The Natural Patriot

Just now I felt the need, as I sometimes do, to just step outside and stand quietly for a while. Letting my breathing and heart rate ease into a quieter rhythm, allowing the soft breeze to wash away the cloud of small things clamoring for attention, gradually becoming aware of the slower turnings of the world around me.

It’s still dark in the early October morning, on the cusp of daybreak, and my first sensation is the smell of damp earth, always welcome and nourishing after a period of dry weather. Crickets drone all around, seemingly hidden somewhere distant and just within earshot. A few birds beginning to rouse. Overhead, thick clouds churn slowly in the first gray light, my neighbor’s great towering pecan tree silhouetted against them. A crow calls, the melancholy soul of autumn in these parts.

In front of me, only beginning to emerge in the dim light, is the new bed we planted a couple of weeks ago, the latest step in the gradual reclamation of the suburban yard and its transformation back to something resembling American Nature. The little perennials, looking forlorn in a sea of mulch, are fading as they go to sleep for the winter. But they’ve set in well and I’m happy knowing that we can look forward to the tiny first sprouts of a prairie of sorts beginning to come to life in March or April.

I learned a few lessons from the earlier phases of the experiment. This time, I used a flat-edged spade to cut the lawn sod into a grid and then overturned the chunks, pulling out what grass rhizomes I could. Then, to discourage the grass from coming back, covered the tumult with a layer of broken down cardboard boxes, pizza boxes, and old newspapers that have been accumulating in the shed for months before dumping a thick layer of mulch on top. That was a good vigorous day’s work.

Then, over the course of the next week, came the planting. Twenty-nine pots in all: 3 bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana), 5 purple milkweed (Asclepia sp.), 3 doll’s daisy (Boltonia asteroides), 5 star tickseed (Coreopsis pubescens), 5 purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), 3 aromatic aster (Aster oblongifolius), 3 Virginia cup plant (Silphium connatum), and 3 false indigo (Baptisia australis). Plus I had to dig up and move the old butterflybush, not a native but spared because it’s so good at attracting butterflies.

It’s an exercise in patience, since this will look much like any other planted garden bed for a year or three and won’t really come into its own as a diverse wildish landscape for probably several years. Nevertheless, we can certainly expect flowers in the spring, and butterflies and birds. Probably also varmints, which hammered some of my earlier native plantings — will have to remain vigilant there. Lots of hard physical work digging, turning sod, wheelbarrowing mulch, and so on, but it’s surprising how good that feels after sitting for weeks behind a computer.

One of these days I really have to write another real post, instead of sending out hat tips to other sites (as important as that is), rehashing my own posts under different cover, and other sleight-of-hand.

But for the moment, I note that Wren has invited me to answer a few questions in association with kindly featuring the Natural Patriot at the Nature Blog Network, a cool site that aims to be the “nexus for the nature blog community, the portal through which readers and publishers alike can locate the very best nature blogs on the net.”

The interview is here. Thanks Wren!

. . . is up at Cephalopodcast — this month’s round-up of blue bloggers (meaning ocean-themed, as opposed to morose and crooning about lost love or some such ill).

0940. Maupin Field shelter. A still, overcast contemplative day, early autumn crickets singing, an unidentified bird — or conceivably a frog — chirping monotonously in the muffled foliage. Green and moist. Dim in the forest. Made good time through the Three Ridges from our camp by the waterfall at Campbell Creek. Yesterday a heavenly dip in the cold pool below the the trickling waterfall — one of those golden moments that shines in memory. After two hard days of sweat and grime and hard climbing and rationing the last few ounces of water, we were cleansed in the natural spring.

A strong consciousness on this trip of the end of an era — my venerable old backpack, the Jansport “hatchback” that I coveted for months before buying it with money from my paper route (delivering the Washington Post from 8th through 12 grade, right through the Watergate years, which betrays my vintage), the pack that has seen so much mileage over the decades, my mobile home on the watershed 17-day hike one summer in high school through Georgia and NC from the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail — the tales this pack could tell. My trusted old friend will ride no more. Most zippers broken, the waterproofing flaking off, dry rot setting in, belt dysfunctional and killing my hips, shoulder strap tied on with a knot, the other one wrapped in duct tape. After more than three decades I’ve sweated through the mountains beneath this rig for the last time.

Farewell old friend.

No, I’m not talking about hay fever. This just in:

National Pollinator Week is coming up (21-27 June), and I just ran across this great website that offers free downloadable guides to improving habitat for these essential animals in your yard or area.  If you live in the USA, you can scroll down to the link on lower right (”Free pollinator friendly planting guides!”), enter your zipcode, and download a concise, illustrated guide that summarizes the importance of pollinators to the ecology (and economy) of your region, describes some of the important types of pollinators in your area, and — most useful of all — lists native plants of the region with their flowering times and characteristics, which allow one to engineer the habitat to support a diverse array of pollinators throughout the year.

There is also a really nice pollinator curriculum for grades 3-6 here. The curriculum includes a bunch of specific activities and lessons, even a community service module, that can be done with kids.

A few days ago, the little garden patch produced its first fruit (photo at right). It doesn’t like like much, I’ll admit, but every baby is beautiful to its parents.

Well, to be truthful, some of the things advertised in the title I already knew, and others I learned from trying to grow things outside in general, rather than from this particular zucchini per se. But the larger point is that growing things teaches one several important lessons that are difficult to get from the everyday, fast-paced, air-conditioned, hyper-caffeinated, homogenized, insular, virtual world that most of us inhabit.

The first and perhaps most pedestrian thing I learned is that I can do this.  Born in the suburbs and having spent most of my life foraging shrink-wrapped pseudo-food from more or less identical supermarkets throughout the 50 states and the world, even I can do this. It’s only one zucchini so far, but there are two or three more on the surprisingly gigantic plants out there, and a pile of green tomatoes ready to spill out of the patch and lots of basil. I’m optimistic about the beans and at least a few leaves of spinach too. And you can do it too (no doubt many of you could give me long lessons about this), with even a few square yards of soil or a few large pots. It doesn’t take much to get started, and then you start seeing all kinds of opportunities.

I learned to be keenly aware of the weather, and in fact to like rain. At least rain of a certain sort and frequency — gentle, sustained for a few hours, coming after we haven’t had any rain for a week. Now, instead of seeing rain as an annoyance as so many of us do in modern life, getting exasperated about getting my shoes wet on the way to the car, my skin feels like it’s gratefully absorbing the moisture as I think of the soil and little root hairs drinking up life-giving water, and the two rain barrels filling up to see us through the next week or so. Well, not always — I still get annoyed when I get soaked on the way to the car.

Most importantly, I learned that eating fresh produce has a satisfaction that is far deeper than just filling one’s stomach with the fuel necessary to keep tapping at the computer. Knowing the source of food, knowing its history, having seen it grow from a flower bud, through hot sun and rain, having tended it and checked on it every morning, heard the birds singing around it, maybe picked off a pest or encouraged a friendly insect, all of this gives eating a satisfaction not only to the body but to the soul that is impossible to appreciate without having done it.

And I didn’t even mention that it was the best zucchini I ever had — firm but tender, mildly flavored with no hint of bitterness, no seeds. Raw or sauteed in a bit of olive oil (I tried it both ways). I could almost feel the vitamins and healthful essence spreading through my body. Nourishment in a much broader sense that we usually think about.

OK, I’m off now to check the garden.

[Editor’s note: Following is Paul Hawken’s recent commencement speech to the graduating class of the University of Portland. It is so inspiring, so filled with poetry and wisdom, and so dead on the mark that I feel compelled to reproduce the whole thing verbatim. I have admired Paul Hawken since I read the equally inspiring book he co-authored with Amory and Hunter Lovins, “Natural Capitalism” (which I still have not added to the NP Essential Reading list where it belongs). Talk about thinking outside the box. He is a true Natural Patriot. Read this essay, ponder it, print it out to read again every couple of months, and follow his advice.]

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

Dear me.  First lightning bugs of the season out in the last few days and I haven’t even reported on this spring’s new incarnation of the Timberneck Biodiversity Restoration Project (translation for uninitiated: yardwork. Only more fun.). Well, it hasn’t been for lack of interest. Since I am off tomorrow for a overnight trip with the boy’s class, a brief tour of the highlights will have to suffice for the time being.  More to come soon, well, eventually anyway. There’s a lot happening out there.

The alert reader will recall that I made a resolution of sorts a year or three ago, inspired in part by Doug Tallamy’s wonderful book, to get serious about re-engineering the yard toward a landscape more in harmony with the evolutionary history of the local area, more hospitable to desirable wildlife of all sizes, less thirsty for imported water and industrial fertilizer, more pleasing to the eye and spirit, less work (?), etc. This has involved both a surprisingly satisfying campaign of piched battle against various aggressive and invasive alien plants, as well as a systematic plan to plant a wide range of native shrubs and perennials over the course of the next few years.  Oh, and a vegetable garden too. A major re-imagining of the property.

After starting tentatively last spring with a little butterfly patch and a few pots scavenged from a native plant sale, we decided to launch into this righteously and contacted our local native plant nurserywoman and guru, Denise Green, who produced a coherent plan to convert a large swath of monotonous green “grass” (mostly alien weeds, albeit many with little flowers that are charming in their way) into a structurally diverse sward of native flowers, grasses, and shrubs favored by butterflies and birds. The idea was to have this native landscape meld into an edible landscape that included an existing pecan tree at one end, and our little vegetable plot on the other. The plan is shown below.

So, long story short, I started with the area between the house and the shed, along the sinuous brick path. First the destruction: I cut down a gnarly old black cherry that was hugging the shed and constantly dropping dry sticks around, as well as a “grandmother tree” (Chinaberry) that had been split and broken up and resprouted many times and was basically an eyesore. Then covered the intervening grass area with old newspapers and pizza boxes and then heaped mulch over that. Into this I planted the shrubs — four highbush blueberry plants (of two varieties to ensure vigorous cross-fertilization), a small fig sapling (the only non-native), and an oak-leaf Hydrangea. Put them in in March and they are doing great!  Lots of big fat blueberries on the bushes (now covered with bird netting), the fig leafed out and growing well, the Hydrangea with two nice flower clusters.

Around the same time I installed a second rain barrel along the front of the house so we now have a capacity of 100 gallons (I hope to add a third eventually on the other side but that will require installing a gutter too, which is a bit more advanced than I want to tackle at this point). I haven’t tapped into the well yet this year.

Now the vegetable patch, at the other end of the edible crescent. Last year was my first hack at this and the results were what one would expect. I planted tomatoes, basil, rosemary, lettuce and probably something else I don’t remember. Basil is pretty tough to kill and it did accordingly well –  we had homemade pesto many times during the summer, always a hit. I got a few tomatoes but most fell victim to a fiendishly clever animal, which I have deduced must have been a raccoon because the villain actually pried apart the wire fence stapled to the timbers surrounding the plot (and, to add insult to injury, mostly took one or two bites out of each, then dumped it on the ground). The lettuce was an abject failure, started too late for one thing.

Anyway, I learned my lesson. Installed a heavier-duty fence with lots of staples and no door (I just hop over the short fence) — so far so good. Worked the whole winter’s accumulation of compost into the vegetable patch. Planted three varieties of tomatoes, giving them a bit more space than last year’s jungle, a bunch of sweet basil, two summer squash plants, two rows of green bean seeds, some spinach from seed, and a single pepper plant. Mulched them after they got established. And have watered them regularly with my collected rain. It helps that this has been a great spring for long soaking, gentle rains. Bottom line: all the vegetables are going crazy. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, the stunted pecan tree is coming into its own now that it has been released from the shadow of the old black cherry. In a few years, we should have good crops of pecans, figs, blueberries, and vegetables too.  Oh, and I am also weeding away and nurturing some volunteer blackberry brambles that came up in the general chaos of the yard edge.

Right. About the natives. Along the wasteland between the driveway and the vegetable patch, I have been waging war against the impenetrable privet thickets for a few years now.  The stuff is almost gone. And, to my delight, it is being replaced, right out of the woodwork, by a volunteer stand of Aralia spinosa, the “devil’s walking stick” — so named for its long naked single trunk covered with frightful thorns.  The spray of flowers turning to berries expected late in summer is supposed to be a favorite of birds. In the same area, vacated by the chopped down chinaberry, two native spicebush are taking off. And, also to my delight, the little patch of sensitive ferns I put in last March has come back and is spreading vigorously. As is the Joe-Pye weed planted in the butterfly patch, which is frighteningly buff — looks like it’s been watered with pharmaceutical effluent from a Major League Baseball clubhouse. The bleeding hearts also returned (see photo at top).

Stand by for photos of the insects attracted to this wonderland as it starts to bloom. Don’t look now but I’m thinking about a chicken coop next year . . .

[Just returned from two weeks in the Land Down Under.  After a workshop in Sydney, we flew to New Zealand and the family spent a week in Gisborne on North Island – Whale Rider country. Very beautiful – dramatic craggy coastlines, gorges through the mountains cloaked in Paleozoic vegetation, tree ferns everywhere, in the dim shade everything covered with mosses, liverworts, brilliant little coral-colored fungi, delicate creepers, ferns of all kinds. Then there is the ocean, which produced something completely unexpected:]

We’d been told by the restaurant owner next door that a dolphin has made its home in a small Bay south of here on the Mahia peninsula and reportedly enjoys, even seeks out, human company. OK. I’m a natural skeptic, and I’ve also been a marine biologist for almost 30 years, which means that the topic of dolphins regularly comes up from civilians at cocktail parties and what not. Everyone loves dolphins, wants to swim with them, share crystals, etc. But in general my sense has been that dolphins do not want to play with us. Why would they? So I nodded politely at all this.  But I was intrigued.  So with a cloudless blue sky and a free day ahead of us, the boy and I headed south to investigate. There are few roads in this neck of the woods so it wasn’t difficult to find our way and after an hour or so of driving we came on a beach – a beautiful strand framed by rocky headlands, which would surely be thronged with people and snarled lines of traffic anywhere in the USA.

But it wasn’t thronged, not in this awe-inspiring country where people are outnumbered by sheep. The water was calm and from the road we spotted a group of maybe ten figures wading in waist-deep water and, sure enough, on closer examination, a dorsal fin was intermittently visible. We hurriedly donned our swimsuits and jogged down the beach and waded into the cool water. There, an adult dolphin, perhaps 8 or 9 feet in length, was slowly cruising the shallows, carrying a diver’s fin on its muzzle, occasionally prodding the wide-eyed onlookers to toss it for him, circling around, enjoying (apparently) a gentle rub under the chin. We stroked his skin, which had the consistency of hard rubber, with a slick surface. We gamely tossed the fin, patted him as he swam by, dodged his misty exhalations, and generally watched in wonder at this strange phenomenon. The locals call him Moko, which I gathered from our Maori guide the next day is a shortened form of an affectionate word for a child that expresses its belonging to the whole community.  Evidently Moko has been a regular at this beach, hanging with the locals, for two years (two years and two days, one woman there told us).

We spent nearly an hour in the water with him, far and away the closest contact I’ve ever had with a dolphin, the boy (and I) enraptured and I reflecting on what a once-in-a-lifetime experience this was. It jolted me into pondering afresh what goes through the mind, by all accounts of an intelligence rivaling our own, of a dolphin? What could this being, this mammalian fish at home in its intricate seascape of clicks and whistles and echoes, its unfathomable intuition of the shoals where fish gather, the subtle, shifting, borders of watery currents in the sea, its strong family ties, what could this creature want with us? Is it an explorer as some of us are? The odd one that feels more kinship with other species than with its own kind, as again some people do? A lonely outcast from the conventional society of dolphindom? An eccentric?

And what does it feel as it weaves among the pairs of lumbering legs and through the cacophonous splashing and shouting of these apparently aware but unintelligibly strange creatures at the edge of the dry world? Does it know that these legs belong to the same creatures that are inexorably changing the watery world its ancestors have known intimately for some millions of years? How could it not know? Surely an animal with the intelligence that its brain size and structure and behavior suggest it possesses could not have escaped the realization, the connection, between us and the growing sickness of its underwater home, that the noisy boats and nets and hooks that relentlessly drag away its food and habitat are operated by these same curious bipeds. Surely the dolphin, its kind if not this individual, has made the connection, as its eyes breach the surface along its wide wanderings, between the density of humans and the sediments and trouble washing off the land to murk up the adjacent sea and confound its sonic seascape? Could this individual even be a missionary of sorts, a lone voice in the deteriorating marine wilderness attempting to make contact in the desperate hope that, for lack of a better word, love might turn the tide? Almost certainly we will never know.

And it suddenly strikes me as perverse that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars launching modern-day rosetta stones into space and monitoring the faint trickle of cosmic electronic noise at the far reaches in a grandiose search for “intelligent life” in the distant universe, somehow – astonishingly – missing that the most incredible manifestations of intelligent life are immediately under our noses, and all we can think to do with them is render their carcasses into meat and oil, or wrench off their long tusks to make baubles and leave the rest rotting on the savannah in view of their own children, or confine them behind plate glass with a beach ball.

What exactly do we mean by intelligent life?