Is Enough Enough, or Is It Too Much?

“Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.”

--Aristotle, in “Politics”

There is a grand irony in using a quote from Aristotle to begin this particular diatribe, since there is an almost limitless supply of other ancient Greeks from whom to pluck the fruits of philosophy regarding happiness and the (relative) unimportance of material wealth.  Aristotle, you see, was the ultimate pragmatist.  In contrast to Diogenes, perhaps the perfect exemplar of self-satisfaction, Aristotle was (in large measure) all about “how can we Greeks get more (at the expense of everyone else)” – and yet, he managed, in this one sentence in his “Politics” which was a precursor to Machiavelli’s “Prince” as a foundation stone for Gordon Gecko’s “greed” speech, to contradict all the cynical materialism found in the rest of his works.

There is a long standing tradition among humans to think that progress can be measured by the acquisition of more stuff.  This dates to the Olduvai Gorge in modern Tanzania, when (millions of years ago) our ancestors were concerned mostly with defending those territorial sweet-spots where there were sufficient supplies of food and materials for crude weapons with which to defend oneself and one’s tribe from incursions by saber-toothed tigers, other hominids, and the occasional pissed-off rhinoceros.

That instinct, in that particular iteration of our species, was perfectly understandable.  However, we now have only one natural predator – ourselves.  And “more stuff” isn’t a deterrent to other humans, it is an invitation.  You want to steal our DVD player?  Well, we don’t want you to do so, but we’re not particularly interested in defending it with our lives, either.  We can always entertain ourselves with shadow puppets, but we cannot replace even one second of happiness by risking our lives and increasing our fear, paranoia, and vigilance, all in defense of “stuff”.

As it turns out, while we at Big Myrtle’s place are often at odds with our fellow Americans over the issue of “exactly how much stuff is enough,” we are somewhat more in tune with the standards most of the rest of the world are attempting to follow.  Numerous international organizations make rankings of “happiest” or “most livable” or “most satisfied” cities/countries/etc. and, while the U.S. is not absent from the top half of most of these lists… it is hardly ever in the top quartile.

There is a reason for that.  In most American versions of “best place to live” economic opportunity and chances for advancement/wealth rank high in our lists of desirable characteristics of a community in which to live.  Most other countries and cultures, however, do not place nearly so much emphasis on wealth creation. 

For example, since 2006 the lifestyle magazine Monacle has published an annual list called “The Most Livable Cities Index” featuring 25 top locations for quality of life, using criteria such as safety/crime, international quality of architecture, public transportation, ethnic/religious/cultural tolerance, environmental health and access to nature, urban design, business conditions, proactive policy development, and medical care.  Portland, Oregon is the only U.S. city to consistently make this list, cropping up around number 23 on an annual basis.

Portland, Oregon... the one U.S. city that doesn't make
the rest of the world queasy. 

For the sake of fairness, the Mercer “Quality of Living Survey” is produced by an American (with global contracts) human resources and financial services consulting firm, which compares 221 cities based on 39 criteria.  The baseline “100” score is New York City (because, hey, they are an American firm, and there is no more American city).  All other cities are assigned scores as they compare to New York.  The Top 10 in the Mercer Index for 2014?

1. Vienna, Austria
2. Zürich, Switzerland
3. Auckland, New Zealand
4. Munich, Germany
5. Vancouver, Canada
6. Düsseldorf, Germany
7. Frankfort, Germany
8. Geneva, Switzerland
9. Copenhagen, Denmark
10. Bern, Switzerland

There are a number of things that these “most livable” cities have that are missing from practically every American city.  Universal health care is one obvious example – opponents of “Obamacare” all screamed about how awful socialized medicine is, but… the fact is, hardly anyone in the world envies the American health care system.  In the developing world, maybe, but… in the industrialized West?  Nothing but crickets.  Hardly anyone in Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, etc. ad nauseum, would prefer American health care to what they have now.  As far as they are concerned, Obamacare is a pathetic attempt on the part of the Americans to move towards a “real” (i.e. single-payer) health care system.

Among the myriad other differences, though (and stepping aside from the politically charged issue of health care which Americans are seemingly incapable of discussing as a purely mathematical and economic issue, resorting instead to the paranoid fundamentalism of American-style-“let’s all get screwed by the rich”-capitalism), is the concept of “satisfaction” as an economic principle.

Essentially, there is very little in the American ethos which tells us as part of our foundational mythology when “enough is enough” – in fact, the very phrase is a cry to revolution, instead of a simple statement that we need to step back from the feeding trough.  For an American, “enough is enough” means the tyrants have finally gone too far, and by God we’re going to holy war over the installation of that stop sign/the issuance of a school bond/the ability of our lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered-nonidentifying neighbors to love one another/the lack of an alien-defense-system-alarm…  “Enough is enough” is usually expressed in American English as an epithet.

In contrast, the Swedish “lagom” is essentially a statement that “that’ll do” – It’s not merely “good enough” it’s “any more would be too much; yes, I see why you want that 3^rd piece of cake/next drink/extra million dollars, but isn’t that bad for your health?”

And they are right.  It IS bad for your health.  American obesity rates are climbing through the roof compared to every country on Earth; longevity comparisons, long buoyed by comparative wealth and access to technology, are actually shrinking for Americans, even as health and longevity in other countries (especially in Europe) continues to increase apace.  Clearly, there is no connection between “wealth” and “happiness” – though, as we shall see, there is a connection between enough and happiness.

The top 25 countries on the 2013 World Happiness Report published by the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network are as follows:

Country	Happiness Rank
Denmark	1
Norway	2
Switzerland	3
Netherlands	4
Sweden	5
Canada	6
Finland	7
Austria	8
Iceland	9
Australia	10
Israel	11
Costa Rica	12
New Zealand	13
United Arab Emirates	14
Panama	15
Mexico	16
United States	17
Ireland	18
Luxembourg	19
Venezuela	20
Belgium	21
United Kingdom	22
Oman	23
Brazil	24
France	25

There is an “Economic Freedom” index put out by several institutions from the Austrian school of economics which more or less parallels the American Conservative movement as funded by the Koch brothers and exemplified by Senator Rand Paul – Not all of the countries in the Top 25 for happiness are listed in their top 50 rankings (Costa Rica, the UAE, Venezuela, Belgium and Oman apparently not being worthy of notice), but a comparison of the lists is interesting.  For the top 10 happiest countries, the average ranking by libertarian economists is 20.1; not a one-to-one relationship… but not inconsequential, either.

However… none of the top three “free” economies make the top 50 in the list of “happiest” either.  Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand are 1,2, and 3 for the free market purists of the world, and they provide less satisfaction than the vast majority of their international contemporaries.

There is a bias in many circles (including, if we are honest, Big Myrtle’s place, where we found this next data point a little surprising and not a little disappointing) to educational performance being linked to happiness – the data says it just ain’t so.  Based on UN “Student Performance Ranking” data, for the top 10 “Happy” countries, the average ranking in student performance is 14.  Closer as a ratio than “economic freedom” but still not exactly 1-to-1, and, more to the point, only Finland among the top 3 educational countries made the top 10 in happiness.  South Korea and China (numbers 1 and 3 respectively) do not make the top 50.  Smart don’t mean happy. 

It is worth noting, though, that for the top 25 Happy countries, while some are not listed on the Student Performance measures (Costa Rica, UAE, Venezuela, Belgium and Oman… what up, Belgium?  Too good for surveys?) those who are listed average 22^nd for educational performance.  It is obviously a better measure than that used for freedom to control capital, even if it is not precise.  Our faith in this measure is shaken, but not discarded – it is hard for us to believe that there is any happiness greater than that found in reading a good George Eliot or Jane Austen novel, save perhaps in watching a Pedro Almodovar movie, something the typical American (… or Singaporean, or Hong Kong resident, or Koch brother, etc. etc.) does not fully appreciate. 

For the overall economic numbers, rather than taking GDP as a total, or even per-capita GDP, Myrtle chooses to use the UN’s “Financial Development Index” which is more or less a measure of the ability to accumulate financial reserves (not just ownership of stocks/real estate/intellectual property/doo-dads and doohickeys, but ability to convert them to cash if need be).  For the UN’s top 10 “most financially developed” nations, numbers 1,4 and 7 (Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan) fail to rank in the top 25 “happy” countries.  Which is interesting, when you think about what it means… basically, apart from a few outlier Asian nations that have whored themselves out to currency exchange markets for the glorification of national ego, the happiest countries are those in which it is easiest to get rid of your crap.  Those places where it is easiest to sell the stuff you don’t really need?  In general, those are the places where overall satisfaction is the highest.

This explains a phenomenon we have noticed on countless weekend excursions looking for castoff furniture, children’s clothing, etc.  The ubiquitous American tradition of the “garage sale” represents hope for the future of our culture, but it also illuminates our current folly.

All too often dumbed-down at present, it is nevertheless true that garage sales are the quintessence of a recycle/reuse/repurpose economy – stuff we don’t want, we sell at pennies on the dollar to anyone and everyone who might want it.  And, if you pay attention at these affairs, you realize that there are two classes of garage sale patrons – the happy ones, who may haggle for a dollar or two, but overall, are just happy to meet folk and oh-by-the-way every once in a while run across some item they may actually want… and then the folk (usually on the seller’s side) who are offended by the idea that they are not getting every last dollar out of a given transaction.  Rich people (let’s face it) are usually just plain assholes at garage sales, especially at their own.  We would love to be more polite, but there simply isn’t any other way to express it.

If your definition of happiness and satisfaction includes money, it is our sincere hope that you would stop and ask yourself… “Yes, but can I get by without this thing for which I am lusting?”  For those who truly need more money, there is no question that the answer will be an honest “no”… but for far too many, particularly in this country, that “no” is exceptionally dishonest.  C’mon… we know you can do better.  You can do better with less.

Happy farming!

Feed the World... One Porch, Balcony or Rooftop at a Time

The so-called “Green Revolution” of the latter half of the 20th century, in which yield-per-acre in industrial agriculture increased by orders of magnitude due to the use of improved technology and intensive fertilization, coupled with the use of herbicides to reduce weed competition and pesticides (including genetic modifications in crops to allow them to produce their own pesticides) to reduce insect depredation, all in the name of improving crop yields in order to “feed a starving world”… it’s all based on a lie.

There is a fundamental problem with the idea that we can increase food production to match population growth,

Most of the world's extreme food security issues are in Africa....

and it is an obvious problem, one which a simple look at two graphs can tell you is at the core of a whole host of global ills – first, a chart of who experiences the most food stress, and next a chart of who imports the most food.

Yes, the amount of food being produced is now greater than it ever has been before, that much is true.  But even before you begin to calculate the nearly incalculable damage that these methods have done (and are continuing to do) to our environment, we really ought to face the fundamental fact that all that extra food is going directly to wealthy people and making them fat.  Virtually none of that extra production is feeding the people who are actually dealing with food security issues.

Virtually none of the world's chief food importers overlap
with food security issues

Between 1961 and 1999, food exports globally increased by over 400%; much of that increase has come in the form of diets becoming westernized in most of Asia – the fastest growing businesses in the Pacific Rim are franchised fast food restaurants like Domino’s and McDonald’s, which to their credit do a fairly good job of localizing their menus in their new locations, but… an island nation like Indonesia is not exactly a great place to grow wheat.  As a consequence, all that flour for all those hamburger buns and pizza crusts comes from somewhere else.

The same dynamic is playing out in pretty much every country on earth where trends toward modernization and urbanization are drawing people out of the countryside and into cities that are increasingly homogenous in form and function.

There is a temptation to say, well, it’s working in Asia, and if you look at the map of underfed persons, Africa seems to be the only real problem child, so let’s just export Big Macs to Ethiopia and presto!  Problem solved!

Apart from the fact that Ethiopian Big Macs would need to be halāl (Arabic “حلال‎ “ or English “permissible”), and producing that much halāl meat is not really possible using modern factory-farming methods (animal cruelty is harām – “forbidden” – in Islam, so if the cow came from a slaughterhouse, a Muslim cannot eat it), there is also the very real problem that cattle production on the kind of scale necessary to let everyone in the world eat beef with the same wanton, hedonistic abandon as Americans do would require the use of more freshwater than the world has available.  Raising more cattle in Ethiopia than is done at present would leave no fresh water for other purposes.  It simply isn’t an option.

Even as an export… the only places in the world with sufficient freshwater for an increase in cattle production are not amenable to the industry – Lake Baikal in Siberia has 20% of the world’s freshwater.  It is also so remote and cold that unless you are either Siberian or Mongolian (or a geography geek), you’ve undoubtedly never heard of it.

The current model of feeding the world, in short, is haphazard and doesn’t work.  Numerous organizations recognize this problem and are leading efforts to reconceptualize how we approach issues of food security.  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has over the years evolved a framework for discussing food security, and their work has been adapted by many other organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and numerous others.

In 2009, the World Summit on Food Security stated that the “four pillars of food security are availability, access, utilization, and stability.”  Which brings us back to our initial premise – the “Green Revolution” methodology of throwing technology at the problem of food security is actually counterproductive, and tends over time to limit the availability, access, utilization and stability of food, particularly in the most food-stressed parts of the world.  To take each pillar in turn:

Availability – Numerous complications make food unavailable under the current paradigm, most notably that technological advances tend not to make production cheaper, but rather only to make production more profitable.  That is, advances in production techniques (better tractors, more powerful fertilizers, etc.) do, in fact, lead to higher yields, but they also require greater capital outlays, and (more to the point) incentivize producing food crops which will lead to a greater return on investment (ROI), not necessarily the same thing as producing crops which will be available for low cost to those who do not have enough to eat.  Poor farmers can’t produce without technology, and rich farmers don’t produce for poor consumers.

Access – Much as with availability, the economics of increasing production also limit access.  A prime example of this problem relates to rice production – the Asian economy has exploded over the past fifty years, with most of the world’s fastest growing local economies over that time period being in the region.  And rice is still, today, the most important foodstuff in every Asian city.  But because the economy has boomed for most, the price of rice has gone up for all.  And so, this simple food most Americans take for granted – and think of as cheap – has become increasingly difficult for poor families to put on their tables at dinnertime.  They have been priced out of the market – even when rice production is good (and that is not always a given thanks to pollution and global warming, both of which have wreaked havoc on rice crops in recent years), increasingly large percentages of the population simply have no access to this food staple.

Utilization –.Farmers down through history have almost never been concerned with whether or not the food they are producing is actually good for a human being to eat, and as a consequence, the marketplace is flooded with alleged food, things no one ought to ever put in their mouths, and including these poisonous calories right alongside nutritious items, and we pretend that this calculus is somehow healthy.  

Any urban space can replace a farm...
if enough of them are used

Increasingly all that improved agricultural production and all those food exports come in the form of high fructose corn syrup – that ridiculously sweet bottle of Coca-Cola started its life as somebody’s corn field.  Maize may have been one of the “three sisters” that allowed the aboriginal Amerindians to thrive, but it has turned into an addictive toxin.  It requires massive chemical intervention (in the form of fertilizer and pesticide) to grow, which poisons our waterways to the point of choking all the oxygen out of large parts of the Gulf of Mexico, and does nothing to feed malnourished children in the Sudan.  It sure has made a lot of folk exceptionally fat everywhere from Miami Beach to Seattle, Washington, though.

So, what’s the answer?  Advocates of the Green Revolution (notably Texas A&M’s own Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug) tend to discount advocates of organic farming:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"

The problem is, in advocating intensive monoculture factory farming, Borlaug and others threw the baby out with the bathwater.  Sustainable agriculture on the scale previously practiced could not, it is true, keep pace with population growth and urbanization.  But, long term, neither can a chemically oriented system of factory farming dependent upon ever increasing yields.  Eventually, soil which requires continual fertilizing, and tilling, and irrigation becomes played out.  Depending on increasing yields will eventually cause the whole system to break down catastrophically.

What is needed is a shift not just in production methods, but in production philosophy.

Which brings us to the fourth pillar…

Stability – Change is the only constant.  One of the strengths of a global economy, of course, is the idea that when there is a shortage in one region, it may be supplemented by imports from another region.  In practice, however, this kind of balancing of temporary shortages is not what the global food economy tends to implement.  Instead, food exports are planned in advance and tend to take advantage of the most profitable redistributions of agricultural goods, not the most needed redistributions.  That is, wheat or corn farmers will export their grain to the country that pays the most, not the one that is the hungriest.  As such, the increasing weather variability brought on by anthropogenic climate change will hit the poorest people in the world harder than it will hit anyone else – slight changes to crop conditions will lead to increasing starvation wherever people are depending on vulnerable supply chains.

The answer, then, is to decrease the vulnerability of supply chains.  And there are two ways to strengthen a chain:  1) increase the strength of the material being used to make the links – this is the “Green Revolution” approach, increasing yield-per-acre on the lands being used for agriculture; or 2) shorten the chain – this is the approach we recommend.

Potato sacks on an apartment balcony

“Not everyone can grow their own food,” goes the argument from the Green Revolutionists.  Poppycock, we say.  It is true that not everyone can put together a backyard microfarm, owing in great measure to the fact that not everyone has a backyard.  However, we have written before about the apartment porch hanging-potato-sack gardens of Nairobi, and spoken at great length about the guerilla gardeners throughout the world who will grow a stand of amaranth or a row of squash in any vacant lot, alleyway, or unused public right-of-way.

The shortest farm-to-table food supply chain is the one that requires nothing more than opening your back door and picking your salad.

Rather than trying to expand industrial farming techniques to all corners of the Earth in an attempt to turn every developing country into Kansas (which, by the way, is going to increasingly be unfarmable in coming decades, thanks to the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, so Kansas will itself be “food poor” under the current model before too terribly long), we ought to be figuring out the best possible way to turn every porch, kitchen window, alleyway, rooftop and vacant lot in the world into a community garden.  

As for the argument that we ought to focus on crop yields… well, fine.  It is easier, though, to fertilize a container garden than it is to fertilize a 100 acre farm.  And there’s no runoff to worry about. 

Potato sacks on a patio wall

 
Ultimately, food security is only one small part of an overall feeling of security which impoverished persons will never find satisfactorily addressed by anything other than economic self-sufficiency.  Relying on an international economy which not only does not put their faces or names to the issues at hand, but does not care one way or the other, is not an approach we ought to ask the people of Botswana, or Turkmenistan, or East Saint Louis, to just trust us on.

There is a strong impulse to call access to food, shelter, clothing, employment and health care and the like a “right” – we don’t quite go that far, but neither do we dismiss such arguments out of hand.  Regardless of how such fundamental human needs are categorized, the simple truth is that no one can be considered “free” who is, through no fault of their own, unable to meet those needs.  And the fastest route, the surest means, of personal security is having the means of meeting those needs for oneself and one’s family in one’s own control.

Subsistence agriculture has, for as long as the field of economics has existed, been an epithet, the marker of uncivilized humans.  It is time for that to change.  Not only should we be teaching people suffering from extreme food security crises how to be the best subsistence farmers they can be… we in the developed world ought to be doing the same thing.  The less we rely on that incredibly long (and incredibly vulnerable) international food chain, the more truly free we shall become.

Something to think about?  We hope so.

Happy farming!

Hot Time in the Ol' Garden... or, "How to Be Besties With Your Veggies"

“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”

Masanobu Fukuoka –“The One-Straw Revolution”

Permaculturalists are nonconformists by nature, so it should hardly be surprising that none of them do things the same way as each other.  Oh, there are some commonalities – lots of use of cardboard, heavy emphasis on seemingly random distributions of various plant species, integration of wetlands and orchards with herb and vegetable plots, heavy reliance on native plants and, of course, plenty of animals around who not only fertilize everything, but also get to eat their fair share.

But in general?  No two permaculture gardens are going to look more than vaguely similar.

Only one of many, many different "Permaculture" or "Forest Garden" schematics

We were thinking about that singular fact recently when we were asked a question about tomatoes by an online chum of the straight-and-narrow twentieth century square-garden-plot-enhanced-by-Miracle-Gro school of thought.  Seems he had moved from Colorado to Central Texas a few years ago, and wondered how to keep his tomatoes producing for as long as possible; when he lived in Denver, he got tomatoes all summer long; last year, living as he does now in San Antonio, they petered out in early June, when the heat simply became too much.

“When it gets over 90°, they just stop producing.”

A common misconception, the truth of which is invisible to anyone who does not practice some form of “forest gardening” or “edge gardening” or “permaculture” – depending on which one of us hippie freak gardeners you are talking to, and what we happen to be calling it on any given day.

The problem is not the daytime high being so ridiculously hot.  No, the problem is the nighttime low not being low enough.

“Well, great,” you may be thinking, “but I can’t do anything about that, either.”

Oh, ye of little faith.  There’s plenty you can do about it.  Fruit set for large swaths of the United States, of course, involves the opposite problem (if it’s too cold at night, fruit will either not set, or else if already set, will not ripen), but that, too, is solved by placing your beloved tomatoes in a broader context, making them part of a wider and more diverse little ecosystem.

Without all the jibber-jabber… give ‘em plenty of shade (put them near a row of shrubs, or a trellis covered with beans, or any of a number of vining squash, or passion fruit, or some such), mulch them heavily with leaves, or straw, or wood shavings, get indeterminate varieties and instead of putting them in cages, let them trail along the ground.  And for y’all Yankees who might be reading our humble blog, the same works in reverse – the things that aid in the prevention of a heat sink in the southern garden also insulate against the loss of heat in the northern garden.

All of these suggestions fly in the face of conventional wisdom, of course.  Practically everyone has a story about their grandmother or great-uncle, or some such, who grew State Fair grand prize winning giant tomatoes in cages, with so-and-so’s miracle fertilizer, and made sure to pinch the suckers from the base of the plant on a daily basis, and did the whole “shake-pollination” thing where they tap the blossoms with their thumbnails.

It’s probably true.  You can produce humongous individual fruit, and humongous bushels of bland-tasting produce from a genetically modified hybrid tomato plant, provided you are willing to suck your soil dry of all other life, and are willing to hang up your garden hat by the middle of June, when the plants will have all gotten crispy in the blistering Texas sun.

We’ve never run out of tomatoes when they are “in season” in spite of not doing all those things common wisdom deems necessary.  We have never had problems with pollination, because we take care of the local wild bee populations, and as a result they take care of us.  Weeds and the like do not bother us because they are a sign of healthy soil, and when harvested in moderation make for excellent salads for us and forage for the chickens.

And those suckers so fastidiously removed by other tomato fanatics?  Yeah, removing them will increase the fruit yield on the plant, but at the expense of the plant’s overall health.  If you don’t mind it dying in June, then by all means, prune away.

We would like to suggest a different course, however.

Rather than thinking of tomatoes as either “Spring tomatoes” or “Fall tomatoes” why not just call them “tomatoes”?  In their natural habitat (something slightly misleading, since they have been bred into ridiculously contorted varieties no longer resembling the wild ground cherries of ages long gone by) they are a perennial fruit.  And in some greenhouses, tomato trees (really just trellised indeterminate vines) live for not just multiple seasons, but actually for multiple years.

Epcot's famous tomato tree

Even if you don’t have a greenhouse, you can still protect the plants from the ravages of the extremes of the year.  We would suggest that step one in such a cause would be to change philosophies regarding your relationship to the plants and to the soil in which those plants grow – a couple of helpful concepts from other cultures (taken in a slightly different context from their usual associations) will illustrate what we mean.

First, the Japanese idea of “Wabi Sabi” – this word is all the rage among interior designers and antique dealers.  Wabi Sabi is the appreciation of imperfection; typically it refers to liking the weather-beaten look of a “lived on” sofa, or the gritty texture of centuries old silverware that has been polished a few too many times, or the beauty of the lines around an old woman’s eyes, showing clearly that she has spent many, many decades smiling and laughing and loving.

In the garden, Wabi Sabi means not clearing away “last year’s crop” – those dead plants?  They are next year’s mulch, and the following year’s soil.  Nothing ugly about them at all, they are a beautiful part of the cycle.  And once your new year’s tomatoes are growing, all the “weeds” in the bed are not ugly, either, nor are they a detriment to your plants’ health.  They are trap crops (attracting beneficial insects, and distracting detrimental ones), living mulch, keeping moisture in the soil and – most important – regulating temperature.  “Better Homes and Gardens” may think your tomato bed looks imperfect; we say, “So?”

The other borrowed concept we’d like to address is the Swedish concept of “Lagom” – loosely translated into American English, this means “plenty good” and we need more of it.  You can never have too much moderation.

Basically, lagom in the garden means not worrying so much about getting the biggest tomato, or the largest yield, and instead having big enough tomatoes, and harvesting enough for your purposes.  A healthy relationship with your environment means not just doing as little harm as possible to the environment on a macro scale, but also treating each part of it with respect on a micro scale.

Our daughter is an avid animal rights activist, and eschews the eating of meat on moral grounds, and she asked us a question recently that we have heard asked in a sarcastic manner before by cynical devotees of the exploitation culture:  “What are the ethics of eating plants?”  Understand, she was not asking whether it is right to chomp on a carrot or not – no, she was asking what are our responsibilities in our relationship to carrots and such?

Understanding that we are actually in a relationship with everything around us, including our garden vegetables, is an excellent first step towards making those relationships right.  Lagom teaches that if we are truly grateful to our plant friends, we will only ask what we need, and will only take what we need.  No more.

As such, any gardening philosophy geared towards getting more than we need may as well be geared towards learning how to grow 7-11 Big Gulp fountain drinks, and McDonald’s Supersized fries.

On the other hand… taking just enough means we get to take for a longer period of time.  We fully anticipate having ripe tomatoes in July and August, in spite of daytime highs in the 100°-plus range, and nighttime lows in the 78°-plus range, because the plants will not be stressed, they will be shaded by velvet bean vines, and cooled by a host of so-called weeds, earthworms, mulches of old vines and oak leaves, and plenty of their own leaves as they trail along the ground, preventing the soil from soaking up all that daytime heat.  They are our friends; we will support them, but we would never presume to tell them their own business – they know how to be tomatoes far better than we do.

However you go about getting friendlier with your garden, we hope you have fun with it.

Happy farming!

Fear and Loathing, both With Hummus and Without It

"The root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward unbridled violence. This can be traced to a world view which asserts that certain ideological and religious goals justify, indeed demand, the shedding of all moral inhibitions.”—Benjamin Netanyahu, 1987  (article in Awake! magazine in 1987, entitled "Terrorism, How the West Can Win")

We have observed many, many times since the events of September 11, 2001, when a handful of Islamic extremists from a handful of countries with strong ties to the United States (most notably our putative ally Saudi Arabia) violently commandeered four commercial airline flights, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center, and murdered just under 3,000 innocent people for the sole purpose of spreading fear and panic in the non-Muslim world, that the terrorists have already won.
It’s the simple truth.

They had one goal – instill fear.  They accomplished it.  And our response was as predictable as it has been lamentable – we have debased ourselves to their level.

We began our musings with a quote from a state-sponsored terrorist with an officially sanctioned position (Benjamin Netanyahu, whose criminal policies in the West Bank and Gaza constitute morally uninhibited ideological, religious, and racist warfare on a daily basis) for an obvious and perhaps even overly sophist oratorical reason – we wish to demonstrate in as unequivocal a way as possible that there is very little difference between the barbaric criminality of those whom we marginalize with the label “terrorist” and those who promulgate government sanctioned policies whose innate character can only be described as violent, immoral and base.

The real irony, the sad kick-in-the-pants to any theory that human beings are self-aware or even remotely sentient, is that along with Netanyahu, the vast majority of supporters of Israel are incapable of reading that Bibi quote from 1987 and seeing the utter hypocrisy and racism which form the entire basis for his statement.  The very title of the article screams it – “…How the West Can Win” means “Terrorism” is of the East.

Newsflash, for Zionists/racists (and while we are only discussing Zionist racism here, rest assured, the same thing applies to Arab racists, who are no less guilty, and also applies to White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant racists, whose pro-Israel stance is biblical, and based on the idea that Jews are their “favorite heathens”) – terrorism is a state of mind, not a political affiliation.

The most active terrorists in the United States are white male militia members.  The most prominent terrorist ever taken on by the U.S. Justice Department was a Jewish racist named Meir Kahane.  Osama Bin Laden?  Bad guy.  But in the same category as WASP and Jewish bad guys.  Bin Laden’s race and religion and geographical point-of-origin had nothing to do with his being a “terrorist”.  His belief in his own theological superiority over others placing him above the law?  That is what made him a terrorist.  It is also exactly the same justification which Netanyahu uses to keep embargoes in place denying food and medical assistance to Palestinian residents of Gaza, which is every bit as sequestered as the ghettos of Johannesburg were during South African apartheid.  The slow starvation and strangulation of the Palestinian people in the Levant?  Why are we supposed to differentiate

Fanatical murderous terrorist.
Would you have known if we didn't tell you?

this from the crime of flying a plane into a building?

The counterarguments come fast and furious, of course, and backed by large money contracts to some of the finest PR firms in the history of advertising and spin-control.  “Israel has every right to defend itself,” etc.

And there is a limited degree of truth to that.

Rocket attacks (even with homemade rockets that exhibit the crudest of ineffectual home-grown engineering efforts) threaten Israeli civilians in an unjustifiable way.  The threat of random violence committed by Palestinian terrorists is a very real problem, and tasked with making its people as secure as possible is a job for which the Israeli government is ultimately and rightly held responsible.

That does not, however, mean that the Israeli people have the right to incur the kinds of depredations they have taken upon the Palestinian people.  Wholesale theft of land, embargo against free movement, denial of freedom to seek employment, jailing without writ of habeas corpus, taxation without representation, summary execution with no criminal court recourse against those responsible… these are all things that caused American colonists to rise up against British oppressors in the 1770s… so why on Earth do Americans have a problem with Palestinians rising up against Israeli oppressors?

We’ll give you three guesses, and any guesses not involving race and religion do not count.

There are simply no other viable explanations for the culturally ubiquitous opinions of the typical American citizen who has not spent time in multiple graduate-level seminars reviewing the various documentation surrounding respective Israeli-on-Palestinian and Palestinian-on-Israeli crimes over the 75 or so years since this conflict first began.

Note we are not claiming that Israel is 100% culpable – there are plenty of examples of Palestinians performing feats of cruelty and inhumanity which are simply unforgivable.  The Olympic hostage crisis alone demonstrates a degree of sociopathology which defies belief.  But on balance… it is the repeated election of racist, violent, criminal government officials on the part of the people of Israel, coupled with their superior economic and military power, that makes them more culpable.

C.S. Lewis (himself a racist, of course, but that’s a topic for another time) summarizes the dictum for who holds primary responsibility in a power struggle for making sure that all persons are respected:  “Never taunt your enemy unless he has the advantage of you.  Then, as you please.”

Of course, there are those who suggest even trying to hold out a measure of blame is inflammatory and unhelpful.  We are sympathetic to this point of view, even if we disagree with it.  The chief objective of those who say do not attempt to apportion blame is to ensure that a solution is sought, rather than to attempt for retribution or any sort of punitive justice, and to this we say ‘amen’.

Along those lines, the authors of “Jerusalem – A Cookbook” (Yotam Ottolenghi, Jewish chef who was raised in Jerusalem, and Sami Tamimi, Muslim chef who was raised in Jerusalem) argue that “…if anything will bring these people together, it will be hummus.”  While they themselves describe this belief as ‘probably naïve’ it is nevertheless the best we may be able to cling to, for the time being.
It is important in the interim, before culture can win the day, that we do not lose sight of speaking truth to power.  The unspoken assumption for most of America, for as long as we can remember, has been that the United States and Israel are “friends forever” and that Israel is right and the Muslim world is wrong.

That ridiculous way of looking at things needs to end, yesterday.  Israel has been wrong for a very, very long time now.  The longer we stand in the way of changing that, the worse it will be for everyone.

We’ll get back to gardening talk soon, we promise, but this has been sticking in our craw for a while now, and had to be said.

Happy farming!