Encouraging Diversity by Doing Nothing

When we first moved here, there were a number of cultivated flowers growing  by the lagoon that were very pretty to look at. Irises and daffodils, and peonies and yucca all had been planted by the previous owners of the property. We also noticed some daisies growing wild by the fence line, and all of these flowers occasionally made beautiful arrangements.

Sword and Bow in 2002 by the lagoon when the irises still bloomed

I have not been tending the flowers, but the daffodils have been coming up every year, anyway, and the peony still manages to bloom helped by the black garden ants. The yucca plant is going strong, but the irises have not bloomed in years. Some plants need work to make them grow and bloom. And other plants prosper in neglect. If you are looking for beauty free of charge, your best bet is the natural beauty that no one has to work at.

I have been preoccupied by other matters besides gardening, and I have let things go. Meanwhile in my pasture, which used to be a monoculture of well mowed grass, all sorts of things have planted themselves, trees and shrubs, and many, many different kinds of flowers.

This blue and yellow flower is sometimes found in cracks in my cement driveway as well as in the woods.

By the path in the pasture you can see the Something Else flower in all its multitude of incarnations. Sometimes it grows side by side with honeysuckle.

I think the Something Else flower is just as lovely as any other rose, and quite possibly more radiant.

No two of them are exactly alike.

Is this closed center a different stage in the flower's development or a different variety of the flower?

Is the darker coloring on these petals due to nutrients in the soil where the seeds happened to fall? Or is it a genetic variation?

It's been raining a lot lately, so they have all received plenty of water -- and it was free of charge!

Different varieties of clover flowers bloom side by side.

One of the things that struck me while on my walk today is that if I had had to plan a garden of wildflowers, I would never have been able to include so many different varieties. Many of these flowers are the same, but different, sometimes in small  gradations, like the colors of the rainbow which imperceptibly change and blend into one another.

Others, like the yarrow above, are very different from most anything else.

There are daisies everywhere, no two alike. Some are more different than others.

These flowers look like daisies, too, but how different they are, and the difference is not a matter of color.

You can recognize the center of the daisy, even when someone has eaten all its petals.

Some insects are pollinators, and some are not.

The butterfly helps select the best daisies from the consumer's point of view. It is a kind of quality control.

But some insects are not interested in what a flower offers in exchange for propagation. Some just want to devour its flesh.

 Is it exploitative when they eat the petals and give nothing in return?

Is it only all right if they go straight for the pollen?

I like that nature is so non-judgmental. Anything that works is okay. Anything that does not is automatically eliminated.

Even when the Something Else flower has been denuded of all its beautiful petals, some insect might still come by and pollinate it. Even in extreme devastation there is hope.

Sometimes I wonder whether I am exploiting the beauty of my flowers. After all, I don't pay them anything to grow, not even minimum wage!

Certain moralists believe that we can only reap what we sow. But I did not sow any of this. It sowed itself. Or if it had a little help, it was not from me.

Central planning is what produces monocultures. Diversity is what results from letting things sort themselves out. I wish more nature buffs understood this, as it applies to both ecology and economy.

Bow looking at an old photo album

One of the ironies of the current conservative versus liberal dichotomy of outlook is that conservatives believe in central planning when it comes to speciation, and hence many deny evolution could have happened, since they think it requires planning to come up with different species, and they cannot conceive of it happening without a central designer. Liberals believe in evolution, but they think that central planning is the only way to run an economy or to save for the future or to secure good health for a population, while conservatives understand that allowing those things to evolve organically works better. The problem with both views is the lack of integrity -- not in the sense of ethics -- but in reference to the ability to integrate information from different areas of life to come up with a world view consistent with itself.

Some wildflowers for Bow

The beauty that we find in flowers is not magnified when they are cultivated -- the flowers get bigger, but the smaller sized wildflowers are actually prettier. When we cultivate fruits and berries and try to plan for speciation by genetically modifying them, the fruit gets bigger, but the flavor is often reduced, I have eaten wild strawberries in Idaho, and they taste so much better than the kind we get in the supermarket, though admittedly they are tiny in comparison.

Life does not get better with central planning. It may get bigger in some cases, but that's not the same thing. You can feed more people on modern grain than on a hunter-gatherer diet, the experts will tell you. but each of these many people will be less healthy as a result. They used to tell us to eat a high carb diet for our health. It was in the dietary guidelines. Then studies showed it was not healthy at all. Lately the gloves have been coming off in the departments of food planning, (HHS and USDA) and we are told we should eat less meat out of reasons of sustainability, not nutrition.  In a natural ecology, sustainability takes care of itself.

I could put in a big effort to plant a garden full of cultivated plants, but I prefer the wildflowers that grow by themselves. They don't cost me anything, and they're also prettier. And they smell good, too! Have you ever noticed that flowers in a florist's shop seem to have no fragrance?

I may not be the one who selects the varieties planted, but I trust the creatures who do, because of their inherent interest in the matter. It's precisely because they do exploit the flowers that the flowers they plant smell so sweet.

 The less I interfere in the process and the more I allow the insects and the wildlife to decide what flowers to plant, the greater the variety I find in my garden.

Misunderstanding Evolution

There is snow on the ground this morning, but school is still on today. Bow is napping, and I am taking it easy.

The snow on the ground early this morning

All is peaceful and I am reviewing. It's a time to take stock of everything, toward the end of the year, before looking forward to the next year. One thing that has struck me lately is how the concept of evolution is being misunderstood by "forward thinking" people. Take, for instance the expression "we are more evolved than that." What on earth does that mean?

Bow outside briefly yesterday -- too cold to stay long, but still fun

Evolution is about natural selection by environment. It implies nothing about one animal or plant being "better" than another in some general, absolute sense. Yet people with pretenses toward enlightenment are using the term as if evolution were about a scale of preference, from worse to better in a long line of improvements, like the great chain of being: with man at the top. The whole time that these people are singing "everything's beautiful in its own way" -- they don't believe it.

What is more, they don't seem to understand that no being can evolve to a place where it is exempt from the laws of the universe. I was trying to tackle this topic on my other blog in a post entitled Misremembering Robin Hood. On my Facebook page, I posted a picture of a rabbit from children's book In Case There's a Fox, and I wrote:

"What if rabbits tried to make a living out of eating foxes? If you understand why that could not work, then you understand why robbing the rich to feed the poor would also not work as a self-sustaining system."

Along came someone and accused me of being in favor of "dog-eat-dog".  She said we need to evolve beyond dog-eat-dog. Since dogs eating dogs would be cannibalism. and I had just explained that cannibalism does not work, clearly I wasn't in favor of dog-eat-dog. Nor do we need to evolve "beyond" that, as it was never possible in the first place. Yes. an occasional killing and ritual eating of a conspecific can happen, but as an ecosystem that could not work, because it would be like a perpetual motion machine. If you feed on someone else, then that someone else needs to feed on something else, not on you, or there will eventually be nothing for anyone to eat. It's also the same reason why two friendly neighbors cannot make a living by taking turns selling each other books they have written. And it's the same reason why our chickens could not live on the eggs they themselves laid.

But this person was so scandalized by the idea of comparing some people to rabbits and others to foxes that the next thing she wrote was something about Nazis. (And you know that when people start calling other people Nazis, a rational discussion is unlikely to ensue.)  And then she came up with this:

If you want to argue science and evolution...I suggest you check out the most recent information on chimpanzee behavior. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, sharing 98% of our DNA. So far from being the gentle vegetarians they were thought to be, it turns out that they are homicidal, genocidal, wage war, and commit sexual atrocities on each other (and on humans they think of as being like them). That is our genetic inheritance

I for one never thought chimpanzees were gentle vegetarians. Have you seen the canines on a chimpanzee? What would lead anyone to think that? Where people get these misconceptions, I don't know!

I gently told her that I happen to live and work with a chimpanzee twelve hours a day. And then she said, did I see what a chimpanzee at a sanctuary had done to a volunteer who worked there when she put her hand on a chain link fence?

I would not recommend putting chimpanzees behind chain linked fences, standing on the other side of the fence, and sticking your hand in -- or even getting anywhere near that fence. You know why? You just made it an us-versus-them situation. If you want to get that close to  a chimpanzee, then cultivate a face to face relationship over a long period of time, and go in without barriers.

Bow and I together
Notice the holes in the grid are so small that you can't stick a finger through

Some of those sanctuaries should call on me to help them design their enclosures. They should also hire me as a consultant for chimpanzee psychology. They should not recruit any people who think chimpanzees are "gentle vegetarians" or pacifists or beatniks or whatever other misconception about chimpanzees happens to be current.

We are different from chimpanzees, but I would not say ever that we are "more evolved." We did not evolve from chimpanzees nor they from us. We had a common ancestor somewhere down the line, and there may have been some interbreeding even once we split off. But by and large, we evolved under different conditions to specialize in somewhat different skills. We have a lot in common, and we can live and work together, but only if we are on the same side of the fence. Put up a fence between you and the chimpanzees, and you have just declared war.

If you don't like chimpanzees because they get violent and wage war, then you probably secretly don't like humans, either. You don't accept yourself or that aspect of your own being. And you probably don't understand the ecology that you purport to want to save.

In any ecology and in any economy, different participants contribute in different ways and serve different functions. Producers are very important, and they are always more numerous and at the bottom of the trophic pyramid, because no system can work that is top heavy. And no matter how they develop and change to fit the circumstances, no individual or species can evolve to be immune from the rules of reality. Which is why cannibalism is never going to work, and we can't make a living by taxing each other.