Category — Politics of plants

 This post was inspired by Jan at Thanksfor2day: I encourage you to check out this link and read  other contributors to the Garden Bloggers Sustainable Living project for great ideas on living a greener life. Every day is an Earth Day, but the official celebration comes up on April 22nd. It’s a good time to get even more ideas about how we can be a part of planet’s health.

I celebrated my first Earth Day by planting a tree. They were planning to pave part of my high school grounds for a parking lot. Some of us protested. The tree was my idea.

This Earth Day (April 22), I’m going to celebrate by planting a seed.

It may seem like a small thing to do, given the magnitude of the situation. Other posters in this Earth Day series have written about compost, conservation, and organic everything. All very valuable ideas, each of which has a body of literature to itself - and deserves it.

But there’s something a lot of gardeners (and would-be gardeners) don’t think about: where do the seeds come from? And what impact does that have on our environment?

I’m not talking about where the seeds are grown, though that’s certainly a consideration; organic seeds are becoming more and more available, and I sometimes pay the extra price for them so I can support organic seed growers. We all know that inorganic farming washes away irreplaceable topsoil, right?

The thing I’m talking about is what’s hidden inside the seed.

Most of the seed gardeners choose from is in one of these categories: open-pollinated, , F1 hybrids, and genetically engineered seed.

Open-pollinated seed is the kind gardeners and farmers have been using for millenia. The kind you can save and plant again next year, getting plants that are pretty close to what you had before.

Open-pollinated seeds can’t be patented; no one owns them. Heirloom seeds,  like the ones from Baker’s Creek  and Renee’s Garden are open-pollinated. So are wild, medicinal, and traditional garden plants, such as the ones in the JL Hudson catalogue  (which also carries heirloom ornamentals and edibles). (By the way, I don’t have a financial deal with these companies; I just think they’re good companies.)

Open-pollinated seed doesn’t just carry on ancient traditions: it’s also what keeps diversity alive. It’s bees, moths, and birds (and the occasional rodent) who do the pollinating, and they don’t have any agendas about making money off the results; they just want immediate gratification. Which means that open-pollinated seeds may sprout in any of a number of combinations of DNA, giving rise to different colors, sizes,  bloom and harvest times, and other variations.

That means if conditions change, the seed has the potential to change with them. So if rainfall levels, climate, water availability or soil changes, open-pollinated seeds have more ability to adapt. And open-pollinated seeds which are saved for enough generations will develop characteristics that make them grow better in your particular plot of soil and climate.

So why would anyone want to plant anything else?

Well, people who want very predictable results when they plant their seeds. Which would be the farmers who raise our food. The big seed companies breed F1 hybrids, to produce the crop uniformity that makes machine-harvesting easier. If you re-use F1 hybrid seed you will get a strange, straggly assortment of plants which may or may not bear resemblance to the plant’s parents. F1 hybrids aren’t designed to reproduce themselves. They’re designed to get you to buy seed from the companies every year.

In the garden, F1 seed provides the same uniformity and vigor. Your petunias may flower more, and longer; your tomatoes will all come in at the same time, and have the same appearance.

I’m not a purist; I’ve bought F1 seed because I’m intrigued by a variety. But mostly, I stick to the old-fashioned kind of seed: open-pollinated.

One kind of seed I won’t knowingly buy, or eat, or use is genetically-engineered seed. Unlike F1 hybrids, genetically-engineered seeds are altered at the level of their DNA.  That means they can be crossed with plants which would never cross with them in nature, as well as with animal DNA and bacteria. Creating, for example, a potato that is properly classified as a pesticide. “The [New Leaf] potato was designated as a pesticide and so was regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), instead of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) which regulates food,” I read at Sustainable Table. Yes, truth really can be stranger than fiction.

Here’s something even stranger: if the GM companies have their way (and right now it looks as if they’re getting it), we may not be able to save our seed any longer.

One farmer who tried to save seed was famously sued for it. Percy Schmeiser,  in Saskatchewan. A seed breeder, he planted his fields with his specialized canola seed. But some genetically-engineered Roundup Ready Monsanto seed drifted in from other fields, contaminating his crop.

Not only did Monsanto not pay him for destroying forty years of breeding work - they sued him. Whether or not he had benefited from the Roundup Ready seed (he certainly hadn’t), Monsanto claimed he owed them money for having their patented crop in his field.

Schmeiser decided to fight back, a small but determined Canadian David against a large corporate Goliath. He toured the country, telling his story, and raising money for his defense.

The Canadian Supreme Court sided with Monsanto. When Schmeiser appealed, the court allowed as how he didn’t have to pay Monsanto - but the other aspects of his appeal were denied. That means that a precedent has been set: it’s OK for gigantic genetic-engineering companies to take over farmer’s fields without their consent. And it’s all right for genetically-engineered seed to wipe out seed that has been carefully bred for generations - seed that has the diversity to adapt to future conditions.

The reverberations may be world-wide: genetically-engineered seed is being forced on many countries in the form of foreign aid, as hybrid seed was before it. If farmers won’t plant this type of seed, they don’t get any of the other foreign-aid benefits: schools, wells, economic projects. But the seed they are given won’t grow without the water and equipment that US farmers use for their crops. And farmers in poor countries just don’t have those. They don’t even have the gasoline to run equipment if they are given it, not just because they don’t have the money, but because they have no transportation to a place where they could buy it. If I were a farmer in that position, I would learn to hate the country that put me into it.

Nobody knows what effects long-term consumption of GM seeds and foods will have. The EU has outlawed them for that reason. And no one knows what future conditions will call for the diversity only open pollination can provide. So when you choose your seed this spring, you’re not making a small decision.

Everything starts with a seed.

I was intrigued by hyperlocavore when I found it on Twitter. The short version (that’s all you get on Twitter) was that this site helps you find gardening partners in your area, so you can share your yards or dig up your lawns and grow food locally.

A lot of people in my area are involved in the slow and local food movements; in fact, a lot of people in my area moved here in the earlier “grow your own” era, and some of the ones who are still moving here have the same sentiments.

While this site is definitely in favor of “grow your own”, the vision is a lot bigger than that. I checked out some of the videos to get the flavor of what was on offer here.

One of the videos, “Transition Towns”, caught my attention.The video might benefit from a little editing. Peak oil philosophy is not a riveting opening for most. But I kept going, and found original and inspiring thinking about how gardens might be a part of  dealing with an oil-based culture that is running out of oil, and choking from the bad effects of oil dependency. That’s what Transition Towns are all about, according to Rob Hopkins, the movement founder.

“We could do nothing, let this unfold as a series of lurching crises, or we could do something…there’s no  reason why a world with less oil couldn’t be preferable to where we are now,” says Rob Hopkins “We really need to re-discover what was actually good about the life before cheap oil.”

So they set about doing it - what else? - locally. In Totnes, Devon, UK, Transition Town enthusiasts began mining their own resources; old people, with their memories from the time before cheap oil  came in and really started to change things.

One thing you notice when you start interviewing, says  Hopkins, is “how resilient people were in those days, how everybody had skills they could turn their hand to. Dig for Victory - Victory Gardens I think it was called in the U.S.  - that was possible because everyone knew how to garden. They hadn’t been to gardening college, they knew it by osmosis. Nowadays, if you said, ‘here’s a spade, dig a hole,’ you’d have lots of people who could design a hole, you’d have lots of people who could quantity survey the hole, inspect the hole up for you, put the hole-digging out to tender, and they could insure the hole-digging process against public indemnity,  but actually there’d be very few people who could actually dig: so we’ve moved away from being a practical, hands-on society.”

Transition Towns is no pie-in-the-sky idealist movement; their idea is to find workable community solutions - solutions that are, in fact, much more workable than the ones we use now.

“The idea is to look to draw what was good  about  those times before cheap oil, not to romanticize it. We try to apply the best of the old and the best of the new, but it’s really about getting people to ask the right questions. We don’t claim to come in with all the answers.”

What they’re looking for is a way to replace common misconceptions with common sense. “If you look at all the plans the government draw up, town planning, it’s based on the assumption that oil prices will always remain cheap, the move away from the household economy will continue.” Hopkins points out that we really have no basis for those assumptions, and so we make bad decisions based on shaky foundations. In the U.S., such decisions have allowed us to become a sedentary, obese, depressed people, whose food travels long distances, and is often highly processed and without nutritional value.

For  Hopkins and the Transition Town movers, one of the first obvious good decisions is to produce food locally. The old model puts “good economy” as the enemy of “sustainability”. The Transition Town movement seem to be saying that we need to work together, locally, toward a richer and more sustainable economy. Which only makes sense. If we mortgage the future, how good is our economy, anyway? Any gardener knows that if you deplete the soil, you’re going to have to pay somewhere down the line.

But I think the most inspiring part of the Transition Town movement is the concept that we don’t have to wait for Big Experts to Solve the Problem for us. “Rather than breezing in with lots of experts who design everything for everybody, it’s a question of unleashing the genius of the community around you.”

(To read more about local food gardening, visit http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/)

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how exuberantly beautiful a vegetable can be. This fading but vital red chard arrested me as I was passing through a friend’s garden, just at the moment when the sun backlit it.

In the past twenty years or so, there’s been a movement to get vegetables back into the ornamental landscape (or maybe it’s the other way around). Pioneers such as Rosalind Creasy an Robert Kourik proved that edible plants can be ornamental, and that landscaping can provide food.

This seems like a new idea (it’s still controversial for some zoning boards and neighbors), but it’s actually a very old one. Food plants didn’t get split up from other plants until the age of European colonialism.

Colonialism opened up new vistas of plants, and for the first time, it wasn’t just curators of botanical gardens who were plant collectors. Wealthy people became aware that they could show off their status by using exotic plants in their gardens. Though slow transportation and primitive shipping methods meant many foreign plants arrived dead, avid collectors were willing to pay the price. Wanting to be the first on your block to have something is not a modern phenomenon.

Neither is showing off  to your neighbors.  Wealthy Western Europeans started to display their substance to the world by planting only ornamentals in the visible parts of their gardens and landscapes; the vegetables and fruits were relegated to areas visited only by the servants.  To show only ornamentals was to announce that you were too wealthy to farm; someone else could do that work for you.

This trend only applied to the wealthy, of course.  Workers and farmers kept on doing what gardeners have done for millenia: they grew what they needed as near to the door as they could get it. Plants that provided medicine or dye or food or were just the gardener’s beautiful pets or breeding project were all grown in one place: the original definition of a cottage garden. For many people, the idea of edibles as ornamentals has never passed away.

But as time went on, Western Europeans (including the ones who emigrated to the what became the U.S.) adopted the styles of those who were wealthier than they were. This trickle-down or social climbing in styles is a very pervasive feature of Western European cultures. The styles don’t necessarily have to make sense for us to adopt them. The reason why Spaniards lisp, for instance, is because one of the royals a few hundred years ago had a lisp. In order to save him embarrassment, the courtiers-the wealthiest class-followed suit. Since the courtiers were wealthy and prominent (the equivalent of movie or rock stars today), people copied what they did. The lisp spread until now standard Spanish Spanish means lisping,  and not only on the “s” sound.

Our culture is full of stories like these. Many of our fashions are not only the sign of deep changes; they are part of creating them. On a larger scale, the separation of food and ornamental plants-something you see in most of the gardens of the modern-day U.S.-reflects the economics of colonialism. A garden that shows that you don’t have to work the land yourself, that unseen others do the dirty work for you, is the basis of colonialism, where far-off workers make cheap goods for our sometimes uneasy consumption. It’s  a knotty issue we’re still struggling with. Maybe we can begin to unravel that knot by appreciating the beauty of red chard.