Seminal Work

It's hard to believe I've never read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring before now. I've been meaning to read it for years, and I'm so glad I've finally gotten around to it.

It really is an incredible, revolutionary, prescient, and brilliant book. So much of what Rachel Carson wrote is so relevant for those of us engaged in growing food now, and really for anyone who cares about the health of the planet and our own health.

I always thought that Silent Spring was just about DDT. It is so much broader and deeper than that--it's really an indictment of the whole way of thinking that sets humans apart from the rest of the natural world.

Silent Spring has a lot to say about how we grow food. Carson's comments on agriculture are still relevant and cutting-edge, even 50 years later. She advocates polyculture/interplanting and explains the problem with monoculture (although I don't think the word had been coined yet), explains the concept of broad-spectrum insecticides--which she says should really be called "biocides," discusses the affect of pesticides on honeybees, explains the way that invasive species of plants and insects can disrupt ecosystems, and exposes the history and origins of synthetic pesticides. She explains that the first synthetic pesticides were developed during WWII, and were chemical agents developed by the military for use in chemical warfare, intended to be lethal to humans. Insects were used to test the poisons, and it was inadvertently discovered that they were also lethal to insects.

Reading Silent Spring has made me bump Linda Lear's biography of Rachel Carson to the next-up spot on my reading list - I'm just staggered by the breadth of this woman's knowledge and analysis, and moved by her beautiful writing. She apparently wrote Silent Spring while suffering from rapidly-metastasizing breast cancer, racing against the disease to finish her life's work. In the 18 months that she lived after the book was published, she was viciously attacked by the chemical industry, which branded her a "hysterical spinster."

Portrait of Rachel Carson from Robert Shetterly's "Americans Who Tell the Truth" series.

I honor the "hysterical spinsters" of days gone by as my feminist foremothers, and am so grateful for Rachel Carson's courage, vision, and brilliance in defense of systems of life on the planet.

Here are some quotes from what I've read so far:

• "Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture--the devotion of immense acreages to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the principles by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds. One important natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect that lives of wheat can build up its populatio nto much higher levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is intermingled with other crops to which the insect is not adapted."

• "The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world--the very nature of its life."

• "Future historians will be amazed at our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?"

• "It seems reasonable to believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction."

seminal (ˈsɛmɪnəl)

— adj
1. highly original, influential, and important
2. (botany) of or relating to seed

[origin: from Late Latin sēminālis belonging to seed, from Latin sēmen seed]

Dead of Winter, Promise of Spring

It's the dead of winter, and not much is growing in our gardens, but I thought I'd post some pictures of our various 4-season gardening contraptions.

Above is a simple, temporary cold frame made from straw bales and salvaged plexiglass windows; carrots and spinach are growing inside. And below are some shots from inside our hoophouse, including a close up of one of the 2000+ babies growing in there: Merveille des Quatre Saisons lettuce, a cold-hardy French heirloom.

In ancient, earth-based cultures in climates similar to ours (specifically: Northern Europe and the British Isles), this time of year was seen as a turning point. The snow is thick on the ground, but the earth underneath holds the possibility of Spring. Our bones are chilled, and we are weary with winter, but we know Spring's green shoots are coming. Pregnant farm animals literally contain new life at this time of year, the babies that will be born in the Springtime. Even when its hard to imagine Spring, we know it will come.

The ancients conceived of this time of year as the time when the goddess changed shape from her winter form --crone, hag, wizened and wise and bony old woman--to her spring form--maiden, bride, supple and fresh and pregnant with possibilities. Candlemas was the Christian appropriation of festivals honoring this transition, and Groundhog Day is the modern remnant of these ancient rites. Neopagans observe the transition as "Imbolc," but it was called by a variety of names by the peoples who celebrated the moment of turning from winter to spring. Whatever we call it, I'm grateful for this time of year -- when the bright blue sky and warm sun reminds me, even on cold winter days, that Winter won't last forever.

I'm grateful for the ways we capture the warmth and light, even in Wintertime. I mean this on a literal level: with coldframes and hoophouses and row cover and passive solar technologies. And I mean it figuratively: with the sickness and sadness in our household (see my last post on Frankie the cat), sparks of sweetness and levity are all the more precious.

In the dead of winter, there is light inside our cold frames and the hoophouse. Christopher cleaned out the ashes in our wood cookstove, and a new fire is lit. Our fridge is full of jars of seeds ready for Spring planting. Tiny carrots and kales and chards and beets and winter-hardy salad greens are growing in various contraptions throughout the garden. And we're holding on to a tiny light of hope for our beloved Frankie, for whatever may be for her.

So happy Imbolc, Candlemas, Groundhog Day, Bridget's Day, whatever you want to call it...and here's to cleaning out the ashes and lighting new fires.

Invoking Spring

The snow is melting today, pussywillows are beginning to bloom, and the redwing blackbirds have returned.   The expectation of Spring is so thick you can taste it!  

It feels like time to summon Spring.  

 

Invocation

by May Sarton

Come out of the dark earth 
Here where the minerals 
Glow in their stone cells 
Deeper than seed or birth. 

Come under the strong wave 
Here where the tug goes 
As the tide turns and flows 
Below that architrave. 

Come into the pure air 

Above all heaviness 

Of storm and cloud to this  

Light-possessed atmosphere.  

Come into, out of, under  

The earth, the wave, the air. 

Love, touch us everywhere  

With primeval candor. 

May Sarton

1912-1995

Presente!