New York Times, Nov. 17, 2008–Montana campground.
Clint Kyhl, a Forest Service employee working out of Laramie, Wyoming directs an “incident management team” that focuses on managing fire threat in dead forests. Dead forests? Yes. Because more and more, up and down the Rockies, that’s what we’ve got: dead forests.
I don’t need a newspaper to show me this; I can see it when I look at the foothills of the Hyalite Mountains just south of Bozeman, and when I go skiing in the Bridgers to the north.
Posted in Environment, News flash!
I know this is a little long, but my next big article for Eric at Planet Natural is on composting, so it had to be done. If it's too long for you, read the first line of each stanza and the whole last stanza, especially the last line. And if the idea that I'm giving advice about how to skim a poem horrifies you, well, now you know the worst about me.
This Compost
SOMETHING startles me where I thought I was safest; |
|
| I withdraw from the still woods I loved; | |
| I will not go now on the pastures to walk; | |
| I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea; | |
| I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me. | 5 |
| O how can it be that the ground does not sicken? | |
| How can you be alive, you growths of spring? | |
| How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? | |
| Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? | |
| Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead? | 10 |
| Where have you disposed of their carcasses? | |
| Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations; | |
| Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? | |
| I do not see any of it upon you to-day—or perhaps I am deceiv’d; | |
| I will run a furrow with my plough—I will press my spade through the sod, and turn it up underneath; | 15 |
| I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. | |
Behold this compost! behold it well! |
|
| Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—Yet behold! | |
| The grass of spring covers the prairies, | |
| The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden, | 20 |
| The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, | |
| The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, | |
| The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, | |
| The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, | |
| The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on their nests, | 25 |
| The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs, | |
| The new-born of animals appear—the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, | |
| Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves, | |
| Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk—the lilacs bloom in the dooryards; | |
| The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. | 30 |
| What chemistry! | |
| That the winds are really not infectious, | |
| That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea, which is so amorous after me, | |
| That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, | |
| That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, | 35 |
| That all is clean forever and forever. | |
| That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, | |
| That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, | |
| That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the orange-orchard—that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, |
|
| That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, | 40 |
| Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. | |
Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient, |
|
| It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, | |
| It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, | |
| It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, | 45 |
| It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, | |
| It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.
by Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. |
Posted in Poetry
The Curious Case of the Missing Information
Here’s one of the oddest, and to my mind most outrageous things I learned while working on the organic lawn article. It’s one of those things I’d heard rumored, and once I started working, it was something that turned up again and again in various documents I consulted: the claim that “inert” ingredients on a pesticide label weren’t necessarily inert.
Pick up any pesticide, and somewhere the label will say “Active ingredients” (and then the name of a chemical, and a percentage, often under 10%) and then “Inert ingredients” and a percentage. These inert ingredients are not named, but no worries; if it can’t react with other chemicals, it can’t harm us. It’s chemically inactive. That’s what inert means, right?
Wrong.
Posted in Organic Gardening, Pests and Pesticides
First in a series.
I’ve been working on a single, simple (ha) post for the past three days. This hunt makes me feel a bit like Theseus in the maze, playing out a thread behind him so he’d be able to find his way back—except it seems sometimes that the thread has broken, and I’ll be lost in cyberspace forever, adrift like the unfortunate astronaut in 2001, A Space Odyssey, when the wayward computer Hal snapped his umbilical cord leading back to the mother ship. (A bit of a mixed analogy there. Sorry.)
The topic of the moment is “inert” ingredients in pesticides—you know, the ones that aren’t active. When I try to trace the citations in a paper by Caroline Cox and Michael Surgan (“Unidentified Inert Ingredients in Pesticides: Implications for Human and Environmental Health” –with a name like that it had better be true, because it sure ain’t beautiful.) I find that those sections in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations are either “reserved” (which apparently means unavailable, censored, you know, the old need-to-know-basis thing) or simply missing—absent, gone, etc.
Posted in Organic Gardening, Pests and Pesticides
Several weeks ago, on a day when it was hard to get motivated for anything, I ended up writing a new, extensive–nay, the definitive–history of the sock wars. You can see it on the Page listed to the right.
I'm beginning to feel like one of those people who peaks in their last year in highschool–you know, the football star, the homecoming queen–and after that, it's all downhill. Sigh. I'll be telling my grandchildren about those damn socks. Right, and they'll be saying, "Yeah, Grandma, we know; you've only told us about it a thousand times."
Damn it, if something else totally crazy doesn't happen in the bloggin' world soon I am going to run out to my garage "in the au naturel," as the Garden Wise Guy so delicately and hilariously puts it, throw all my gardening tools into the alley, light them on fire, and throw myself on the heap, shrieking.
Heavens. I had no idea I was that pent up.
Posted in Nearly Total Nonsense
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