Good morning, Gardeners.
As Memorial Day puts the end to what we call the spring
season, the temperature today is forecast to hit 91 degrees. Pretty warm for
this time of year And it makes me think back to February and March, when winter
was waning and the temperatures were way
above normal.
I remember the utter joy of that early spring. We all felt
it. Who but the most ardent skier could help practically skipping for joy when
the flowers and trees started blossoming and the sun warmed our bare heads weeks before we could have reasonably expected?
I also remember reading at the time a comment from a writer
who wished the world could be like the movies and have foreboding music piped
in so people would know that this weather was not something they should be
happy about and that we should be thinking of what it meant vis-à-vis climate
change. I wrote about that and the worries farmers at the PASA Conference were
expressing concerning the warm winter.
But then I went on enjoying not having to have a fire going
24 hours a day, putting in some early plants and harvesting asparagus. The
normal freezes that followed the warmth I first tried to hold off by covering
things and then just tolerated as I waited for Spring to come to stay.
It came. I got busy and, if I thought of that early warmth,
it was to wish I had taken advantage of it better in my garden. But then I
heard last weekend that friends and Millheim Market farmers, the Macneals of
Macneal Orchards and Sugarbush, wouldn’t be at Market regularly because they lost
85% of their fruit crop. I lost 100% of mine, at least the tree fruits (I still
have berries), but then, my trees are young and still produce sporadically and
lightly anyway. I didn’t worry overmuch. I would do as I always have and get
the cherries, pears, and apples I cellar, freeze, and dry for winter eating at
the Farmers’ Markets.
Cue the music.
Some of you are perhaps thinking, oh, too bad for the
Macneals! Nice people. I hope they have other sources of income. But you,
Julie: get your apples from Washington, your peaches from Georgia, your
cherries from Wisconsin, your pears from…wherever pears grow. Heck, you never
have do go a day without anything you choose. That’s the good thing of having
global trade.
And it is. Personally, I try not to take advantage of it,
but I pass through the produce section when I go to the supermarket. I see what
my coworkers are breaking out for lunch. I know I’m in the minority. But what I
hadn’t really thought about is how the two things are connected. The fact that
we have raspberries all winter, that recipes today call for ingredients that
don’t come fresh in a given area anywhere near the same time, mean we are pumping
greenhouse gases into the air so that we don’t have to think locally. That we
don’t have to ever delay until summer the pleasure of eating a tomato or a melon.
It’s here that I’d like to point you to another blog, the
only one I currently have a link to on the Learning Garden’s blog site (and where you can get to his site to read the whole of the post I quote below). John Michael
Greer has had an absolutely fantastic series of posts since around February,
documenting the history of empires and how that of the United States is
following the same path. (Short aside: I put them all in order in a Word document
to print out for my husband, who doesn’t like to read for long periods on a
screen. If anyone wants it to print out or wants to borrow it when Pat is done
with his printout, let me know.)
Anyway, his most recent 2 posts have been about how the only
way to change the world is to change ourselves first:
Consider the book review I
critiqued in last week’s post. One of the bits of rhetoric the reviewer used to
dismiss my suggestion that social change has to be founded in personal change
was the claim that "you can’t end rape [just] by not raping anyone."
Perhaps so, but as one of my readers pointed out (tip of the archdruidical hat
here to Ozark Chinquapin), someone who claimed to oppose rape would normally be
expected to demonstrate that commitment by, at the very least, not raping
anyone; an antirape movement that claimed that rapes committed by its members
didn’t matter, because it was working to end rape everywhere, would rightly be
dismissed as an exercise in extreme hypocrisy. Yet you’ll hear the identical
logic from people in a good deal of the environmental movement, who insist that
they can’t be bothered to lighten the burden their lifestyles place on the
planet because they’re going to save the Earth all at once.
Work out the practical implications
of that argument, in other words, and it amounts to a justification for
clinging to the comforts and privileges of the modern industrial lifestyle even
at the expense of one’s supposed ideals.
Even at the expense of one’s friends’ livelihoods. Even at
the expense of our children’s grandchildren’s futures. Even at the expense of
the natural world I love and we all depend on.
I sit here typing away on my laptop, with the electric
coffeemaker helping keep me awake, the refrigerator humming, the kitchen light
on even though, as I’ve composed this tome, the daylight has increased enough to
do without it. I have plans to drive into State College this evening to have
supper with friends, all of whom live within reasonable walking distance of my
house. I plan to do laundry today, and if I have the time, to hang it to dry
instead of using the electric drier. If I don’t, well, I’m busy. I’m busy.
I can’t think right now of a snappy, optimistic wrap-up to
this post. It seems every day I read or hear something that makes me tell
myself I really need to change my life. It may be that I use this blog to share
those things, share my trials and inevitable errors. Please share yours. I
could use the company.
Julie
