Vista 2

Here I am, back at my spot on the overhanging cliff.  I wasn’t planning on coming here right now – this is an impromptu visit and entry – so I don’t have my laptop, which I think is a better way to get acquainted with a natural setting.  So what, I’ll transcribe the entry onto my laptop later.

            Now just so happens to be around the same time of day as the previous time I was here.  4:30pm.  Sunny and beautiful.  Pittsburgh seems to shine like that.  Today I must be sitting a couple inches to the right, because through a chink in the branches in front of me I see a brilliant turquoise dome catching gleams of sunlight.

            Having read Nancy Gift’s book, A Weed by Any Other Name, I feel like I’ve taken on an ant’s eye view whenever I’m outside walking to class or sitting in the grass.  Right now, I’m noticing all the weeds around me on the lawn and in the surrounding brush. I can identify some, but most I don’t know the names for.  I wonder if they’re mentioned in her book.  Why didn’t she include pictures?  Drawings at least!  I would be able to identify this tangling gangly alien looking thing with the pretty flowers.  But I do see crabgrass, a yellow dandelion, and – ahh! a fluffy white dandelion about to blow away into a hundred pieces.  And clover.  Lots of clover.  Perhaps this explains all the bees circling my ankles.

            In Connecticut, I work in my town’s nature center, an amazing facility called Earthplace.  During the summer Earthplace runs a summer camp, which allows kids to get in touch with the natural world, through interaction with animals, lots of trail walks, experiments, arts and crafts, field trips, canoe trips, etc.  I love this place.  The camp director is an expert beekeeper and there are two hives on the property that she maintains throughout the year.  Bees are one of her passions, but she just so happens to be highly allergic.  We’re all prepared, of course, in case she’s stung.  There are a significant number of campers who show up at the start of camp every session armed with their Epi-Pen Jrs.

            The thought terrifies me though.  As Becky takes me on a tour of her hive, thousands of bees swarming around her head, her bare arms, her legs, my heart pounds.  You’re going to get stung for sure.  I want to grab her, snatch her back to safety.  But then she reemerges from the hive area, no stings, no swelling, no anaphylaxis.

            The next day, Becky invites the ten-year-old campers for a visit to her hive.  Are you crazy?  I don’t ask that.  Because what I realize is – these children need to learn not to fear things that are only threats if you make them threats.  A bee will sting you if you are provoking it.  Yes, sometimes a bee will sting you for no reason at all, and that sucks.  But cars crash, friendly dogs bite.  If you teach a child to fear bees, that snakes are evil, spiders are to be crushed under your shoe, then they will grow up with the wrong impression of nature – an ignorant and biased one.  Like Gift says in her book, children need to touch to learn.  Okay, so don’t touch the bees.  But getting up close is so cool.  And seeing that bee hive up close was really awesome. 

            I went off on a huge tangent here.  It’s getting a little chilly.  Clouds are passing over the sun, and golden rays are no longer reflecting off that turquoise dome.

Response 2: Tangled and Confused

            What are weeds?  The technical definition is “a plant out of place,” but as Nancy Gift points out in her book, A Weed by Any Other Name, people think of weeds as those pesky little plants that spring up in their gardens when they shouldn’t.  It is a purely subjective term.  Weeds are plants we don’t cultivate.  Why don’t we?  Good question.  That’s what Gift’s book answers.  As a weed scientist, Gift is an expert on the benefits and disadvantages of harboring weeds in your backyard.  She speaks very highly of the majority of these marginalized warriors and designates a spot for each of them in her garden, even the thistle.  The only weed she sanely exiles from her garden is the poison ivy. 

            Gift guides us through her backyard, her family life, her education in biology, and most importantly, through the intricate history and ecology of twenty types of weeds.  Gift is honest and thorough.  If there is a plant that is evil, she comes out with it.  This plant is going to stab you, give you a rash.  But many of these unwanted plants are edible, flower beautifully, and are natural guardians of our spoiled, wanted plants.  Gift loves her weeds, and I think it almost impossible if her passion hasn’t infected her reader.

            One of my favorite parts of Gift’s way of storytelling is the proximity we get to her home life.  Weeds were a key part of her childhood (she remembers playing with plantains on the playground and constructing clover crowns) and she cannot fathom raising her own children without the inclusion of weeds.  We therefore get to read wonderful little anecdotes about Gift and her daughters – planting bulb gardens, trying, and failing to raise chickens, playing croquet on a bumpy lawn.  In witnessing these scenes, many of which take place in her own backyard right here in Pittsburgh, I was really impressed by how much was going on.  Of course they have a lot of plants in their yard because their mother is a gardener, biologist, botanist, weed specialist extraordinaire, so they also get the animals – rabbits, toads, chipmunks, bees, butterflies.  They play croquet, they go sledding.  They make snowmen, they roast marshmellows.  They plant gardens, they grow vegetables.  They have a brush pile that is pretty much the most exciting brush pile in the entire world.

            What I’m getting at here is there is nothing unusually exciting about the Gifts’ backyard, except that Nancy doesn’t spray herbicides on it, allowing the weeds to grow.  But because their yard is in a natural state, it seems like there is so much more for her family to interact with.  There are certainly more plant and animal species inhabiting her land because of the lack of chemical treatment to the grasses.  Gift also is providing more shelter for animals in the form of standing dead trees, which she purposely doesn’t remove, as well as their enormous brush pile.  I imagine their backyard as a magical forest, the perfect place to raise a child.  How delightful it must be for her daughters – to be able to go outside and see all these animals and plants, to explore, to know their backyard is a wilderness in itself.  Sure, they can have a football toss on the lawn with their father.  But right there, on the edge of their lawn, is a huge brush pile, “covered with snow, its crevices possibly filled with warm, furry little bodies, waiting for spring.”

            This idea of a beautiful lawn captivated me throughout the book, and I was interested and frustrated by the idea of aesthetics.  Who ever said that manicured lawns were beautiful?  Uniform.  Trim.  Boxy.  All.  The.  Same.  It must have to do with a history of domination and control.  Coming to a land and conquering it.  It is a show of power, affluence, prosperity.  In American culture, it is a way of showing off success.  The backyard is a place where we relax after a long week of work, and a neatly manicured lawn is a way of showing we can afford to lavishly primp that space.  But it seems like there was a giant disconnect in the aesthetic regarding backyards.  Gift points out, “The presence of weeds is completely consistent with the lawn’s purpose.  Many of us buy homes so we can have places to relax, and weeds are an indication of relaxation – some might say relaxation of standards. (82)

            And seriously, is all the effort of lawn care really worth it?  The thousands and thousands of dollars spent annually on mowing and mulching and spraying and watering.  For what?  So your lawn can look like your neighbor’s lawn can look like his neighbor’s lawn?  Which looks pretty boring to me.

            “Is all the effort of lawn care really worth it?”  Really worth all the money?  What else?  Cancer?  Throughout this book, while Gift is serving to the reader all this fascinating information about weeds, she is also constantly addressing the battle of herbicides and pesticides.  To spray or not to spray?  This is what really stuck with me.  If the virtues of the weeds isn’t enough to convince you to have a natural lawn, then maybe it’s the threat of cancer.  Studies are showing that breast cancer has a statistical association with the use of lawn services (33.)  I’m willing to bet that more studies will come out in the near future using slightly more confident language.  Prostate cancer, breast cancer – cancer in general – WILL be linked to the chemicals we ingest through our food and water.  We spray herbicides on our lawns so that the unwanted “weeds” like clover and crabgrass won’t grow.  We’d rather have that inch tall uniform grass that’s considered so beautiful with chemicals that we roll around on, that inevitably will seep back into our crops and waterways.

            I cannot help but think that in the future (if we make it there,) society will look back on us and get a good chuckle in the same way that we laugh at Elizabethan women for using lead-based makeup to appear paler.  Future humans will say of us: “They used to spray chemicals on their lawns to look unnatural!  Ho ho!  And they’d breathe the chemicals, and they’d seep into their foods!  Ha!  And it would give them cancer!”  It’s worse than smoking cigarettes to look cool, or going to tanning salons.  Not only are you hurting yourself, you’re damaging the ecosystem on your property and creating a detrimental situation for a much greater population, including your children and their entire generation.

            So instead of killing the weeds, let them grow.  Gift is an expert, and she point out to us readers how weeds are helpful because the presence of certain types may be a clue that there is a problem with the soil.  For example, “Crabgrass…can indicate that a soil has been compacted; tall clumps of spiky, tan broom sedge indicate poor soil nutrition; broad reddish tinged leaves of dock can indicate acid soil – but violets simply indicate shade” (38.)  These plants are letting us know what needs to be done to improve the soil, but in many cases, our reaction would simply be to uproot them.  They’re weeds!

            I could not help but think about food when reading this section.  We alter our food so much; I have a hard time calling it food at all.  White bread for example (I’m not even going to mention Wonder Bread because I have a hard time distinguishing that from Play-Doh.) While whole grain flour is where it’s at – all the nutritious parts of the grain are found in the germ – we shell this off in the refining process and create white flour.  White flour, with its lack of nutritional value, has unfortunately proven to be contributing to the massive wave of obesity overcoming Americans.  Whole grain consumption, on the other hand, greatly reduces the risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular, and coronary heart disease.  So it’s obvious that the whole grains are better for us: not only are they reducing our risk for diseases, but they also contain important micronutrients.  But we love our white flour.  So what do companies like Wonder Bread (ugh) do?  They add those missing micronutrients to their product.  And what do our health care systems do instead of pulling the problem up by its roots and nipping it in the bud?  They search for expensive cures for these diseases.  They find ways to incorporate them into our lifestyles.  Obesity is become increasingly tolerated.  Everything is bigger.  America is supersized.

            This is so much like weeding.  The weeds are giving us obvious clues as to what is working, what is natural, what needs to be done to make the garden (or our society) functional.  Nancy Gift offers, “We can choose to listen to what the weeds are saying, or we can try to cover the problem by spraying and putting down sod, in square trimmed patches as natural as peroxide blond hair” (38.)

            We need to stop and relax for a moment and let the weeds show us what to do.  

Vista 1

I have never had a view quite like this one.  From where I am sitting, perched on the edge of a grassy slope, legs dangling over the steep side, I can see a city.  Yet here I am, in what certainly feels like the woods.  At the same time, I hear both joyous buzzing of cicadas and frantic sirens of fire engines.  The wind is blowing, and far away is the whoosh of highway traffic.  This is Pittsburgh.

For the two weeks that I have lived here, this city has done nothing but impress me.  Coming from Connecticut, I knew nothing next to nothing of Pittsburgh’s makeover.  No, I didn’t think it was still the same smoggy steel mill, but I was definitely surprised when I saw the huge tree population, beautiful rivers, and the incredible new buildings like PPG Place and the unparalleled David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the largest “green” convention center in the world.   Pittsburgh combines the old and the new.  It remembers its past and embraces the promising opportunities of its future. 

This spot I have chosen on the hill seems to agree with these themes of the city it belongs to.  Surrounding me on three sides is Chatham, my new nest, where I will be learning, growing as a writer.  In front of me is a city, a brand new world. 

The buildings of Chatham are made of brick.  They are sturdy, official - what I think of as smart buildings.  Below me is a pathway where students occasionally pass by on their way to or from class.  Now that I’ve been sitting here for a few minutes, I’m very glad I picked this spot because it’s not in absolute solitude.  Between my floating thoughts, I get the periodic joy of people watching.

I feel that besides the beautiful vista that this site offers, I may have identified with this spot because of the odd staircase below me that descends over the cliff and down the hill.  It can only be described as a twisty tree-house.  Of course it reminds me of Arbofilia, the station in Costa Rica where I spent two months.  It was there, in the rainforest, where I felt most connected to the natural world, and as a result, found the pieces of my life fitting together, suddenly so clearly.

Beside the tree-house stairway is a tree that reminds me so much of home.  When I have a chance, I’ll look up its name.  It’s killing me that I don’t know it.  I associate it with the water or growing near sand.  

Other trees are starting to turn, I now notice for the first time this year.  It upsets me that I have a hard time appreciating how stunning the fall leaves are – I’m too busy dreading the winter that’s inevitably to follow.  Maybe by sitting in this spot every week and really connecting with these exact trees, I will be able to better appreciate the cycle of the seasons the plants go through.

I feel very at peace with this spot and am confident with the choice I have made.  I just have to be careful not to drop my laptop over the cliff. 

Response 1: Atom Bombs and Safety Pins

Welcome to my first ever blog!  Yes, I’ve always been a private one, hiding inside my spiky little shell.  But now, in the pursuit of knowledge, I am urged to reveal myself on the fascinatingly intelligent and worldly web.  For my course in nature writing, my classmates and I will be using our blogs for responding to readings on nature and the environment that intrigue us, as well as for keeping our own nature journals.  But this “nature writing” is a sticky subject, because, after all, what is nature? 

I think most people would say that nature is essentially anywhere on earth beyond human’s grasp.  It is a bird sitting on a branch, a forest without loggers.  It is a sea turtle laying eggs on a moonlit beach, a tadpole turning into a frog.  Babs, my mother, says nature is “the sky, the sun, the moon, the trees, the dirt.”  Then, more affirmatively, “The dirt.”  Wikipedia widens the definition to “the phenomena of the physical world” and also “life in general.”  With a definition like that, more than a sticky subject, I imagine “nature writing” as a whole fly-papered tree, taking hold of every thing, living or dead, that happens to stick to it during a hurricane.

In “This Nature,” Pattiann Rogers writes, “Nature is everything that is.  We are not and cannot be ‘unnatural.’”  She goes on a long and dispassionate rant how abortion and the atom bomb and language and the safety pin are all nature and natural.  Why?  Because we humans have created those things.  And what are we?  “We are thoroughly nature.  To claim otherwise is to attempt to place human beings and everything we do in some rare unimaginable realm beyond the universe, thus rendering the power of our origins lost and our obligations vague.”

This statement fascinates me.  Indeed, we do separate ourselves and what we do from nature.  But how can we?  Are we not animals?  In the same way that a bird builds a nest, do we not build houses?  Can we not see that Chimpanzees are territorial to the point that they will commit murder to another of their own species?  Isn’t that what we do in war?

It is ignorant (but at the same time, delightfully human) for us to distinguish ourselves from animals and nature, for as science continues to prove, the differences between all us critters are very very slight. 

So why, I wonder, have we identified ourselves apart from nature and the other two million identified species on Earth?  Something tells me it has to do with a pang of guilt we feel in response to those alarms blasting in our ears, signaling the destruction of the planet.  Oh, you don’t hear them?  It’s just a global crisis.  Nothing to worry about.

But back to that bird’s nest that we were talking about.  Picture this: It is early May.  A fat gangly looking bird, shiny black feathers on her back, bright red breast.  She flutters around a low brush, collecting twigs in her beak.  She grabs some grass, some paper, a feather!  Oh, what a find!  Now, for a spot.  Under the foliage of a thick bush, the perfect branch awaits.  She builds her nest.  Her home.  She lays her eggs, they hatch, they cry.  She feeds them.  They fly.  Summer fades.  The nest breaks apart.  Twigs fall away.  A feather is carried with the first autumn breeze.

Now picture this: Dad backs the Jeep out of the garage on Monday morning.  God, it stinks.  The trunk is filled with plastic trash bags.  He heads over to the dump, throws the bulging sacks onto the heap.  And that’s that.  He heads back to his nest, where he grows his family.  The cry out.  He feeds them.  They fly away.  Little does he know that eventually his trash will float out to the Pacific Ocean, to become part of a garbage patch twice the size of Texas.

So both these nests are natural, but what is the difference?  One is destructive, while the other blends back into that from which it came.  So we are naturally destructive.  And what else is nature?  Besides war and laughter and bombs and hospitals and marriage?  Nature is natural selection.  Like millions of species before us, humans have the potential to go extinct.  “We are destroying the environment,” we are warned.  But this is not true.  The “environment” will go on.  “Nature” will always endure, even if it is depleted, weak, and choking for a breath of fresh air thanks to humans’ (naturally) irresponsible behaviors.   It is us that may cease to exist, and perhaps this is to be our natural course of existence on this planet.  Am I comfortable with this somewhat tragic fate for mankind?  I think so.  But there’s one more thing.  If nature is everything, then nature is anything.  And nature is constantly changing.  Humans are the most intelligent and adaptive species ever to live.  And we do seem to care about one another, at least sometimes.  So maybe I’m too quick to subscribe to a “Life After People” mentality.  If anything could change the course of nature, it’s humans.