Don' waste a cent on Pollan. We don't need that kind of 'de-valuation' on
this list!

BUY BUY BUY

"Ecophilosophy: a fied guide to the literature" by Donald Edward Davis.
There are annotation of 334 publications on Environmental Ethics and Values
in it. It is published by R & E Miles, San Pedro, 1989. (Peace and Plenty)

JimTantillooo:
>  Plus I think he's right--well, at least most of the time. 
 
Plus Plus. He is a bit of shill. I think the anti-GMO crowd could recruit
some Marmota monax (wood chucks) and raise them like rabbits and then let
them loose into those franken lettuce patches. That would be better than
letting Pollan get rich writing and publishing purile fantasy. Franchement bebe!

john foster

>(I wouldn't follow his original
>woodchuck control strategy.) 

He is going to loose his lettuce in one night.


> I encourage everyone here to rush out and buy

Home Economics by Wendell Berry, or Suzannah Moodies "Roughing It" or even
Janet Frame's "Scented Gardens for the Blind."

Or "Ecophilosophy: a fied guide to the literature" by Donald Edward Davis.
There are annotation of 334 publications on Environmental Ethics and Values
in it. It is published by R & E Miles, San Pedro, 1989. (Peace and Plenty)



>it, if you don't already own the book.  (How's *that* for an endorsement?)
>:-)
>
>Here's the conclusion to "Pollan and the Woodchuck" .  .  .  .
>
>Jim T.
>
>=============
>
>Pollan writes:
>
>	"Well, if fences are out of place in the American garden, where
>exactly do gasoline fires fit in?  Fortunately, my brush with general
>conflagration among the vegetables shocked me out of my Vietnam approach to
>garden pests before I'd had a chance to defoliate my property or poison the
>ground water.  But my fury at the woodchuck put me in touch with a few of
>our darker attitudes toward nature: the way her intransigence can make us
>crazy, and how willing we are to poison her in the single-minded pursuit of
>some short-term objective.  You think you know better until you've been
>beset by cabbage worms or aphids and then seen just how fast a shot of some
>state-of-the-art petrochemical can wipe them out.  But after the firefight
>I resolved to keep my head and think more in terms of containment than
>victory."
>
> .  .  .
>	"What was the right approach to pests in the garden?  How could I
>halt the advance of Dudleytown [an abandoned and overgrown nineteenth
>century settlement nearby] without turning my garden into a toxic waste
>site?  I was beginning to see that these questions quickly led to larger
>ones about how we choose to confront the natural landscape.  Domination or
>acquiescence?  As developers or naturalists?  I no longer think the choice
>is so obvious.
>
>	"Domination, translated into suburban or rural terms, means lawn.
>A few acres of Kentucky bluegrass arranged in a buffer zone between house
>and landscape, a no-man's-land patrolled weekly with a rotary blade.  The
>lawn holds great appeal, especially to Americans.  It looks sort of
>natural--it's green; it grows--but in fact it represents a subjugation of
>the forest as utter and complete as a parking lot.  Every species is
>forcibly excluded from the landscape but one, and this is forbidden to grow
>longer than the owner's little finger.  A lawn is nature under totalitarian
>rule.
>
>	"On the other side is acquiescence: the benign gaze of the
>naturalist.  Certainly his ethic sounds nice and responsible, but have you
>ever noticed that the naturalist never tells you where he lives?  Unless
>you live in the city or a tent, the benign gaze is totally
>impractical--sooner or later it leads to Dudleytown.
>
>	"The trick, I realize now, is somehow to find a middle ground
>between these two positions.  And that is what a garden is, or should be: a
>midspace between Dudleytown and the parking lot, a place that admits of
>both nature and human habitation.  But it is not, as I imagined, a
>harmonious compromise between the two, nor is it stable; from what I can
>see, it requires continual human intervention or else it will collapse.
>The question for the gardener--and in a way it's a question for all of
>us--is, What is the proper characteristic of that intervention?
>
>	"Even my limited experience in the garden suggests that finding a
>good answer to that question will involve a much more complicated set of
>choices than the usual American alternatives, which seem to consist of
>either raping the land or sealing it away in a preserve where no one can
>touch it.  That the first approach is bankrupt goes without saying.  Yet,
>right as it sounds, the second one may be a dead end too.  Gardening
>quickly teaches you to distrust all such absolutes, to frame the questions
>a little differently.  Must we *always* shrink before our own power in
>nature?  We are one of only a handful of creatures with the capacity to
>deliberately alter our environment.  To simply renounce that power--isn't
>that in some sense to renounce our humanity?  *Our* nature?  And is that
>nature any less real than the nature we seem to think exists only *out
>there*?  The poet and critic Frederick Turner, in a *Harper's Magazine*
>essay that seeks to break us of our habit of seeing nature and culture as
>opposed, asks why it is we can't see ourselves, and what we make and do, as
>part and parcel of nature.  He cites the reply of Shakespeare's Polixenes,
>in *The Winter's Tale*, to Perdita, who spurns the hybridized flower
>because it is 'unnatural':  'This is an art / Which does mend Nature --
>change it rather; but / The art itself is nature.'
>
>	"For the gardener, breaking free of the notion that art always
>negates nature is liberating.  Fresh aesthetic prospects open up, of
>course, but more to the point, a promising strategy against pests can begin
>to take shape.  For starters, one can now reexamine the American taboo
>against fences.  Fences may offend American ideas about democracy,
>limitlessness, and the landscape's sanctity, but perhaps we need to
>consider the possibility that their absence offends the idea of a garden.
>For most of history people have been making gardens and most of their
>gardens have been walled or fenced.  The word *garden* derives from the old
>German word for enclosure, and the *O.E.D.'s* definition begins, 'An
>enclosed piece of ground.  .  .  .' (Compare that to *Webster's*, which
>makes no mention of the idea of enclosure.)  Writing in 1914, George
>Washington Cable pointed out that 'a gard, yard, garth, garden, used to
>mean an enclosure, a close, and implied a privacy to its owner superior to
>any he enjoyed outside of it.  .  .  .  Our public spirit and our
>imperturbability are flattered by {fencelessness}, but our gardens .  .  .
>have become American by ceasing to be gardens.'  The long history of
>gardens, which traverses so many different cultures, suggests that perhaps
>there is something about erecting a wall against the landscape on one side
>and society's gaze on the other.  We number the beaver damn among nature's
>creations; why not also the garden wall?"
>
>***
>	"The time had come for me to put up a fence.  I went with five feet
>of galvanized steel mesh stretched across posts that had been treated with
>arsenic to resist rot and then sunk three feet into the earth.  The bottom
>edge of the fence runs a foot underground, to deter the tunnelers.  It
>doesn't look at all bad, and even though the wire mesh is invisible at a
>distance, when I close the garden gate behind me I feel as though I've
>entered a privileged space.
>
>	"But much more important is the fact that, so far, the woodchuck
>respects the fence; the cabbages have reached softball size unmolested.
>The woodchuck doesn't appear to have abandoned his burrow, however, and I
>picture him jealously pacing the garden perimeter at dawn, scheming,
>looking for an angle.  I remain on alert.
>
>	"Now, four feet of fence won't impede a doe with snap beans on her
>mind, but I can take care of her, too.  Six inches above the top of the
>fence, I'll string a wire that pulses every three seconds with a hundred
>volts of electric current.  I've been told to smear the wire with peanut
>butter in order to introduce the deer to the unprecedented and memorable
>sensation of electric shock, after which they should be gone for good.  The
>electricity will run off a solar panel that sits atop one of the posts,
>reaching toward the sun like some gigantic hight-tech blossom.  This last
>touch strikes me as a nice bit of jujitsu, turning nature's power against a
>few of her own."
>
>	"Intervening against the insects is not quite so straightforward,
>but here, too, there may be an art that 'itself is nature.'  The key to
>eliminating an insect from the garden is knowledge: about its babits,
>preferences, and vulnerabilities.  Most chemical pesticides represent a
>very crude form of knowledge about insects: that, for example, a powerful
>chemical such as malathion somehow cripples the nervous systems of most
>organisms, so a little of the stuff should kill bugs but not (presumably)
>any bigger creatures.  Even though this knowledge has been produced by Homo
>sapiens wearing lab coats, it is not nearly as sophisticated or precise as
>the knowledge a ladybug, say, possesses on the subject of aphids.  The
>ladybug is not smart, but she knows one thing exceedingly well: how to
>catch forty or fifty aphids every day without hurting anybody else.  If you
>think of evolution as a three-and-a-half-billion-year-long laboratory
>experiment, and the gene pool as the store of information accumulated
>during the course of that experiment, you begin to appreciate that nature
>has far more extensive knowledge about her operations than we do.  The
>trick is to put her knowledge to our purpose in the garden."
>
>.  .  .
>	"Biological controls won't solve every pest problem--there are
>still too few of them, for one thing.  But the approach holds promise, and
>suggests what can be accomplished when we learn to exploit nature's
>self-knowledge, and stop thinking that our art and technology as being
>necessarily opposed to nature.  For how are we to characterize milky spore
>disease as a form of human intervention in the landscape?  Is it
>technological, or natural?  The categories are no longer much help, at
>least in the garden.
>
>	"I won't know for a while whether I've completely solved my pest
>problem.  But, puttering in my newly fenced garden, watching the mantises
>standing sentry on the tops of my tomatoes and the ladybugs running
>search-and-destroy missions among the eggplants, I'm starting to feel a lot
>more relaxed about it.  Though Dudleytown remains over the next hill, I
>know I can still stall its advance as long as I continue to put my thought
>and sweat into this patch of land.  I still have much to learn, and there
>are going to be setbacks, I'm sure; gardening is not a once-and-for-all
>thing.  Yet I think I've drawn a workable border between me and the forest.
>Might it prove to be a Maginot Line?  That's possible, but I think
>unlikely.  Because it doesn't depend on technological invincibility.  Nor
>does it depend on the benignity of nature.  It depends on me acting like a
>sane and civilized human, which is to say, as a creature whose nature it is
>to remake his surroundings, and whose culture can guide him on questions of
>aesthetics and ethics.  What I'm making here is a middle ground between
>nature and culture, a place that is at once of nature and unapologetically
>set against it; what I'm making is a garden."
>
>--Michael Pollan, *Second Nature: A Gardener's Education*, NY: Dell, 1991,
>pp. 53-64.
>
>Jim T.
>
>p.s. mindful of fair use issues, I once again urge everyone to rush out and
>buy a copy for yourself.  Only $12.55 US at amazon.com (paperback).  Check
>out the purchaser reviews once you get there--I just found out about that
>first one myself!  :-)  jt
>
>


"You never know where fish will go."

Molly Ivins

http://www.star-telegram.com/columnist/ivins2.htm



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%