The Solace of Green Spaces

Irises at Armand Bayou Nature Center

Our lives have been upended with Tom's diagnosis of cancer. The clinical trial he participates in requires travel, and we are also working to settle an estate of Tom's aunt. 

Just a few days ago, Tom asked, "Are we going to have a garden this year?" Gardening has long been our shared hobby, from the very first years of our marriage when we had a gardening plot on Texas A&M University property as undergraduates and graduate students. There is solace in growing things, in being reminded year after year of the magic of a dry seed becoming a living plant. Gardening is hope.

We may not have a garden this year beyond my herb garden and the plants that flourish in our sunroom. And so we seek other green spaces for solace.

On a recent visit with our son in Texas, we checked out Armand Bayou Nature Center, near where our son lives and works. It was a lovely cool spring day, the second best kind of day in Texas to me, the first being a lovely cool, clear day in October or November. We started out taking the boardwalk, admiring Louisiana irises blooming on the edges of ponds and spotting alligators and many turtles. At the Interpretive Center we spent about 30 minutes talking about invasive species with a young woman with a display chart. Then we headed out to some of the trails. We walked part of the Ladybird Trail in order to meet up with the Prairie Interpretive Trail. Tom, whose master's degree is in native grasses and his Ph.D in forestry, wanted to see up close the restoration efforts of one of the last remaining stands of Texas tallgrass prairie.

One of the educational plaques on the Prairie Interpretive Trail included a photo of bison. "Did buffalo live in this area of Texas?" I asked Tom. He answered yes, and I tried to imagine herds of 1000s of buffalo foraging in an area that now is mostly home to petrochemical plants.

Later, on the Discovery Trail that led us through the restored Martyn Farm, we stopped to look at the two live bison there on display. They seemed as calm as cows, and it took some effort to imagine the long-gone time when millions of these animals thundered across the great plains of America.

Tallgrass Prairie Restoration Project, Armand Bayou Nature Center

At 2500 acres, the Armand Bayou Nature Center is the largest urban wilderness in the United States, according to its website, and its peaceful retreat is a balm in this part of Texas. Just that morning a fire had broken out at a nearby waterfront tank farm. Tom and I had spied the smoke from the Fred Hartman Bridge as we drove to our son's home. As the days went by, the fire increased, and a heavy cloud of smoke hung over Deer Park and much of the surrounding Houston area. Although at first the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality assured local citizens that they had nothing to fear from the fire, the organization later had to warn people that hazardous levels of benzene were detected in the air, and people were cautioned to shelter in place. Toby Baker, executive director of TCEQ, compared the environmental devastation of that fire to Hurricane Harvey:

Baker, who noted there is still a significant amount of those substances on site, rattled off a variety of stunning figures to demonstrate the breadth of response to an incident he said is the most serious he's seen since Hurricane Harvey: Nearly 184,000 barrels of contaminated water collected, an estimated 100,000 barrels of petrochemical product spilled, hundreds of response boats and nearly 2,000 response personnel on the scene.  (Kiah Collier, "Texas Environmental Chief: There's Still a Fire Risk at Deer Park Facility," The Texas Tribune, 4 April 2019)

 At a time when the Trump administration is rolling back many environmental regulations, it's even more important for citizens to support places such as Armand Bayou Nature Center and to demand that the government strictly enforce the regulations that keep our air and water safe and clean. I thought of this as I watched that dark cloud grow to the north of Armand Bayou Nature Center. Just a shift of the wind, and that cloud would be above us at the Center, with cancer-causing benzene filling our lungs. 

And so we ended our walk at Armand Bayou Nature Center, a study in contrasts: the good work of people trying to salvage green spaces in a steadily growing urban area and working to save the environment versus the toxic stew from a company that had been notified and sued several times in the past for its lax environmental controls.

Father and Son

In Search of a Lovely but Subversive Lawn Aesthetic

At no time do I understand better the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" than when I contemplate American lawns, with their rigid borders and carpets of lush grass. Even before we moved to the dry West, I was struggling to create lawns that winked and nodded at our national obsession with shortly-cropped grass while incorporating more subversive landscaping--planting or just encouraging native flowers and grasses, with their shaggy beauty; incorporating gardening in border areas of a front yard; leaving dandelions to grow in grassy areas and ignoring those brown spots caused by disease or insects. But I always left enough lush green grass to prevent the neighbors from assuming I was an anarchist --or something. 

The American lawn is an Industrial Lawn:

Plant diversity is minimized; grass predation by insects is controlled by insecticides; weed species are controlled by herbicides; new, genetically-altered grass strains are designed to withstand applications of potent weed killers; fungal attacks on grass are thwarted by fungicides; the addition of fertilizers substitutes for naturally occurring nutrient cycling; droughts are avoided by irrigation; and mechanical soil aeration compensates for the absence of a soil structure that promotes natural aeration. (F. Herbert Borman, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Gaballe. Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony. Yale University Press, 2001)

In other words, the American lawn is pretty much an environmental disaster-- all that run-off of pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers and the demands of irrigation from 20 million acres of residential lawns. 

The America lawn also communicates socioeconomic class, status, maybe even patriotism or political leanings --or even the mental health of the home's inhabitants. Neighbors often make assumptions about homeowners by the state of their lawns. Most of us want our neighbors' goodwill, and so we submit to the the demands of the "Majoritarian Authoritarian" lawn. If social conformity doesn't work, there is often formal law to make us give obeisance to the European aristocratic ideal of a well-kept lawn:

...[I]n a great many jurisdictions of the United States, formal law, otherwise known as local public ordinances and private land use deed restrictions, regulates the length of grass or "weeds" in the front lawn. Chances are if the front lawn measures more than six inches in height, a violation from the public weed inspector or the homeowners association is soon to follow. Oftentimes, these grass or weed height ordinances do not make exceptions for alternative landscapes such as wildflowers. (Asmara M. Tekle, "Law and the Authoritarian Aesthetic of the American Lawn." Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Journal, 2011. Online)

I am all for democratizing my lawn, but I'm not ready to open the borders to all the seeds blown into my property in this very windy country. I'm searching for a lawn aesthetic that does less damage to the environment while still being pleasing to the eye--or at least pleasing to me. Here in an area that receives only 10-12 inches of annual precipitation and that is also experiencing a moderate drought, that means wise irrigation. The person who built our house in the 1980s put in an extensive irrigation system that subsequent owners did not maintain. Pipes swelled and burst, leaking water under black landscape plastic and gravel that a subsequent owner had installed. We have abandoned all of that broken system except the lines to the vegetable garden and a small apple orchard and have placed drip hoses in our garden and in flower beds along the house, where more water-thirsty plants also get additional run-off from the roof. Currently, I'm also catching precipitation run-off in buckets; I want to replace those with rain barrels or maybe even a cistern if we get ambitious.

But what about the lawn? 

We have a small front lawn planted with fescue which we mow occasionally. Tom is thinking of slowly replacing the water-thirsty grass with a native, drought-hardy grass, but that will take time. In the meantime, I'm giving my attention to the back yard and one side yard, leaving the other side yard to fate for the time being: the soil there has been compacted by previously parked automobiles and now serves as our wood lot.

Here is the a look at the backyard, as of yesterday morning:

partial view of our backyard

and turning around to take a photo in the opposite direction

We live in an ancient volcanic field, and the ground is full of rocks, with thin soil above. To put in the foundation of cross ties for the chicken house, Tom had to use a pickax to dig out the rocks. Digging in the backyard recently to plant some purple coneflowers, I hit rock within three or four inches. My plan is to amend the soil enough along the back fence (which our property shares with a pasture) so that I can plant fairly drought-hardy flowers that will need occasional watering with an irrigation hose I will place along the fence. In the meantime, I am trying to identify native flowers and plants that grow with very little water and that have propagated naturally. My standard: if I like the looks of the plant, I'll not pull it up. 

The green plants along the fence are a type of annual (native) sunflower. Neither Tom nor I have been able to identify the white flowers, but they look like a type of brassica. Pollinators love them.

close-up of what we think is a brassica but which we have been unable to identify

I tried planting wildflower seeds I purchased online from a garden supply store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but the seeds sprouted poorly, probably because they needed a lot more water than I provided. Those I planted in flower beds next to the house which have better soil and receive more water, sprouted and thrived. The thin top soil dries out very quickly here, which is why I'm planning to amend the soil along the fence and let the rest of the back yard fill with native plants that require little or no watering. The landscape naturally remains brown here until the monsoon season starts in July.

A species of low-growing Erigeron (fleabane) grows in the disturbed areas of the front and side yards. I'm encouraging these. The flowers close in the evening and open as the sun warms them up.

I love this species of globe mallow, which I am encouraging in many areas of the yard.

I am less fond of this member of the mallow family (Malvaceae)--Cheeseweed or Little Mallow (Malva parviflora)--lower right-hand corner of photo. It's low-growing and very invasive. The seeds sprout everywhere; the flowers are white.

Cheesemallow (see photo above) was introduced from Europe and, according to A Field Guild to the Plants of Arizona, by Anne Orth Epple, is "a common weed of fields and open lots" and is "boiled and eaten by Native Americans." I would like to have a bit more information than the author provides on that last claim, though.

Another plant introduced by Europeans that I thought I would like because it remains green for so long and is very drought-hardy, is horehound. A great crop of it grew in the backyard until I realized just how invasive it is and how irritating are its clingy, sticky seed pods. I dug a lot of it up, but the seeds sprout by the thousands, and plants still remain in corners of the yard and along the edge of the pasture next door. The herb is "highly unpalatable to livestock" according to Wikipedia.

horehound (Marrubium vulgare)

Common purslane (Portulaca oleracea), another plant introduced by Europeans and now naturalized, grows well here, too. I'm just not sure how much of it I want to grow in the wilder areas of the yard; I've been digging it up in a front yard flower bed. I know that it can be eaten as a salad green, and as a teenager, I tried it once.

Common purslane

One flower that blooms brightly in pastures and along roadsides during the rainy season is what I think I have identified correctly as Paperflower (Psilostrophe tagetina). I've found only one bunch on the edge of our front yard, but I hope to introduce more into the backyard. Anne Orth Epple describes it as being "a many-branched, aromatic, rounded plant" which is also "poisonous to sheep." We don't have any sheep, so no worries there.

Paperflower (Psilostrophe tagetina)

In Georgia, I grew a lovely tall species of native Gaura, and here in Arizona, I have found a couple of species in our yard--Scarlet Gaura and Lizard-Tail Gaura--but I have yet to take an adequate photo of the Lizard-Tail Gaura. The stems and flowers are very dainty and not very conspicuous, but I'm tending a patch in the side yard near the apple orchard, and it's growing naturally with other grasses and native flowers between the chicken yard and pasture fence.

Scarlet Gaura (Gaura coccinea), also, Scarlet beeblossom, plains gaura, butterflyweed

a patch of Scarlet Gaura growing in the side yard near the apple orchard

Anne Orth Epple notes that these flowers are pollinated by moths at night. I'm hoping that these moths aren't the same ones that begin as tomato hornworms, which we have been pulling off our tomatoes and feeding to our chickens--poor hornworms! The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center describes these as "rather weedy plants," but I like to think of them as "ethereal." That's my aesthetic, anyway.

I have noticed in our yard two of the nineteen species of verbena that can be found in Arizona, but I haven't accurately identified the most prolific one, which reminds me of cultivated verbena. I am encouraging these flowers, as well as what I think is a horse-mint. 

I think this is New Mexico Vervain (Verbena macdougalii), but it might be another variant of vervain. "Picture-booking" plants is neither an easy nor accurate enterprise.

A second purple-flowering Vervain is in the lower right-hand corner of this photo. I am also encouraging the plumed grass, which I have not identified yet.

Horse-mint (Agastache pallidiflora)

The flowers of the horse-mint are inconspicuous, but I have a soft spot for horse-mint as it grows prolifically in areas of my home state of Texas, where I have fond memories of first identifying it.

There are other volunteer plants in my yard that I have yet to identify but which I like for various reasons--the color or shape of their stems, the smell of their leaves when crushed. My plan, at this point, is to identify as many plants as I can, encouraging the growth of those I like, transplanting more to fill in bare areas. In the back yard, I'm arranging a pathway that will meander through plants that will never be mowed, though I will certainly have to tend them by weeding or thinning. In the side yard near the apple orchard, I hope to have a little meadow of wild flowers that I will mow only around the edges, near my cultivated flower beds. That's the plan, anyway.

I love the color and shape of the silvery-stemmed plants in the background (a type of sage?)

Volunteer wildflowers in an untended area at the edge of the front lawn--globe mallow, Lizard-tail Gaura, fleabane (flowers not open yet for the day), pink evening primrose

A quote attributed to May Sarton reflects what I feel about gardening: "Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace."

Gardening and writing have long been for me ways to combat loneliness, a consequence of moving often and of a personal tendency to seek solitude. 

The Myth of Our Stewardship of the Planet?

Photo from the 1870s of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer.
source of image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting

The way we are burning through fossil fuels and creating a climate that will have (and has already had) devastating effects on the planet, its people, its animals, its plants, its countries reminds me of what I read in a book about Red Cloud, leader of the Western Sioux during those peoples' last fight with the U. S. government. I recalled this bit of history when I read Bob Drury's and Tom Clavin's The Heart of Everything that Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend. In 1840, though already depleted, the bison of North America still "number[ed] upward of 25 million to 30 million, nearly double the 17 million Americans counted in [the U.S. census of that year]." By the early 1860s, the buffalo had disappeared from the Platte River Valley, where Red Cloud had spent his younger days, "having lost the battle for the corridor's already scarce water and vegetation to the 100,000 head of cattle and 50,000 sheep that passed through the territory annually."

Drury and Clavin describe the rapid demise of the massive buffalo herds:

A solitary hunter equipped with an accurate large-bore Sharps rifle could fell up to 100 buffalo in a single stand, and this technology marked the beginning of a Plains-wide slaughter that within four decades would reduce an estimated 30 million animals to less than 1,000. It was the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in human history, far worse than what the world's whaling fleets had already accomplished, and, as Sitting Bull was to lament years later, "A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell. A death wind for my people."

 In 1869, the Union Pacific Railroad was completed across southern Wyoming, Northern Utah, and into the goldfields of Montana. The wide open West suddenly became even more accessible to buffalo hunters with those 50-caliber Sharps rifles who could kill thousands of buffalo in a short amount of time. The white hunters took only the fur and the tongues, leaving the huge carcasses to rot on the prairie. The U. S. government promoted this massive slaughter as a way to subjugate the Plains Indians, who depended on the bison for food and clothing, and to force them on reservations. The slaughter also made way for cattle ranching--with its own devastating impacts on the environment of the West. 

It is difficult for me to read this history and not get depressed over our current grappling with massive environmental degradation: we seem to be systemically unable to curb or control our voracious appetite for destroying this planet. We dress up our dreadful maw in words we hope to disguise the rotting carcasses of our environmental rampage: "Manifest destiny," "civilizing the natives," "economic growth," "job opportunities," "regulation over-reach." We slaughtered the bison that once were so numerous a herd could thunder by for days; for our sins, we then put the image on our coins and in nostalgic paintings that represent a West we say we yearn for yet willfully destroyed. 

The negative reactions to President Obama's climate deal with China underscore my worries that we will not be able to face successfully the greatest challenge of our time: global climate change caused largely by fossil fuel usage. Even as a supporter of this initiative and of other movements to curb carbon emissions, I can't completely subdue the doubts I have about our real commitment to mitigate the negative effects of the dangerous levels of carbon in the atmosphere.  The article to which I have linked above in Mother Jones notes that the deal with China includes "[e]xpanding funding for clean energy technology research at the US-China Clean Energy Research Center, a think tank Obama created in 2009 with Xi's predecessor Hu Jintao." All of this sounds wonderful, but I am also reminded that during the Obama administration, hydraulic fracturing (or, fracking) has been touted as  a "clean" fossil fuel. Another Mother Jones' article, "The Chevron Communiqués," explores how "[u]nder [then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's] leadership

the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe--part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel.

How "clean" fracking is, however, is very much open to debate, as research suggests the environmental consequences of this process, from an increase in earthquakes to  well water contamination to methane leaks to the possible health hazards posed by the chemicals used in fracking. The fossil fuel industry's protective tendency to downplay any hazards makes many people all the more suspicious of those claims to "clean energy." In a public forum that I attended last night at Lakeshore High School in Mandeville, Louisiana, one person testifying for a local oil company unequivocally stated that contamination of St. Tammany Parish's drinking water by fracking was "absolutely" impossible. The industry's secrecy also raises suspicions. The U. S. State Department's first shale gas conference in August of 2010 included "delegates from 17 countries," other departmental agencies, and industry representatives--but the media was barred from attending. And the fact that U. S. oil companies are "snapping up natural gas leases in far-flung places" calls into question just what our government is promoting--good stewardship of the earth or the bottom line of industry giants such as Halliburton and Chevron, in their world-wide attempts to wring the last bit of profit from diminishing fossil fuels?

Government and industry fail to engender the trust and commitment needed to make real changes in energy use, and few people seem to understand the global impact of their energy choices. This short-sightedness was particularly brought home to me in a single event at the public forum in Mandeville, Louisiana, led by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources but requested by the town of Abita Springs and Concerned Citizens of St. Tammany. One of the representatives of Helis Oil and Gas Co., had just described all the extra efforts the company "promised" (but has not committed to legal contract) to ensure the safety of its fracking operation and asked what more could the company do. "Drill somewhere else!" a local citizen yelled. Many in the crowd shouted and clapped in agreement, waving "Don't Frack St. Tammany" signs. It was difficult not to be sympathetic--such is the pull of tribal allegiance--but at that moment my support wavered and disillusionment increased. If we are concerned only with our little patch of paradise, we've learned little about global environmental degradation. Will it take the last drops of fossil fuel, just as it did the few remaining bison of the millions that once roamed the American West, to teach us the folly of our rapacious plunder of the earth? Too bad the lesson doesn't seem to stick.

Science has proven that global warming is driven by fossil fuel usage, and we need a united front--citizens, industry, countries--to cut our carbon emissions to prevent massive changes to the planet as we know it--but we may be too late. We already may be standing on the bones of our failure to fulfill what must have been a fantasy of our stewardship of this planet.

Leaving the untilled edges

at the edge of my yard

A few days ago, Tom and I were talking about gardening practices, and he remembered a story that one of our pastors told in a sermon years ago when we were young and still attending the Baptist church. This preacher used a farming story as an analogy for sin. He said that early Norse farmers had a practice of leaving the edges of their fields in weeds; they did not till up to the edges of their fields. Now, Tom didn't know how true this story of Norse farming was, and in several minutes of searching on the Internet, I couldn't find any reference to Norse farmers leaving the edges of their fields untilled. However, that's the story the Baptist preacher told; he probably got it out of a book of illustrations for sermons.

 So, what, according to this pastor, was so bad about leaving the edges of one's fields untilled? Weeds would flourish there, seed, and then disperse throughout the tilled land, infiltrating the harvest. A field with untilled edges is like a person who leaves just a little bit of sin in her life, the pastor said. That little bit of sin will spread its seed and poison the pure actions of a Christian. The Christian should be careful not to follow the practices of pagans; sin must be weeded out of every area of one's life. That Norse farmer would have a better harvest if he pulled out every plant not associated with the fruit of his harvest. 

This story struck us because it emphasizes a worldview that is inimical to any kind of chaos, that prefers an authoritarian control, that categorizes everything as good or evil, black or white, sin or innocence (and innocence is suspect). It's a worldview that preaches "dominion" over the earth, as if humans are the ultimate arbiters in and over Nature.  And it's a worldview with devastating consequences.

When every bit of arable land is pushed to the maximum in farming practices, the natural world suffers. Habitat is destroyed, and the creatures that depend upon that habitat are diminished as their habitat is diminished.  According to a comprehensive survey of American bird life in a report titled "The U.S. State of the Birds,"

[m]ore than 97% of the native grasslands of the U.S. have been lost, mostly because of conversion to agriculture. As a result, grassland bird populations have declined from historic levels far more than any other group of birds.

You see this worldview of authoritarian control over nature in suburban yards, where all the grass is one species, poisoned and pummeled to punish any plant that dares to raise its inflorescence above the height required by neighborhood lawn control. An unholy number of lawn and pest control products enable suburbanites to become little dictators to nature: herbicides and weed killers, fungus and disease control, algae and moss control, animal repellents (deer, rabbit, snake, mole, bird, bat, goose, cat and dog repellents), pest controls of all kinds. According to a 2002 fact sheet of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Americans use more than a billion pounds of pesticides each year to combat pests on farm crops, in homes, places of business, schools, parks, hospitals, and other public places." (my emphasis)

Everyone knows that our addiction to pest and weed control is hurting us and the planet, and yet we continue to slather the stuff on our lawns and public spaces. It just goes to show how powerful a metaphor can be: the American lawn is a stand-in for the soul--weeds and pests are the dark stain of "sin." Untidy lawns, the untilled edges of a field, are indications of moral failings.

So let's exterminate the metaphors that equate the natural world with sin.

 And leave the edges of the field untilled.


note:
Advice for creating a healthy yard, from Audubon

Reflections on Gulf Sea Life, Ocean Trash, and Oil

heart-shaped oil deposit we found on the beach at Grand Isle, LA

This past weekend my husband and I spent a couple of nights on Grand Isle, Louisiana, where we walked the beach and the mosquito-infested trail in Grand Isle State Park and toasted our 34th wedding anniversary over a dinner of shrimp and flounder. (The shrimp was so-so, my husband's flounder the better choice.) Except for the occasional balls of oil we found on the beach and the oil platforms we could see from the beach, nothing much reminded us of the huge BP oil spill of two years ago.

Every morning the public beach is mechanically swept clean, and a person in a motorized cart picks up the larger pieces of trash that might otherwise clutter the sweep of sand where folks set out their towels and beach chairs and unfurl their umbrellas and aluminum-poled sunshades. And BP is doing its part to lure tourists to the Gulf states, assuring us all that everything is just wonderful on the coast.

On the surface, things don't look so bad. A closer look provides a more disturbing view.

On strolls behind the mechanically-swept beach, we noticed hundreds of small pieces of plastic and swaths of the terribly invasive water hyacinth that clogs bayous, rivers, and lakes, and, when washed out to sea, dies in the salt water that then deposits the stuff on beaches. In the state park one morning, we watched some guy on a tractor disk the beach and pile the water hyacinth in drifts of sand behind the reach of surf and tide, and on the public beach, we watched plastic water bottles, Styrofoam, and a huge plastic bag wash up in the surf in a matter of minutes. In the debris behind wind-deposited sand, we noted hundreds of colorful plastic bottle caps, faded by salt and sun, and occasional tar balls.

On the beach in the state park, Tom and I were glad to see dolphins cavorting in the surf just beyond the rock jetties. But then I spied something large, gray, and fleshy protruding from the shallow water between the beach and the rock jetties, near where people were setting up their fishing lines. A closer look with binoculars indicated a dead sea mammal, probably a dolphin.

In March of this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report that describes "'unprecedented' harm to dolphins in the area of the 2010 spill, a vast stretch of the Gulf south of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts and the Florida panhandle," according to an article on the environment in National Journal. The article provides some of the horrifying statistical details:

Carcasses of 675 dolphins were recovered in the region between February 2010 and February 2012, or roughly 337 each year, the report said; the average number of “strandings” annually in the northern Gulf from 2002 to 2009 was 74.  And the 159 carcasses recovered in Louisiana waters after the spill was eight times higher than the historical average, the NOAA scientists reported.

In addition, nearly all of the 32 live dolphins captured and studied in Barataria Bay, one of Louisiana’s hardest-hit areas during the spill, were underweight, anemic, and suffered from liver or kidney disease, and half had abnormally low levels of hormones, the study said. The symptoms “are consistent with those seen in other mammals exposed to oil,” the scientists said.

Other damages to sea life have been observed, as well, including "horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp," according to an investigative piece on Al Jazeera's website.  We're being told, of course, that Gulf seafood is safe to eat, but the impact of BP's Gulf oil spill of April 2010 won't be fully known for years. For instance, scientists have also found higher concentrations of heavy metals in oysters, but they "don't yet know how trace metals like those found in the oysters move through food chains, or what effects they could have on high-level consumers, including people."

Tom loves oysters, and I know he will be unhappy to learn that other threats beside oil spills may be taking oysters off the menu. We focus on local and regional threats such as the BP Gulf oil spill, but that oil spill is just one horrific drop in the ocean. Climate change is affecting ocean acidification and threatening oyster reproduction, coral reefs, and other kinds of ocean life.

Our throw-away lifestyle threatens ocean life, as well. I am currently reading Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them," which is full of astounding bits of information, such as the following:

Depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today's marine debris--the preferred bureaucratic term for flotsam and jetsam--is made of plastic. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, according to a 2004 EPA report, the United States still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, and in that sewage are what the Environmental Protection Agency charmingly calls "floatables"--buoyant, synthetic things: Q-tips, condoms, dental floss, tampon applicators. [I spied two pieces of pink plastic tampon applicator pieces on the beach at Grand Isle.]

and

Globally, we are currently producing 300 million tons of plastic every year, and no known organism can digest a single molecule of the stuff, though plenty of organisms try.

When Tom and I toasted our 34 years of marriage at The Lighthouse on Grand Isle, I added a hopeful wish for 34 more years of married life. I wonder what a stroll on the beach will be like in 34 years. Will there still be a beach at Grand Isle? Will oysters be on the menu?

other links:

"'Hug the Monster: Downplaying the Climate Threat Won't Work as a Survival Strategy," by Joseph Romm, at grist.org, 7 May 2012.

"Afloat in the Ocean: Expanding Islands of Trash." by Lindsey Hoshaw, for The New York Times, 9 November 2009.

"Fish Consumption Advisories," for the state of Louisiana, on the website of Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Twice the Size of Texas

I have read several articles over the past several months about the huge gyre of trash in the Pacific Ocean that turns in upon itself, pulling in more and more detritus from our throw-away lives. Today's New York Times had another story on the Pacific garbage patch, "an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas." The idea that not one but several such tremendous toxic turds of human waste exist is really rather difficult to comprehend. And so the smaller evidences of our indifference seem to capture more clearly the monstrous consequences of the myth of convenience: the anecdote of the rainbow runner caught by researchers that had 84 pieces of plastic in its body and the picture in The New York Review of Books of the baby albatross, dead and eviscerated on a beach, revealing the many pieces of plastic its parents had fed it, thinking the colored bits to be food. The picture of that baby bird is more horribly eloquent than anything more that I could write here.

Oh, and this is depressing, too.

We're #1! (Unfortunately)

Years ago we lived near Baton Rouge, Louisiana; I taught on the LSU campus while my husband was in graduate school. The area along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans was known as "Cancer Alley," called that because of all the industrial plants along the river and anecdotal evidence of high rates of cancer (unsubstantiated scientifically). Well, now it seems we're in another toxic place: Forbes just named Atlanta the most toxic city in the United States. Forbes based its calculations on 

the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment, the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the total number of Superfund sites.

Actually, by "Atlanta," Forbes means "metro-Atlanta," including Marietta and Sandy Springs. Interestingly enough, cities such as New York don't make the top-ten of Environmentally Toxic Cities in the U.S. A. because of fine subway systems that encourage people to leave their cars at home. Here in Atlanta, we have MARTA, a system in financial difficulties and, according to Wikipedia, "by far the largest United States transit agency not to receive state operational funding." (Yay, Georgia! so progressive!)  The other states in the top ten ETCUSA:

2. Detroit
3. Houston
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
6. Cleveland
7. Los Angeles
8. Jacksonville, Florida
9. Baltimore
10. Portland

Oh, and in my home state of Texas-- "Houston, we have a problem," an air problem, that is, according to Jim Lester, vice president of the Houston Advanced Research Center.

Facilities in Houston released 88.7 million pounds of toxic chemicals in the environment in 2007, and the former site of a methanol fire and chemical explosion number among the city's 50 Superfund locations. Factories that serve the local petrochemical industry emit benzene and 1-3 butabeine, toxins proven to be particularly harmful, that the area's intense sunlight and lack of wind keep trapped in the local area's atmosphere.

Fortunately, I wasn't planning to return to the Houston area to live, even though five generations of my family preceded me in making the Houston-Baytown-Beaumont area their home. But where to go if Atlanta gets too toxic for my tastes? Well, according to Forbes, here are the top ten LEAST toxic cities (among "the  country's 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas") in which to live:

1. Las Vegas, NV
2. Sacramento, CA
3. Riverside, CA
4. Austin, TX
5. Seattle, WA
6. San Diego, CA
7. Virginia Beach, VA
8. San Jose, CA
9. New York
10. Phoenix, AZ

Oh, well....none of these cities is on my list of dream places to which to retire. So I guess I can still keep dreaming......

Animal Feces--or Worse--in Your Water?

The New York Times has an interesting article on violations of the Clean Water laws, of the EPA's lax oversight during the Bush administration, and of the consequences of that laxness: "Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering." In interviewing "more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists," New York Times journalists have discovered that "an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways." The article describes the consequences of water pollution on the health of one family in West Virginia who live just seventeen miles from the state capital and on the career of one lawyer who joined West Virginia's environmental protection agency, where, he discovered, "everyone was terrified of doing their job." He eventually lost his job because he did his job; powerful industry lobbyists used their leverage with state politicians to get him fired.

In West Virginia, as in Washington, the corruption of those hired to keep the state's water safe can be seen in the revolving door of the state's environmental agencies: regulators "leave for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed." Pressure from the EPA has been seriously lacking, too:

Enforcement lapses were particularly bad under the administration of President George W. Bush, employees say. “For the last eight years, my hands have been tied,” said one E.P.A. official who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “We were told to take our clean water and clean air cases, put them in a box, and lock it shut. Everyone knew polluters were getting away with murder. But these polluters are some of the biggest campaign contributors in town, so no one really cared if they were dumping poisons into streams.”

The New York Times has gathered data on "more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance." Want to see how your state measures up?: "Find Water Polluters Near You." I clicked through the pages of companies in Georgia that have permits to discharge pollutants and was surprised by the number of violators who hadn't been fined for their violations. Uh.... okay....maybe I wasn't surprised. Just disgusted.

Here is another interactive map: "Clean Water Violations: The Enforcement Record." Enforcements in Georgia: 48.2 per 100 violations. Enforcement Record for my home state of Texas: 7.6 per 100 violations. Big surprise.

Quote for the Day: Healthcare and Farmers

Reading an article that Tom sent me and that I linked to two posts below, I came across an interesting quote. The article is about sustainable farming, the hard truths of trying to farm organically and the collective will needed to amend our farming practices. Here's the quote:

If we're going to ask the market to pull in a new direction, we'll need to give it new rules and incentives. That means our broader food standards, but it also means money—a massive increase in food research. (Today, the fraction of the federal research budget spent on anything remotely resembling alternative agriculture is less than 1 percent—and most of that is sucked up by the organic sector.) And, yes, it means more farm subsidies: The reason federal farm subsidies are regarded as anti-sustainability is mainly because they support the wrong kind of farming. But if we want the right kind of farming, we're going to have to support those farmers willing to risk trying a new model. For example, one reason farmers prefer labor-saving monoculture is that it frees them to take an off-farm job, which for many is the only way to get health insurance. Thus, the simplest way to encourage sustainable farming might be offering a subsidy for affordable health care. [my emphasis]

Barack Obama has it right: everything comes back to health care. Solve the health insurance problem in this country, and other problems will be on the way to being solved, or at least one big hurdle to solutions will be removed.

Source: Paul Roberts, "Spoiled: Organic and Local is so 2008," Mother Jones, March/April 2009. www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008

Overpopulation? Several news items

This morning I watched a little bit of Good Morning America, which included a story about a man in Dubai who is aspiring to father 100 children. Of course, he has had more than one wife, seventeen, in fact. So far, the man has fathered 86 children, with two more on the way. He is a very religious Muslim and believes that in having a large family, he is doing God's will.

Later, I ran across an article about the effects of population explosion on the planet, which reminded me of a conversation I had with Tom this weekend as we were gardening. While we support organic gardening and local farmers, we realize that modern farming practices have made it much, much easier to feed the planet's population. I remember when population control was in the news in the late 1960s and early 1970s; people thought the burgeoning population would lead to apocalyptic crises. Well, those crises haven't occurred in wealthy countries such as the United States, but it's debatable whether or not other less wealthy parts of the world suffer from population growth. It's true that modern farm practices certainly enable us to feed more people than one could have once imagined.

Of course, there are problems with too many people on the planet. People gobble up natural habitat in their search for food and shelter--understandable, for one wants to live and to support one's family. But other species become extinct, fuel consumption goes up, millions of acres of land are denuded of trees, and greenhouse gases affect the health of the planet. I am certainly not for coercive population control, but I do think we each have individual responsibilities to make the world a better place. I'm not sure that having oodles of children is a way to do that. (Cue here the story of the mother who recently gave birth to octuplets.)While one man's goal to father 100 children isn't going to tip the balance, there would be a problem if many men sought to father 100 children, a problem not just for the planet but for women, too!

If such fecundity is God's will, perhaps he'll provide us with ways to deal with the consequences. And--just in time--NASA is launching the Kepler satellite, which will spend over three years looking for other planets that can support life. Our life, that is, human life. Other earths just waiting to satiate our ravenous appetites. Hmmmmm.......

A Reminiscence of Redwings

Red-winged blackbirds are sitting high in the tops of the trees in our 1940s-built suburban neighborhood. Their trills cascade through the air like waterfalls, and I remember why the red-winged blackbird is one of my favorite birds. I love the territorial song of the males in spring, what's called the "okalee" song, when it's combined with the other songs of the species. The combined chorus is beautiful to me.

When I hear red-winged blackbirds, memories rush in as well as feelings associated with those memories. Where I grew up near the Texas Gulf coast, red-winged blackbirds descended in huge flocks on the flat birdfeeder (a wooden post with a metal cookie sheet nailed on top) that my father placed in our front yard. As a child, I loved gazing out into the cold from the warmth of our space-heater-warmed house. Huge flocks of blackbirds would wing across the sky and settle into the rice fields that once dominated the Gulf Coast landscape in Chambers County, Texas. The sky would be black with birds. Now those rice fields are covered with McMansions, suburbia, or acres of invasive flora such as Chinese tallow trees.

Later, as an adult with a young family, I moved to northern Minnesota, where red-winged blackbirds nested in the spring and summer. I loved seeing red-wings perch on tall grasses in the bogs and mosses of north-central Minnesota. The birds' presence reminded me that although I was far away from my place of birth, the natural world spanned that physical distance, closing the gap between home and heart.

The birds also remind me of the sugar cane fields of Louisiana. My best friend and her husband lived for years in a house on the edge of sugar cane fields, on the west bank of the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge. Many times I sat in my friend's pecan-tree and oak-tree shaded yard listening to the songs of blackbirds rise up like smoky memories from the alluvial soil of those fertile fields.

But those red-wings remind me of far more than the natural world. They remind me of a man whom I loved more than words can express, my maternal grandfather, Leonard Everett Benton. Papa Benton was a Texas cowboy. His schooling didn't go past the eighth grade, and he made a living over his lifetime by working in the oil fields and for Humble Oil, raising cattle, breaking horses, and, in his old age, working for Liberty County doing odd jobs such as mowing roadsides. One of my favorite childhood memories is that of listening to Papa play "Redwing" on his harmonica. He would stomp around my grandparents' wooden farmhouse, his cowboy boots keeping time with the music, his old, rough, calloused hands cradling the harmonica against his lips. He was a kind and gentle man, always "hoorahing" his grandchildren, hugging us, teasing us, offering us chewing tobacco and then disgusting us with the tobacco juice he spit into a coffee can. One of his favorite teasing pastimes when we were very young was to show us how "a cow ate corn": he would squeeze our legs just above our knees until we would squeal for him to quit.

The only times I saw him angry--and I can count those times on one hand--was once when he felt that my grandmother had been treated unfairly by her grandchildren and those rare times when he would come home drunk. However, in his drunkenness, his anger was muted, turned mainly toward my grandmother, a faithful Southern Baptist, when she would criticize him for drinking, and occasionally toward nothing in particular, when he was trying to work around the house and was less than sober. Even then, his anger was never violent or scary. I look back on those times as rather times tinged with sadness, the regrets of a man who never reached his potential or his dreams yet who remained open-minded and willing to learn until the end of his life. Despite his shortened schooling, my grandfather was an avid reader. Of course, being the lover of all things western, my grandfather loved to read the novels of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. But once when I was visiting from college, Papa had evidently been reading about dinosaurs, for he asked me if I believed that the world was that old and that dinosaurs had existed.

Papa was also an agnostic. He attended church very occasionally, but he told me he didn't believe everything that the church taught. He was my early introduction to agnosticism in a family of very faithful church-goers--Pentecostals, Catholics, and Southern Baptists--and now, as an agnostic myself, an agnosticism that has developed in me in recent years (the last eight years of the Bush administration put the final nail in the coffin of belief in organized religion for me), I take comfort in my grandfather's agnosticism: God might be present, the stories might suggest truths, but the whole truth is not to be found in religion, and particularly not in one branch of one religion.

When I think of red-winged blackbirds, I think of Papa, and I think of a song by Nanci Griffith, another daughter of Texas. That song is "Gulf Coast Highway," and when I hear those words, my eyes well up with tears. I see my grandfather's face; I hear his voice; I feel his arms around my shoulders. I see a heaven that might exist, that might take in even old agnostics:

And when he dies he says he'll catch some blackbird's wing
And he will fly away to heaven come some sweet bluebonnet spring.

"The Wrong Way"

At a recent party, I overheard an exchange that underscored for me the stupidity of emulating the wealthy. One man at the party was preparing a cup of coffee. As he poured in the sugar and creamer, he turned to the rest of us and said, "A friend from England told me this--to put the cream and sugar in the cup first, and then pour in the coffee. The motion of the pouring coffee stirs up the cream and sugar, thus mixing the separate elements. Then you don't need to use one of those wasteful wooden stirrers to mix the cream and sugar."

He then looked across the room at a British man who was present and added, "I don't know if this is a class thing or not, but it certainly makes ecological sense."

The British man smirked and said, "You've done it the wrong way. It is a class thing," suggesting that my friend's way of stirring coffee was a lower-class thing to do.

Using the motion of the liquid being poured into a cup to mix the sugar and cream makes a great deal of pragmatic sense. Doing so eliminates the use of wooden stirrers, saves more trees, and reduces garbage. It eliminates the use of plastic spoons, a choice which also leads to more environmental friendly consequences. Yet we may shrink from this pragmatic choice because we fear that doing so will label us as "low-class."

This exchange prompted me to think of other choices we make because we do not want to be seen as low class, because we want to emulate the wealthy. Think of our lawns, for instance. Suburban Americans are in love with broad expanses of bright green, trimmed, and weedless lawns. Why? Because they perceive the lawn as an expression of their wealth, like those broad expansions of English grounds. The neatly trimmed lawns are meant to emulate the English squire or duke, someone rich enough to have large amounts of land remain untilled, fallow. And so Americans pour fertilizer onto their lawns to make the grass grow and then cut the grass with gas-powered mowers to keep it trimmed and neat. They pour herbicides on their lawns to kill the dandelions and bunch grass. Those herbicides and fertilizers get washed away by rain and infiltrate the groundwater and nearby streams and rivers, with negative environmental consequences. To maintain that green expanse, people rake the leaves from their lawns, place those leaves in bags for garbage pick up. The lawn waste goes to the landfill instead of decomposing and adding nutrients to the soil. Such "de-nuded" lawns require more watering. And so it goes.

A neighbor told me that her father didn't garden because he thought that it was low class; only the rural and needy garden. The wealthy buy what they need and want; only the lower classes dirty their hands. We see similar attitudes in the Wall Street tycoons that have helped bring our country to an economic meltdown. Rick Santelli can scream on television that poor homeowners who are facing foreclosure are the cause of our nation's troubles--but surely we know better. Yes, many folks were dazzled by the opportunities to own what they could not really afford (again, emulating the wealthy--and following the advice of leaders who told the public to "go shopping"), but those Wall Street tycoons are more to blame. They bundled together toxic mortgage-backed securities, thinking that they could make oodles of money on these iffy assets. And now we all have to pay the piper. We've emulated the wealthy to the detriment of the environment and of our society. This is the "wrong way."

When We're Afraid We Won't Have Enough

Updates below blog

Why is aggression always the Republican answer to problems these days? The drought in Georgia has heated up the rhetoric over state boundaries. First, Governor Perdue disputed Alabama's and Florida's rights to the water of the Chattahoochee River; now state Republicans are trying to get a piece of Tennessee.

In the late 1700s, the Tennessee-Georgia border was set at the 35th parallel. However, in the early 1800s, a surveying team placed the border at a little over a mile south of that parallel, and thus the Tennessee River has been within the Tennessee state line since that time. No one complained until this year, when Georgia Republican state senators introduced a bill to change the border back to the 35th parallel.

This is how Republicans want to solve Atlanta's thirst: not by conserving what we have, not by regulating growth and thus the out-sized demands on our resources; not by changing people's attitudes toward water use--but by stealing from our neighbors!

According to some news sources, changing the state line would also give Georgia a slice of Chattanooga and Mississippi a slice of Memphis.

1818 Map Error Raises New Water War Front," Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Drought-Thirsty Georgia Wants Slice of Tennessee," The Ledger

"Dehydrated Georgia Wants Slice of Tennessee," The St. Augustine Record

Updates: What Others Are Saying

"Bordering on Ludicrous," says the Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff, on Feb. 24, 2008

It's not just about water, says Sen. John Bulloch (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more)

Secret water talks affect more than those within I-284, says Dusty Nix , for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer editorial board

Border Bill a diversionary stunt by leaders who lack courage, says Bill Shipp, of the The Athens Banner-Herald, Feb. 24, 2008