about as much land area as the state of Georgia. As for the portion of the planet’s land surface that is paved, probably around 0.2%. That is small in quantity but potentially huge in effect. And I cannot imagine that this percentage will do anything but grow rapidly as populations swell, development of infrastructure increases around the world, more goods need to be trucked to more places, and urban centers require greater connection to each other and their hinterlands.

A part of me loves to get out in my car and drive. It feels like such freedom! But I fear that the asphalt cage, in addition to its negative effects on us and our lives, is gradually imprisoning nature, taking away its freedom, autonomy, and joy.

Nuisance Human Beings

I went to a wonderful talk last week on “Wildlife Encounters” given by an employee for a state wildlife agency. His office is one that deals with “nuisance” animals. They include deer, bear, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, bats, snakes, and woodpeckers, as well as others. There are several reasons they become “nuisances” for human beings. They come into a yard, scare people, and harm or eat pets. They eat garden plants and landscaping. They hole up in attics and poop everywhere. They drill holes in homes to dig out insects. They run across roads and cause us to hit them with our cars. They cost us money in insurance claims and extermination fees.

But there is another way of looking at the issue. In most cases, it seems, we create the problem. Animals such as bears and raccoons would not normally want to come so close to houses and yards because they consider humans a threat. But they do so when we provide ready food sources, such as garbage piled in the yard or by the street. The speaker pointed out that almost all bear sightings near houses occur in the early spring, when bears are coming out of hibernation and hungry; they fall off in early summer, when natural food sources for bears are in ready supply. The most successful bear-avoidance strategy is removing garbage from open places, such as placing garbage outside on the morning it will be picked up rather than letting it sit there for days at a time.

Deer would not normally take the risk of spending time eating backyard gardens if they were not hungry because of overcrowding. In many places around the mid-Atlantic where I live, there are four or five times the number of deer per acre than the “carrying capacity” of the land will allow; that makes for a lot of hungry deer behaving in ways that are not natural to them (including eating backyard gardens and even eating baby birds in the nest). Overcrowding of deer leads to diseases that affect humans, such as Lyme Disease. [On a side note, because I’m also a grammar and punctuation freak, please note that it is simply “Lyme” Disease, no s or ‘s at the end!] The most successful means of treating the problem of deer overpopulation is hunting them, and unfortunately lots of well-meaning people actively oppose hunting or seek to over-regulate it.

I asked the speaker if his agency ever has a seat at the table in discussions of new housing developments, and of course the answer was no. Development is rampant in my area, swallowing up woods and pastures in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. We’re crowding wildlife into smaller and smaller wilderness areas and then considering them “nuisances” when they come onto our property. The speaker explained that, once an animal has become habituated to humans and human neighborhoods, there is no going back. Moving a “nuisance” bear to another part of the woods doesn’t work; studies of tagged bears show that such bears will continue to seek out humans and grow bolder and bolder about approaching homes, campsites, and cars. Thus the slogan “A fed bear is a dead bear.” State wildlife agencies, and the animal removal agencies with which they contract, generally no longer catch and release. A “nuisance” animal that is trapped will be euthanized. A very sad end to this particular story of the relationship between humans and nature.

What would happen if we started to see ourselves as “nuisance” humans? What if we thought a bit about the world from the point of view of wildlife and then acted accordingly: stopped putting pet food and garbage outside, considered deer movement flows and put up fencing accordingly to keep them out of our gardens, watched to see how squirrels and bats were getting into our attics and then simply filled those holes, drove a little more slowly and carefully during the deer rut, and so forth? What if we planned development a little more carefully, to decrease the amount of land fragmentation that resulted, or to allow some habitat to remain in large developments so that animals were less likely to come into our yards looking for food and shelter? What if we accepted well-planned hunting as a necessary solution to an unnatural problem? And what if we stopped letting our fears of animals get the best of us? As always with nature, how we perceive it affects how we act. The question is: can we change our perception?

Valentine's Day Animals

Google “Valentine’s Day and animals” and you will find a wealth of links to sweet photos and stories about how animals love each other; kiss, hug, and otherwise embrace; and form lifelong bonds. It’s true: there is a lot of love out there in the animal world. A friend was just telling us of his dog’s despondency and death after her elderly dog companion was put down. The same behavior has been documented among songbirds, who mostly mate for life, and may sit by the body of a dead mate for hours or days. Mammals love to snuggle against other warm mammal bodies, as seen in the above photo of two very cuddly pet rabbits I used to have.

Really, the animal world is a mixed bag, and we get into dangerous territory when we start anthropomorphizing, or giving human characteristics to, animals. Songbirds may mate for life and mourn the death of a mate, but male mallards gang rape lone females in a terribly violent way during the mating and nesting season. Guinea pigs, horses, and parrots should never be kept alone as pets because they need the companionship of others of their kind to remain healthy psychologically, but golden hamsters will fight and kill each other if kept in the same cage as adults. Even those sweet bunnies in the photo above only reached that bonded state after several weeks apart as I slowly and carefully introduced them to each other amid a great deal of aggression. Plenty of animals spend their lives in solitude and some are aggressive toward each other when together. You won’t see those photos in an online article on Valentine’s Day!

So why do we need to show animals in love? What are we trying to say about ourselves and them? Perhaps we are acknowledging our own animal nature and hoping that, if bunnies and kitties and squirrels and piglets can love each other, then we can love each other, too. This is why animal examples are so risky; some evolutionary psychologists and biological anthropologists have used the mallard and other examples to suggest that rape is a “natural” behavior among human men. Another possibility: perhaps we want to believe that the animals around us are able to enjoy love and other emotions at the levels we do, that they lead highly satisfying emotional lives, especially as our pets. This is risky as well and leads to a lot of hand wringing when we feel we are causing animals harm or not doing our utmost to care for them. I really don’t have answers to this question, but what I do know is that this view of animals and love is a construction that is highly specific to certain societies in certain places.

Take as a contrasting example what anthropologist James Suzman writes in this New York Times article about his experience with the Ju/’hoansi, hunter-gatherers who live in southern Africa and are more commonly known in the U.S. by the old-fashioned and inapt term “the Bushmen of the Kalahari”. These are people who live very close to animals and know them well because they must know them well to hunt them successfully and survive in their world. Suzman argues that they empathize, rather than sympathize, with animals:

For them animal empathy was not a question of focusing on an animal’s human-like characteristics, but of assuming the whole perspective of the animal. Their animal empathy defied verbalization. To empathize with an animal you couldn’t think like a human and project your mind-set into it; you had to “be” the animal.

But this kind of empathy did not persuade Ju/’hoansi and other hunter-gatherers to feel sympathy for animals or assume a duty of care for them. Rather it made people focus more on the non-human behaviors of animals rather than what they had in common. Among people who considered themselves to be just one of many different kinds of animal-people in a wild environment, hunting, death and pain were parts of everyday life. Human compassion did not extend to other species.

Suzman goes on to suggest that people like those of us reading this blog post or his article are different because we live in a world in which animals have evolved and been bred to please us. Our animal world consists of pets, animals trained to delight us at zoos and aquariums, round-eyed cartoon animals who make us cry and laugh, and even wildlife displayed as entertainment in nature documentaries. We think of animals in terms of what they do for us and then conclude that, doing so much for us, they must love us, and that, loving us, they deserve our love. And there we have a whole bunch of human emotions all wrapped up in our relationships with animals.

Suzman is not saying that the Ju/’hoansi way is better, and neither am I. He describes their behaviors towards the dogs who live among them in ways that, from our perspective, seem abusive or neglectful. At the same time, I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy - or good for animals - that we anthropomorphize them to the extent that we do. What I want to consider is that we interface with animals through a construction that we have formed of them and our relationship to them, a construction that has not been and is not the same in all times and places. We also construct ourselves and our view of our humanity through them, which makes me think that all of those Valentine’s Day articles on the internet may tell us a lot more about ourselves than they tell us about the animals they feature.