Trying to Hear the Catbird
The bird sound was bizarre: a rapid, energetic collection of squeaks, whines, and whistles, bouncing around with a jazz-like randomness, interspersed with brief bursts of more normal-sounding, composed bird song. The singer was difficult to locate, somewhere dozens of feet up in the massive mulberry in my back yard. After a minute or two, the apparent source was located- a catbird?- flitting and bobbing about in something akin to a singer grooving to the music…
Then the weed-whacker fired up. “BWAAAH, b-b-b-WAAAAAH, BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!…” as an unseen neighbor assaulted some undergrowth in a nearby yard, hidden behind a privacy fence. Any possibility of hearing the bird, or having anything akin to a quiet moment on a lovely late Spring morning, was toast.
This incident is a microcosm of the difference between my approach, and many others who are acutely aware of, and concerned about, the environment, and that of most of my neighbors as well as the general public. And more specifically, between those of us who actually make a real effort to protect and assist the natural world, and those who vary from clueless, to apparently hostile, to its existence.
The standard common view of ‘normal’ American (and, as our views apparently come from there, European, too, I would guess) homeowner yard composition and maintenance baffles and frustrates me. This approach appears fixated on two main principles- conformity and tidiness. A ‘normal’ yard is mostly grass- full stop- and usually non-native, subtropical varieties at that. Other plantings are to be neat and pretty, with little to no consideration for environmental impact. Native plants may get included, but only by chance or because they are seen as cheaper, hardier options. Even when providing these advantages over another, non-native choice, the slightest trivial reason- wrong color, shape, or just ‘looking messy’- may result in harmful aliens being chosen over helpful natives.
In the end, it would seem that this attitude is as much about worrying what the neighbors think as anything else. Considering we live in an age where our environment is showing worrying signs of being stressed to the point of collapse, this would seem to be slightly silly and short-sighted. Especially when efforts to assure the Jones’s aren’t tut-tutting at one’s deviant lawn care are helping, even to a tiny degree, to destabilize the environment.
The most damaging aspect of ‘normal’ lawn maintenance is the hefty role poisons play. Each of ‘-cides’ commonly used to maintain a tidy, vanilla, grass dominated yard does damage to the larger environment. Each adds it’s own tiny push to unbalance the environment’s stability.
The most obviously dangerous killer chemical class are pesticides; accounting, undoubtedly to a large degree, for the precipitous decline in honeybee (and all other insect) populations. Bees, and other pollinators, are vital to almost all aspects of food production. If populations continue to reduce, agricultural productivity will likely drop proportionally, and the risk of a sudden, disastrous collapse in both pollinator populations and food production is far from impossible. That such a collapse is being risked at the same time that climate change is stressing food production is more than disturbing.
And beyond pollinators, a collapse of other insect populations would be disastrous in ways we likely cannot even comprehend. Certainly, knocking out the foundational role they play in so many basic environmental functions- from breaking down organic matter to aerating soil- to even a small degree would likely have dire consequences. To say nothing of the devastating impact such declines would have on the legion forms of wildlife that depend upon insects for a food source- whole classes of birds would likely disappear from many habitats.
Of course, the quite reasonable counter argument to these fears is that without these poisons, food production would be drastically decreased anyway. But the average homeowner is not producing any meaningful amount of food, no matter how impressive their gardens. And most are using them for trivial, nit picky reasons- quick elimination of household invaders, like ants or wasps, or to keep the flowerbed pristine.
And these uses are all the more lazy and reckless when there are easy to use, environmentally neutral, chemically simple options available. Ants can be killed with comparatively tiny quantities of borax laced cornmeal. Straight boric acid will wipe out roaches. Wasps and other ‘scary’ insects have zero interest in stinging you unless you’re killing them- avoid them, swat them, or usher them out an open door or window. For the flowerbed (and the garden- from experience, I know it will absolutely nuke infestations of all kinds), diatomaceous earth is deadly to bugs, chemically inactive (it kills by mechanically cutting the crap out of their bodies), and can be applied in ways that limit damage to helpful insects, by, for instance, washing it off shortly after dusting the pests you’re after.
There’s also solid arguments that our chemical intensive, industrial approach to agriculture is the wrong approach anyway. That the ‘we have to do it this way to feed the world’ paradigm is more a result of our past eager adoption of seeming chemical silver bullets, and the profit drives behind them, than necessity. When serious thought and effort is applied to growing food organically, yields can approach, and even surpass, chemical/genetic manipulation heavy methods. And it is hard to not believe sustainable agriculture methods, which much more closely match how the ecosystem works naturally- instead of beating it into submission with chemicals and bizarre plant hybrids- will be much better for us, and the planet, in the long term.
It’s difficult to not see the negative influence of consumer culture, and the omnipresence of marketing and its shameless, fanatical efforts to increase corporate profits, in advancing this dystopian, deeply unenlightened approach to nature. We are constantly pounded with commercial reminders of the need to poison our yards, our homes, our general vicinity. That responsible citizens ‘weed and feed’ and treat their lawns for grubs every fall, that they never tolerate unsightly edible, pretty natives like dandelions to exist in their yard, where their ability to thrive and enrich the ecosystem is apparently regarded as a filthy, dangerous threat, that any intrusion or possible intrusion of insects into their home rates a Hiroshima level chemical response. As usual, slick marketing silliness is deployed ad nauseum, with the obvious motivation to get people to buy more, more often. For example, a recently received mailer from a major hardware chain, whose main focus is pushing a four part, one per season lawn care regime from a massive lawn care industry player. By following this ‘perfect lawn’ plan, you’re also guaranteed that you will be poisoning your lawn, and everywhere runoff from you lawn flows, at least every third month. But of course, your ‘ideal’ green wasteland is not coming cheap, either. To say people buying into this commercial idiocy are misguided, and being played for fools, is difficult to refute.
In some cases, these chemical marketing schemes are not only harmful to the environment, they are an openly transparent scam, like the plague of ‘mosquito control’ companies claiming to be capable of keeping your yard to any meaningful degree ‘mosquito-free’. Like many a corporate/capitalist grift, it depends on utter failure to notice the massive logic holes and contradictions involved. Or noticing the fact that, despite undoubtedly significant corporate pressure to do otherwise, the EPA refuses to in any way vouch for their effectiveness. Claims to be ‘bee safe’ are ludicrous marketing claims, nothing more; you can’t kill lots of mosquitos, via broadly targeted spraying, and not kill lots of beneficial insects. You cannot both spray sparingly and infrequently, and magically keep mosquitos, who, if people haven’t noticed, can fly, out of your yard. Although I have no hard evidence to offer, per logic it would seem that these companies are scamming/lying on at least one of these two points: that they significantly reduce mosquito populations in people’s yards; that they do so without heftily reducing all other flying insect populations, including bees. Considering that, again, mosquitos can fly, I seriously question that without a physical barrier ANY efforts to keep them out of an outdoor space are laughably hopeless. And to do so it would take CONSTANT spraying, not only keeping almost all surfaces coated with a thin coat of poison, but maintaining a regular mist of toxic fog around the outdoor space. Which would in itself be easily defeated by a light breeze. Which would be ironic, as a seemingly much more effective, and massively less damaging approach, is to simply create that breeze yourself with a common household fan. Mosquitos, same as any small insect, simply cannot fly against anything more than the mildest breezes.
These blatantly commercial, and idiotic, approaches to mosquito population control are even more perverse when the mosquito life cycle provides an incredibly simple, easy, and cost free answer to completely breaking the cycle of mosquito reproduction. They must have standing water to lay their eggs, and then that standing water must continue to exist for, at minimum, a week plus. Any emptying of the water they are developing in kills them, all of them, as well as any unhatched eggs. Simply regularly dumping standing water, or even better, eliminating containers that allow that standing water to accumulate, will greatly reduce mosquito populations on your property. And if you can get your neighbors to do the same- or even better, if there was any kind of consistent, widespread informational campaign to encourage the wider population to eliminate standing water- area populations will plummet. Of course, if you live next to a swamp, or a wet area where stagnant water is common, such efforts are doomed. But such is simply reality, and one of the conditions of living in such areas, the same way as living in a desert is inevitably dry (which someone needs to tell Las Vegas), or living in the high latitudes comes with dealing with cold, or in tropical areas with heat.
Again, you would think even trivially contributing to the possible widespread collapse of agriculture, with attendant starvation, suffering, and unrest, would be regarded as silly at best, borderline sociopathic at worst. And when it is done to keep bugs from eating ill-suited, alien flowering plants which will be dead at the end of the season anyway, it seems particularly stupid.
Beyond pesticides, and the ‘kill ’em all, let god sort them out’ approach they represent, their fellow killer agent- herbicides and fungicides- deal their own widespread, untargeted environmental mayhem. Herbicides generally broadly attack wide classes of native plants, plants that work well within their environment, feeding native insect and animal populations, reducing erosion, and being capable of surviving harsh local weather. In addition to introducing more toxins and complex chemicals- with all their unknown effects and interactions- into the environment, the general pressure on native plants, and support of ill-suited natives, represents a fundamental undermining of local ecosystems. By excluding native plants, native insects that depend on them for food, shelter and reproduction struggle to maintain their generally well evolved, important roles in the their local environment, roles that often include pollinating, or otherwise assisting, their native plant allies. When pesticides and herbicides both are attacking such symbiotic relationships at both ends, significant components of local ecosystems can start collapsing, leading to more knock on effects, as related components are also stressed, and may similarly start to collapse.
A particularly illustrative example of the danger of herbicides would be the wildly profitable, widely used- and possibly carcinogenic, liver, kidney, and DNA damaging herbicide glyphosate. The evidence one finds when looking into glyphosate seems very mixed. Some governmental bodies are banning it, others are screaming about how safe it is. When one considers it is THE most used herbicide on the planet ( — insert cash register ringing sound — ), and that crops have been specifically engineered to work with it ( — insert more cash register ringing sounds — ), only a fool would think that there isn’t a very large desire by many powerful entities to find it ‘safe’. Perhaps the clearest evidence that it is dangerous is that the company that owns the formula is, despite the profit hit, phasing it out quickly from the household consumer market, out of fear of lawsuits.
The way consumer society has built this “poison everything we find inconvenient, or things we are told are bad” attitude towards nature isn’t the only damaging environmental effect of a culture that is constantly in search of things to sell. It has also conned us into believing that the natural way plants are fertilized- through the mechanical, bacterial and fungal breakdown of dead plant matter and other organic material- is both insufficient and unforgivably messy. Instead, we are told we must both remove unsightly plant-food-in-making, and replace it with chemical fertilizers that are often environmentally irresponsible.
First, many chemical fertilizers are derived from oil, and thus add to the raft of negative consequences it brings; direct environmental damage from extraction, the risks and costs of transportation, as well as being another prop holding up an incredibly destructive, but incredibly rich and powerful, oil industry. And unlike the ready-made plant and other organic waste already present in yards, chemical fertilizers bring additional environmental strain in that they must be processed, packaged, and shipped, all likely using climate destroying fossil fuels.
Chemical fertilizers are also directly damaging to the environment, with many waterways now choked with oxygen gobbling, sometimes toxic algae growing rampantly from chemical fertilizer runoff. In a number of ways, it appears clear that chemical fertilizers are simply ill-suited to the natural environment, that the normal process of plant fertilization, the slow breakdown of organic matter into widely spread, less chemically concentrated plant food, is the only healthy way it can be done in our environment. That the shortcut to powerful, easily washed away chemicals is incompatible with natural systems, and should be limited- or mitigated, at worst- in use, especially for non-agricultural purposes.
Not only is the American consumer told that chemicals are the way to fertilize, and that all good lawn owners do so, regularly (often completely unnecessarily), the same consumer is taught that the natural, ideal sources of yard fertilization- leaves and other plant matter- must be gathered up and taken away. Again, the logic is backwards and perverse. Instead of taking the approach that is easiest, cheapest, proven, and ideal, the approach that is inconvenient, costly, and fundamentally ill-suited to natural systems is pushed and widely accepted. Instead of using slow releasing, perfectly suited sources of plant food- the dead organic material from the same plants, obviously containing all the elements needed to make new plant matter- we have been conned into instead paying to import destructive chemical fertilizers into our environment.
And not only do we burn fossil fuel, and waste resources, to bring chemical fertilizers to our homes, we then turn around and often burn more fossil fuels, and waste more resources, to remove the natural fertilizer sources those chemicals are replacing. Hence the spectacle of people bagging up massive quantities of exactly the matter needed to keep their yards verdant, to be carted off in diesel belching trucks to, ideally, be composted somewhere else nearby, or un-ideally, dumped in a landfill. A fair amount of this matter just gets dumped into the usual trash stream, for a direct trip to the landfill, to be entombed and contaminated in toxic trash.
This material should simply be composted in place, either literally where it falls, or by assigning a comparatively tiny portion of the yard to a compost pile that, as long as it gets wet, will, even with minimal effort, break down such matter into near dirt (humus) or actual dirt. To keep leaves or loose matter from blowing away, top it with a spare piece of screen, or create a natural version by laying waste branches in layers on top. Various composting apparatus work great, too, but are not required to eventually produce compact, broken down slow release fertilizer that is ideal, made up of the same elements and compounds of the plants it’s feeding. Highly water permeable, it will tend to soak into or stick to soil, not wash away. The different degrees of breakdown in partially/mostly composted material provides both structure for soils, as well as seeding proto-fertilizer in place, to compost and feed the plant directly over time.
Of course, occasional use of chemical fertilizer, sensibly applied, is far from a climate felony, or even a misdemeanor. Personally, I regularly use chemical fertilizer to supplement natural fertilizer when growing food. I have bagged yard waste in the past, and even used pesticides. It is far from impossible I could find myself doing either in the future- but only as a last step, reluctantly taken. It is hard to begrudge individuals their tiny contributions to the general degradation of the environment, when the real climate wreckers are massive entities, from Exxon to the Department of War, oops, I mean Defense.
But the larger point, a plea for a more logical, less hostile basic attitude toward nature, stands. The impact of many small actions, by many actors, is far from insignificant. Adjusting attitudes away from mindlessly destructive habits, even those that represent very minor, in the broader context, impacts on a stressed environment, also provide a nice reminder of our inescapable role in that environment. As well as our utter dependence upon it, our remarkable fortune to be born into it, and the inescapable, if often obscured, fact that we are ONE with it. And that by attacking it, degrading it, and ignoring our impacts upon it, we are not only harming our blameless co-inhabitants, we are, very possibly mortally, harming ourselves.