It's All Relatives

Illustration above taken from Geometric Designs for Artists and Craftspeople by Dover Publications, which is nice enough to give away free samples of its clip art.

A POPULAR SAYING BACK IN MY COLLEGE DAYS, when we were first breaking free of the moral absolutes our parents had tried to teach us, was "It's all relative." Much later in life, when I began to learn about ecology and such, I changed what by then had become a cliche into a phrase that I can still live by. And so today I often announce, "It's all relatives."

In other words, everything is connected to everything else. This is hardly news to anyone the least bit familiar with ecology or natural history, but the specific examples never cease to inspire interest--and, in me at least, something akin to awe.

The paradox of protection
One such example came up recently in a study published in Science magazine. In this research, scientists working in Kenya fenced off whistling thorn trees (a type of Acacia) so that the trees could no longer be eaten by elephants and giraffes.

Now, it might seem that protecting the trees from huge plant-eating mammals would be a good thing to do. But after about 10 years of this, the trees were all dying off.

It turns out that the Acacias ordinarily provide good habitat for a particular type of ant. The trees provides food and shelter, in return for which the ants attack any animal that tries to eat the trees' leaves.

Once they were fenced off, however, eventually the trees got lazy and stopped providing the right habitat for the friendly ants. As a result, these ants were replaced by other ants, which had no interest in defending the trees. On the contrary, these new ants have a mutually beneficial relationship with a type of wood-boring insect, which soon took up residence in the Acacias.

Eventually the health of the Acacias began to be undermined by the wood-boring beetles and other insects that were able to invade now that the friendly ants were gone. And so the Acacias started to die.

For want of an ant ...
The trees were, quite literally, being killed by kindness.

Fencing off large predators caused the loss of their tiny defending army, leaving the trees exposed to far worse dangers than the occasional elephant or giraffe. Invisibly to human eyes, relationships that had evolved over thousands of years had been preserving the health of the trees. Yet as scientist Todd Palmer pointed out to writer Cornelia Dean in an article for the New York Times, it took only 10 years for this protective net to fall apart after humans intervened.

As Dean's article notes, scientists are finding similarly complicated relationships all over the planet. In North America, for example, research conducted in Yellowstone National Park found that wolves protect aspen trees by frightening off elk that otherwise would over-browse them. In its article on mutualism, the Wikipedia points out that gardeners sometimes try to create mutually interdependent relationships, as when we plant beans next to corn so that the beans can provide nitrogen for the corn while using the corn stalks as trellises.

It's (also) all relative
For wildlife-friendly gardeners and natural landscapers, stories such as these are reminders that we must not be too hasty to identify any creature as an enemy. One of my favorite examples, which I've talked about before, is aphids. Most gardeners kill them on sight, but they are one of the best bird foods in the garden, and if you want to attract birds, usually it's best to let those aphids live.

At one time most people in the West assumed that wolves were "bad" because they killed elk; now we know that the relationship between predator and prey, a., is more complicated than that and, b., affects many living things, not just the most visible participants.

Likewise, preventing a plant from being eaten might seem like the obvious thing for a plant-lover to do. But is it? Can we be sure?

Perhaps the best attitude to take toward any fellow creature is to acknowledge that, like all creatures, it has a role to play. Unless we know what that role is, best to proceed cautiously.

My own rule of thumb is that native species, having evolved together, are presumed to have relationships that are worth preserving. Non-natives, being new introductions, are less likely to be important in some larger drama that is currently invisible to me.

But even so, I try to remember to proceed carefully. After all, it's all relatives.

For more information on the research done in Kenya, see the BBC News or the Scientific American.

Gardening as Infinite Game

Michael Umphrey describes gardening as an infinite game. Many cultures have images of something having no beginning and no end, like this Celtic knotwork pattern that comes from the good people at Dover Publications, who are nice enough to give away free samples of their clipart packages.

THIS MORNING I HAD THE PLEASURE of opening an email from Michael Umphrey, resident of Montana, teacher, writer, and author of a book on community-centered education. Michael blogs on several topics, including gardening, from his Internet home at the Montana Heritage Project.

Michael let me know that he had read yesterday's post, "A Gardener's Duty," liked it, and linked to it, which of course sent me in search of the post that mentioned me, me, me. But the ego boost of seeing myself mentioned on someone else's blog was greatly exceeded by the joy of reading Michael's other entries. I started with his take on my post, "Gardeners Understand Small Solutions to Big Problems," then moved on to a post with a title that's bound to appeal to any gardener: "No Time to Garden." It begins with a sentence almost any gardener will understand: "I don't have time to garden well. I garden anyway."

This post introduces the notion that gardening is an infinite game, explained at length in a marvelous 1999 article Michael wrote called "A Sense of Time." An infinite game is the opposite of a finite game, which is played to win. An infinite game is played in order to go on playing. Michael writes:

Football is a finite game. Gardening is an infinite game. A political campaign is a finite game. A family is an infinite game. A business deal is a finite game. A religion is an infinite game.

Michael offers a description of gardening that captures why I continue to garden despite lack of time and, far more debilitating, a frequent sense that the best thing I could do for the Earth would be to do nothing at all.

Gardening, he writes, "takes place as a nexus of vision, art, science, community, and time." This puts gardening, along with forestry, ecological restoration, and agriculture (all practices having to do with the management of land), on a short list of practices that allow us to experience all of these things at once. I don't know about you, but I find that if I dwell in this spot long enough, I begin to see life itself as an infinite game, and can at least briefly put away all my fretting and worries and hovering despair. This experience cannot be expressed in words, but Michael evokes it in the following passage:

Having a garden is, to me, mostly a way of paying attention to the grace that dazzles and reassures, a way of aligning one’s small efforts with something so vast and good that we slowly learn we really do have nothing to fear.

A Gardener's Duty

This Milo Winter illustration from 1919 shows one of the fables attributed to Aesop, who lived in the 6th century BC; the story itself has been traced back to the myths of Ancient Egypt. In this story, a lion spares the life of a mouse. Later when the lion is trapped, the mouse returns the favor by gnawing the ropes and setting the lion free. The enduring popularity of this and similar stories across many different cultures is evidence of an innate human belief that helping others is ultimately a benefit to ourselves. Or as the last line of Aesop’s fable states, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." This image is courtesy of Project Gutenberg via the Wikimedia Commons.

ABOVE ALL, DO NO HARM.

This is a very old idea in ethics, sometimes called “the principle of nonmaleficence.” The idea is simple: If you are in a position to hurt someone else but don’t have to, don’t.

Ethicists refer to this as an ethical duty. The duty of nonmaleficence is embodied in the words of the Greek physician Hippocrates(460-370 BC)—who wrote that physicians should do good when they can but, “above all, do no harm.”

The duty of nonmaleficence is not the only duty. It must be balanced with the duty of fidelity, which involves such things as keeping promises and not telling lies; the duty of autonomy, which means respecting others’ freedom of choice; the duty of justice, which equates with what most people mean by fairness; and the duty of beneficence—which means that, given the opportunity to do something good, you should. The Oxford English Dictionary defines beneficence as “active kindness.”

Philosopher David Hume, who died in 1776, said that the sense of duty is fundamental to human morality. The evidence: that the duties not only appeal to us rationally but also have the support of “sentiment”—an 18th century way of saying that they appeal to us innately. Recent investigations into the way the human brain works support the notion that a sense of right and wrong—a conscience, if you will—is probably built in to most humans. Most likely it evolved because people who treated others well were usually treated well in return, improving their chances of survival.

A duties-based approach to ethics is less taxing than the rules-based approach many of us were brought up with. Duties require us to do our best in each situation—trivial or earth-shattering, it doesn’t matter. But the approach also recognizes that sometimes duties can conflict. Having trouble deciding whether to help that elderly person cross the street? You can weigh the benefit the elder derives from your good deed against the harm done to the drivers of oncoming cars, and to yourself and others if it will make you late.

Living this way, you may never be the opening story on the 11 o’clock news. But you will be able to look yourself in the mirror and sleep at night. And you know what? Someone who lives a life of nonharming, trustworthiness, respect for others, fairness, and doing good will add as much to the sum of happiness in the world as anyone can. If you don’t believe me, you are hereby condemned to sit down and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” one more time.

What does this have to do with gardening? Well, not to let the big corporate types off the hook--but the choices made by millions of individuals have emerged as one of the major causes of planetary degradation. Choices made in the way we manage land—even if it’s a half-acre back yard—affect the quality of our air and water, species diversity, and a host of other matters of more-than-passing interest to a lot of creatures for a lot of reasons.

Frequently these choices are of little consequence to us. That oceanic expanse of lawn, requiring the riding mower and truckloads of chemicals, may be there for no better reason than because the neighbors have one and so we thought we ought to have one too.

The principle of nonmaleficence requires us to think before we hop on that mower or call for those trucks. Is what I am about to do harmful? If so, can it be avoided without doing even more harm to someone else? How?

The principle of beneficence calls upon us to ask whether we can actually do some good. Is there something we could plant instead of lawn that would be of greater benefit?

Flexibility is built in: If you manage a golf course you are allowed to keep the lawn while you look for ways to do good (beneficence) without putting your family in the street (fidelity and nonmaleficence).

Yet, at the same time, you are required to recognize that duty to others—not just yourself or, for that matter, even your employer—is an inextricable part of ownership or control over land. It comes with the territory, so to speak. The power to do good implies a duty to do good. The power to harm implies a duty not to. To quote Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

One’s duty isn’t always obvious. A criticism of any flexible approach to ethics is that it allows rationalization—as in, “the harm done to me if I am two minutes late is greater than the harm I would do by leaving an elderly person stranded in the middle of the street.” (The criticism of rigid ethical systems, however, is that they lead to absurdities—as in, “I will help this elder across the street even if I cause several fender benders in the process.”)

Living dutifully also requires information, because we cannot gauge the effect of our actions without it. Duties are not abstract—they arise from, and can be exercised only in, practical situations. (This is probably why a duty-based approach to ethics has always been popular in medicine. It is also, I suspect, why duty could be making a comeback.)

Figuring out what it means to manage land in a dutiful way, giving people the information they need to make those judgments—that’s what I’d like this blog to be about. Maybe, instead of calling what I do wild gardening, I should have called it “dutiful gardening.” Or how about beneficent gardening? Gardening with active kindness.