Living With the 'Vast Green Wave' : part 1

July 2 2009
It’s well known that plants have developed many strategies for survival. Some may distribute toxins that keep away predators, some may attempt to flood an area with seeds, others develop spines, while many have developed co-operative evolutionary strategies with the species, including animals, around them to help them survive. Sometimes this may happen on a greatly compressed evolutionary scale, e.g., corn and orchids to take the two most spectacular success stories, when evolution and ‘adaptation’ seem to move at hyper speed under the guidance of human hands. Corn especially threatens to become a global monocrop under the guidance of genetic engineering, displacing and warping whole sectors of ecology, economy (think of bio-fuels) and the whole dietary regime of us humans (it has been estimated that a quarter of the 45,000 foodstuffs in the supermarkets contain corn; even George Will, conservative pundit, seems to have been swayed by the facts and statistics of Michel Pollan and others. There is no need to rehearse Pollan’s very persuasive work, a pretty good, short interview with him here in The Christian Science Monitor boils it down succinctly).

I particularly like Pollan’s phrase ‘the totalitarian landscape’ when referring to the omnipresent lawn. I’ve found it not really very possible to discuss the problem of lawns with many folks because it’s really not a question of facts of logic, more questions of psychology and sociology (same sorts of questions that have to do with ‘economics’, though much darker and deeper there) and how we feel that we have to exist in a larger community.

Certainly Homo sapiens sapiens has become by far the most successful living group on the planet, utilizing every strategy for survival possible and then some, including releasing toxins, flooding the planet with ‘propagules,’ as the DNA packets called seeds are called by botanists, and manipulating all species to be subservient to needs, wishes, and desires. It would seem however that the human sphere may be reaching a limit as to how far manipulations can proceed without a planetary structure ‘feeding-back’ in a negative way. James Lovelock, inventor (or discoverer) of the earth as ‘Gaia’ or an integrated phenomena (some would say ‘organism’) thinks we may be past the point of any turning back with the damage done to the bio-sphere with as little as twenty years left of life as we know it now. (recent article here, a biography here)

Well, in a way I guess that’s neither here nor there since we’re going to do what we want to do regardless of consequences .... and besides that all of us have a notorious short attention span, seems to be built into our life styles now. The Vast Vegetative Wave operates on different frequencies than do we now. Our buildings are sealed and air conditioned. Our access to that world is measured in the minutes or seconds it takes to get to the car or to the front door. (yes, there are exceptions but I’m not talking about you or me ;-).

At any rate, we know there is a relationship between the way we live, the choices we make, the ethics we have, and, not even last or least, the environment we live in, our dwellings, and the vegetable kingdom. But, like the animal kingdom now, it’s a thing that we try our best to relegate to the dim corners of life.

Soooo…what if we could incorporate that Vast Vegetative Wave …what would it look like?