I’m going to start off my semi philosophical / ranty / musing post with two quotes from Richard Manning’s book Grassland:
“Our science, our poetry, and our democracy fail because they lack specific information of the plants.”
“The culture of plants is the same as the culture of people.”
That last one is around a discussion of Aldo Leopold’s idea of a land ethic (and if you’ve not read A Sand County Almanac, exactly what are you waiting for?). In all my thinking and writing, and sometimes in my doing out in the garden as I plant or photograph, I’m developing a land ethic. It is not one that is in response to the land—not as a manager, caretaker, or gardener—but one of learning from the land the cycles of life, of creation, of existence beyond myself, which in turn makes me more aware of my own creation.
Recently there was a video, which I posted to my blog’s Facebook page last Friday, showing a massive swarm of starlings shifting and pulsing like bed sheets over a lake. Superimposed on the spectacle was loud music, which destroyed the birds, the lake, the moment. I wonder why we have to push ourselves so much on the world, why we can’t or won’t or don’t shut up and listen and be in it (why do college students surgically implant ear buds into their ears?). Maybe we’d be less apt to get angry, be jealous, and want something else, that promised land over the next horizon where life must be better, where we won’t be so human. Oh, the history of our pioneers.
Here’s more from Manning:
“As the colonial culture of the west, we [European Americans in general] have no culture, which is just the same problem as having no story that tells us how to fit in the place…. We need more stories that will settle us to the land, not more stories reacting to those who would and do destroy it, but as long as the destruction goes on, these accounts of our struggles will be our only story.”
“Lilacs disconnect one’s yard from the prairie that is around and so disconnect our lives from reckoning with the real wonders of the grassland. The Nebraska plain is not barren, after all.”
I wonder, can the garden be the story Manning calls for? Why don’t we tell stories of the landscape on its terms, instead of pushing music as the narrative vs. a flock of starlings, or milkweed instead of lilacs? What power are we losing when we impose our senses on the landscape—senses influenced by desire, doubt, envy, grief, and even ecstasy and love? Do we elevate nature, or do we devalue it? Are we nature, and are we native or exotic?
Manning says that only 20% of land in the Great Plains could maybe, possibly, be able to again one day support native ecology. There are a lot of conditional words in there, likely because our idea of nature is one—for good or not—of a gardener and a garden, just as how a painting or sculpture or musical composition subliminally reflects the artist.
“What we see at the roadside is not nature, but a face we have painted for nature. The leafy spurge, crested wheat grass, and penned bison are our own images reflected through a fence.”
What do we see out of our windows? Whose nature is it? Does it matter? What land ethic arises from a lilac or a bunch of switchgrass? One-third, or 6,600 plant species, are exotic foreigners to North America. They won’t be going anywhere, and the new native, the new land ethic, will be a story full of shadows and echoes.
I planted morning glories in my garden as a reminder of my mother, our relationship, and the stories of her childhood and family that have redefined how I look at people in nature. Just like us, the morning glories spread like crazy, uncontrollable, yet are so precarious that the slightest frost withers them away. In autumn they are invisible, overshadowed by the faded bones of indian grass, liatris, wild quinine, aster, and rudbeckia. Maybe if we know the culture of plants as being the same as the culture of people, we will know the land, know our humanity, and be less apt to destroy either. Maybe.
* If you like this kind of post, would you tell me? If you don’t, tell me that, too. I don’t want to be in left field all by my lonesome.
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About Benjamin Vogt
several things on a caffeine hungry brain – i feel like most people see the garden/yard as something that should be neutral. much as so many of our houses are beige/tan/cream vinyl confections, and so many rooms are filled with variations of those colors on the walls and floors, our personal landscapes are filled with ornamental pears, forsythia, lilacs, endless expanse of green lawn. no thought goes into it, conformity is seen as the ideal. i get a lot of blank looks when i talk about the native plants i put in, and the critters i’d like to attract. it gets a little lonely sometimes..
re the murmuration of starling video – i agree the music was jarring, but i still think that the video was effective and awe-inspiring. most of the people i forwarded it to, forwarded it on as well and enjoyed the music, some were like me and wished for the sound of the birds, or the water, or the exclamations of the two young women witnessing it. maybe they should have two videos posted, one for each camp.. my kids were amazed, and how many people, viewing it, looked at birds a little differently afterwards?
cheers, now for the coffee
julianna
Conformity if the Jeffersonian ideal of democracy and equality. Perhaps if we looked out over a prairie we’d see conformity, or an ocean. Is it in the eye of the beholder too much? As for the vid, hey, you know I just can’t agree with you. That music was so loud, so booming, so intrusive–it was, for me, the equivalent of a machine gun taking down the flock.
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Conformity, on the ocean? About 30 years ago I travelled on a small research ship from Saldanha back to Cape Town. The sea version of the road we sometimes travel now. And I was mesmerised by the waves and the clouds and the seals and the penguins. I didn’t see conformity, I saw another natural environment with the same depth and breadth of wonder as your prairie or our mountain and its fynbos. (Can’t spell prairie, where does that word derive from?)
Write on Benjamin – this is wonderful!
Elephant’s Eye recently posted..Summer Gold at Paradise and Roses
I’m pretty sure “prairie” comes from the French–the etymology is buried in one of my prairie books somewhere. What I meant, responding to you, is that pioneers saw the prairie as a desert, and I believe that term has been applied to oceans to a lesser degree. Anything the looks remotely “same” is barren of life and usefulness. Except lawn, of course.
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My memory is that “prairie” comes from the French word for meadow.
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Benjamin I think we need these discussions so I encourage you to keep going. The Leopold book is in my winter reading pile so I am anxious to read it…I have been moving more exotics out and trying to learn about and plant more natives…I too get the hairy eyeball look from neighbors who do not understand what I am doing with my wildlife garden…I don’t care and I just keep telling them….I actually saw a swarm of starlings last week that was amazing in their dance and it took my breath away…I have never felt closer to the land, the earth, my core than in my wildlife garden…
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I wish my neighbors gave me looks, then I’d know I was making progress. Everyone keeps to themselves in my neighborhood. Enjoy your looks, take pleasure in them! I always feel so magically uplifted when geese fly over the house, especially so low that I can hear their wings. Of course, if I had ear bud in my head I wouldn’t be able to hear them. At least the lawnmowers appear to be done for the year.
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we’re lucky, directly under the geese flight path, saw and heard one bump into another last week. could do without the cursed deer eating everything though!
No deer in my small fenced yard. I’m hoping to move closer to the Mississippi River next year–and see lots more birds flying north and south.
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Please keep on writing these philosophical posts! They are wonderful…and so badly needed!
I read Manning’s book several years ago when we returned to the prairie after 6 years on the Gulf coast. Tonight, as I opened it to see what lines I had marked at that time, I noted one that particularly seems to fit into this discussion. Talking about the environmental catastrophe that has occurred because European culture does not value grasslands, saying that the environmental movement won’t mature fully until it combats this devaluation, Manning moves to, “Our goal must change from preserving nature as separate from humans to the more necessary task of remaking ourselves so that we might function as a part of nature.”
I would go a step further, actually. We ARE a part of nature, like it or not. We always have been and always will be. I think our goal needs to be learning to see ourselves realistically, as part of nature, and learning to live with our natural neighbors in a way that functions well for both them and us.
Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic”, of course, was one of the first explicit calls for this change in our attitudes toward nature.
Gardening with native plants is an incredibly important part of meeting this goal, in my opinion. Gardeners can be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. Douglas Tallamy’s wonderful book, Bringing Nature Home, is a great read that will state this concept much more eloquently than I possibly can. If you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend it.
Well, that’s more than enough for now. Thanks for such a thought-provoking post!
Gaia Gardener recently posted..And This Year’s Survivors & Thrivers Are…..
Very good responses that adds much to my post, thank you! Of course I’ve read Tallamy’s book, even saw him speak here a month or so ago. I think in order for us to live WITH nature we have to be humbled by / within it, I think this will only happen because we make it happen–global warming, no fresh water, no fossil fuels. I’m pretty pessimistic that way. Just as with WWII, we have to ahve our backs against the wall before we act.
Living with nature is sort of, to me, not the right term. I mean, as you say, we already are nature, do live in and with and among it, but I contest again it is possibly our religious views that dominate how we live with nature. I’m a firm believer that rich white men, self centered ones, contorted the Bible’s ideas (for example) on nature and our roll within it. The Bible, the Qu’ran, all these major religious texts are very green, yet at least in the west we have a fundamental belief that nature tests are moral fiber, our purity–I mean, just think about the culture of hikers and bikers and surfers, let alone rail road barons or oil moguls or pioneers. Well, that’s enough for tonight! Good thoughts, thanks.
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Like you, I fight depression and pessimism over what it is taking to change the human mindset from one of “nature as the enemy” to one of “nature as a network of life, in which we are an integral part.” I keep doing what I can (through restoring my own land, learning about the local plants and wildlife, blogging, doing stints on the phone line as a Master Gardener, giving talks to community groups, etc.) but it never feels like I’m really having an impact. All I can do is keep trying, though. Tiring as it can be, I find that I can’t live any other way. And, sometimes, I’m lucky enough to get a glimpse that maybe I am helping just a little….
As far as religious views, I agree wholeheartedly with you. For too many years, religious texts have been used to justify extraction and destruction, among other negative actions, instead of stewardship and care. There is, thankfully, a budding (pun appropriate) movement that I’m hearing about to emphasize environmental awareness and care within the religious community, at least here in the States.
Again, thank you for your thoughtful and enjoyable posts. And good luck on your job search!!!
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There is a green evangelical Christian movement in the U.S. I’ve read some on, and is very encouraging–finally reading the Bible the right way. Have you read This Sacred Earth by Roger Gottlieb? It has contributions from authors discussing many of the main religions across the world, connecting religious text with environmental mindsets. It was a watershed book for me, because so many in my family were once German Mennonite farmers, very conservative, very work-driven, very nose to the grindstone in the field (which is why the prairie vanished in 30 years I guess).
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I haven’t come across that book – I’ll order it and look through it. We come from similar backgrounds: my ancestors being Dutch Reformed farmers (and ministers) who came to Iowa in the mid-1800′s and started breaking out prairie.
Have you read David Abram’s books, “The Spell of the Sensuous” and “Becoming Animal”? The first one, especially, really deepened my appreciation of how much a part of the natural world we really are. (To me, the titles don’t really capture the essence of his books well, so don’t let them put you off.)
Gaia Gardener recently posted..And This Year’s Survivors & Thrivers Are…..
Love, love, love your post. I am nursing my ill father at his home among miles of finely trimmed lawns. I am craving natural areas. There is an environmental center in walking distance surrounded by barbed wire and kept locked unless an elementary school class or caretaker visits. I called the county and learned they are protecting the native flowers from people that may steal them.
Yesterday I plunged into a wooded area and drank in the sound of the insects, birds and even a babbling brook.
My husband tells me that while I have been away a neighbor placed an order with the county to have my ditch cleaned of growth. I loved to walk past my ditch. It was full of insect life, box turtles, berries and wildflowers. There is even a trail worn by the racoons which pass through each evening. My neighbor has run his ditch under ground through a pipe and covered it with lawn which is cut and sprayed and lifeless. Ah, but now my ditch is disturbed and I have collected native seeds to spread, next year I will again enjoy the life.
Oh my goodness. Barbed wire to protect nature? Has it come to that? And the irony of barbed wire–a product that accelerated our expansion into and dissection of the Plains. I’m really angry about your neighbor. Can they do that, call the city? I think education is in order when you can, up front, brutal honesty. It reminds me of yet another account I was just reading, about how when Kiowas surrendered at Ft. Sill in Oklahoma, ending their freedom on the southern Plains, the army shot 800 horses in front of them, then sold or gave away another 2,000. I suppose if we can do this to horses, and we still do–and to lots of other animals–it’s pretty easy to mow our lawns and call the city on a neighbors’ “weeds.” Spread those seeds, Carole. Spread them in your neighbor’s lawn, too.
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This is a beautiful post. I wish everyone that read it felt it as deeply as I have. I am restoring 2 & 1/2 acres in the eastern side of San Diego. I have to laugh when my neighbor expresses the wish of planting myoporum on her very steep slope someday. It makes me remember my earlier attitude about fixing nature, by planting common, store bought plants. I am so glad to have my eyes opened. It is a journey that never ends.
Thanks, Jean. It’s sort of how my other writing sounds, maybe (in books, plug plug). I think in order to feel nature deeply, as you say, it starts with childhood, after that, it’s all about letting go, being broken down so you can see beyond yourself and from another perspective. There’s good reason why spiritual experience and nature are tied together–it’s a process of breaking down and building up I think. Just like gardening.
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Benjamin (Ben?), I think you may have hit a very important chord there. You’ve given me a new thought to chew over for a while…. Thank you.
Gaia Gardener recently posted..And This Year’s Survivors & Thrivers Are…..
Have just read Fred Pearce – When the rivers run dry. Chapter by chapter he made my hair stand on end (Mexico is obliged to send its river water to the USA, so the farmers have none – and so on around the world. Oh and Friends of the Earth began when they wanted to turn the Grand Canyon into a reservoir?!)
But he ends with some interesting stories about India. They are, in parts, returning to traditional methods of catching rainwater, recharging the aquifers, and there is again clean water in the wells.
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Love this post and have been thinking about it. I feel a long rant about our misuse and misunderstanding of the word ‘nature’ come on…
Well then, you might like a book by Jack Turner called The Abstract Wild….
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