Construction Damage Clip

I grew up (to the extent that I grew up at all) in the western Minneapolis suburbs in the 1970's and early 1980's. I watched suburban development replace the (mostly) oak woodlands I played and hiked in as a kid. I worked summers at a garden center in Plymouth and loaded cars and trucks with the plant materials (Crimson King Norway Maples, potentillas, spireas), landscape fabric, crushed rock and plastic edging that were used to replace the native woodlands that were lost.

I entered forestry school intending to be the guy who figured out how to build in wooded areas with minimal damage to existing trees, and how to re-plant what couldn't be saved with native plants. Once in forestry school I quickly realized that I didn't have to figure these things out. A lot of folks much, much smarter than me had already figured these things out. Donald Willeke. Dr. David French. Steve Kunde. Many, many others. I decided instead that I was going to be the guy to bridge the gap between all of those brilliant people and the general public. I was going to be the communicator.

I got off to a good start. In 1988 with Don Willeke's help I started a non-profit organization called Lasting Woodlands. I published a newsletter on construction damage and celebrating our native woodland plants (being a forester I'm sure I focused too heavily on trees and not enough on shrubs, ephemerals, and other important components of a healthy woodland system!).

I gave my first seminar on preventing construction damage to trees 22 years ago. I wish I could say that I fulfilled my initial promise as the communicator of this information. I didn't. But I will.

Hopefully this is at least a small start. Again with deepest thanks to Ron Schara of Minnesota Bound and his top-notch production staff, here is the short clip I did on construction damage prevention that aired in May. If it made just one homeowner or builder stop and give some thought to protecting a 36" diameter oak on their property then it was worth it. (Actually, it was worth it no matter what because I enjoyed working with Adam and Steve from MN Bound. What I mean is if it saved one tree it was worthwhile.)

... proving once again that there is nothing as painful in the world as having to watch and listen to yourself on video!

Oak Nirvana

I just got back from Oak Nirvana. A place with staggering diversity of oak "species." A place where there's so much natural hybridization that it renders laughable the concept of species when applied to the genus Quercus (frequent readers know that I contend that there are perhaps two true "species" of oaks with hundreds of interbreeding variations in constant transition and evolution). A place that literally makes my head spin with the possibilities and potential for going back in time to our acorn eating Eden. A place where the word dirt is spoken with the reverence it deserves.

Stay tuned.

Happiness is... Absolutely Brilliant Readers!

I've been exploring - in a very intermittant and extremely haphazard sort of way - the question of why humankind "evolved," or more accurately transitioned, from living a life of relative leisure and plenty living on the "fruit" of trees - acorns - to living a life of toil and sweat waging war on the soil to grow grains.

Commenting on my most recent post on the subject reader "Eric The Red" wrote:

... consider these aphorisms. The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. An army marches on its stomach. The bible stating that man must support himself by the sweat on his brow. Control what a culture eats (and how much free time the culture has) and you control what that culture does.

Brilliant stuff, encapsulating in a few short sentences what I've been struggling with across months and rambling paragraphs.

Control. I have to think that the concept of control - over land, over food, and therefore over populations - has a lot to do with the transition from living off the bounty of trees to the sweat, oil and blood-soaked battle with the land.

Yes, traditional balanocultures had a tradition of "ownership" to some degree. In California's balanocultures, which survived into the 19th and even early 20th centruries (and which, I should thankfully add, still survive today as a culture but not with the same freedom of movement or control over the land) family would lean a decorative stick against the trunk of a particular oak tree to claim ownership of that year's acorn crop. A family hoping to share in that tree's bounty would then need to negotiate for the right to a share of that tree's crop, and provide payment of some kind.

But this is a very different concept than the kind of land ownership necessitated by and made possible by production of annual grain crops.

Dr. David Bainbridge writes that California balanocultures could gather enough food to last a year in just a few weeks of labor. Of course there would be continual labor involved in processing (leaching and grinding) and cooking the acorns to eat, but this work would be done with the reassuring knowledge that a year's food - or two years' food - is cached and safe. The amount of leisure time must have been astounding! Astounding... and a real threat to anyone hoping to control a population's activities. Far easier and far better to have those people (and by "people" I mean men who a) must have had immense amounts of leisure time in balanocultures and b) would be the people rulers would most want to control for their own military purposes) staring at the back end of a beast of burden while fighting to keep the plow straight. Far easier to own and control the land, and get others to work it in exchange for a very small portion of the crop. Far easier to keep others in a permanent state of indebtedness.

It's a system we all bought into, and buy into every day in a hundred small, almost unnoticeable ways.

I've been obsessed with the question of why we changed, why we stopped eating acorns. Greed, control, guilt, wanderlust. I'll keep thinking about and writing about this question of why.

But the new question I'll be spending a lot more time thinking about, writing about, and hopefully living out is: How do we go back?

Oak Wilt Clip

With very sincere thanks to the fantastic production staff at Minnesota Bound, here's the clip on oak wilt they aired this past spring.



We're losing enough oak trees through forest succession, land "development," disease and poor natural regeneration due to high deer populations. We don't need to lose any more oaks to something as ridiculously preventable as oak wilt.

Acorn Crop Failure?

OK, time to get back to saving the world. It's always funny - in a heartbreakingly sad sort of way - that it's possible to be too busy to save the world. Business has been ridiculously good of late, which from a mundane perspective (paying the bills, feeding the children... the little things) is great, but has cut into my writing time.
Balance, Chris, balance.

I'm starting to read Gary Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat, which chronicles the author's effort to spend a year eating only foods grown, fished or gathered within 200 miles of his Tucson home. The book holds a special interest for me, as a born-and-bred Minnesotan who lived in Tucson for three years and never was able to acclimate myself to desert life. Then again, within 200 miles of Tucson there's a lot more than desert. It's a matter of both altitude and attitude.

In one of those great coincidences you find every day if you're looking for them, after I picked up Nabhan's book at the library I was reading an article in Smithsonian magazine about the work of Joshua Tewksbury, who is doing fascinating research trying to determine why chiles are hot (other than the obvious reason of trying to embarrass Midwesterners at Tucson dinner parties)... and Gary Paul Nabhan is mentioned as a friend and collaborator of Tewksbury.

Me being (unfortunately) me, the first thing I did upon picking up the book was to turn to the index and look for passages about acorns. There is one listing, p141. I flipped to the page, eager for a story of an easy harvest, a season of nutritious meals, a parable for our times. Instead I read a story of... complete and total acorn crop failure.

Nabhan took a trip south of Tucson toward Nogales (thus going up in elevation) hoping for a harvest of acorns and chiltepines, the northernmost wild chili. But when he arrived he found that neither crop was ready to harvest. The chiltepines were still green and "not fiery enough for me," Nabhan writes (meaning they would probably set my tongue on fire) but there were no acorns to be seen. A late freeze and snowfall had caused a complete failure of the acorn crop that year.

For Nabhan the trip was not a total loss. On the way home he stopped and gathered a variety of wild greens. Upon arriving home he fixed a meal of grilled scallions and poblano chiles and hand washed greens heated in a sauce pan only long enough for them to wilt slightly. What follows is a brilliant piece of writing: "Their flavors were so fresh, so buzzed with their recent photosynthetic surge that my meal sizzled with sunshine. Within minutes of devouring them, I felt greener, as if I were on some folic acid high. I dreamed that night of having chlorophyll in my skin, as if I had become green as the Green Giant himself."

But, of course, we're not here to talk about greens, even when the writing is that good. We're here to talk about acorns as food, and in that context this passage in Nabhan's book is deeply troubling, especially when considered within the context of the question I have been asking: Why did mankind walk away from a life of acorn eating to take up the plowshare and grow grains?

This passage might give us a glimpse, at least, of how it might have happened in one place... and then another. A warm spring, causing the oaks to flower. A late frost. A freak snowstorm. The flowers are killed and the acorn crop is a total loss. Sure the locals were smart enough to have enough acorns stored up to survive a year without an acorn crop. But then it happened again, and maybe a third time. Running out of reserves for both people and livestock it is decided to plant some grain seeds next year as a back up plan, just in case. Then for a while there is both, grains and acorns. Archeological evidence suggests that in these cases people did the logical thing: fed the grain to their livestock and kept the acorns for themselves.

But from that point on, they were grain people. Tied to the land - to a particular piece of land to be defined as mine/not yours - to tend the crop. Building a new economy in which some control land and seed, and others must provide labor in exchange for a share of the harvest.

It didn't happen everywhere at once. Where it happened it was a gradual process spanning generations, so that no one even noticed a change was happening at all. It's interesting to speculate, as Michael Pollen does so eloquently, who was really using whom: Were humans using grains to gain control over land (and other humans) while (in theory) reducing risk of catastrophic food shortages, or were grains using humans to take over larger and larger portions of the Earth's surface and resources?

Just a glimpse. A complex puzzle. But in the answer the answer to my question of "Why?" is not nearly as important as the answer to the question: "How to we go back to a tree crop-based culture and economy?"

Happiness is...

Comments!

Paradise Lost - Stupidity?

"Stupid is as stupid does"
~Forrest Gump's mother

"The stupidest man on Earth
is the man who thinks he's smarter
than everyone else"
~Anonymous*

I have been thinking a lot about stupidity. (I'm sorry, but I really like that sentence.)

Last week I was going to pick up the theme I have been wrestling with for some time: For millennia humankind lived a nearly Utopian life among food-bearing trees, both in creation myth and in reality. Biblical man was cast out of paradise by a fall from grace. Perhaps that is truly what happened. But my secular mind has been searching for a deeper answer to a question that is at once simple and endlessly complex: Why? Why did we did we stop living a life of leisure, happiness and peace harvesting & eating tree crops - which in many areas that meant primarily acorns - and switch to a life of toil and sweat producing and eating annual grain crops? (Incidentally, we made the same bone-headed decision on behalf of our livestock as well. Originally we both ate acorns. And when we started cultivating grains we actually first fed them to our livestock, keeping the acorns for ourselves. Only later did we decide to do battle with millions of square miles of the Earth’s surface to produce grains for us both.)

Various sources discuss overpopulation and competition for resources, overuse of the resource (the arboreal equivalent of the Pleistocene overkill theory), or, as William Bryant Logan convincingly argues in Oak: The Frame of Civilization, wanderlust and boredom.

Well, like I said I was getting ready last week to explore these theories when events conspired both to delay my writing but also to bring me face to face with an entirely new theory I hadn't considered: Stupidity. People can be remarkably, mind-blowingly stupid.

Let's first talk about the different kinds of stupidity, and then explore how these different flavors of stupidity might have caused us to leave our cushy happy life eating the fruits of the trees and spend our days instead in endless toil, at war with soil, and in love with oil (Nobel Prize for poetry here I come!). Much of what is viewed as "human nature" (oxymoron?) is meant to get us through the day and, more to the point, get us collectively and me individually regenerated in a new generation. Many of these same traits result in actions that are, over the passage of time, stupid, pointless and self-destructive.

1. Arrogance/hubris - Believing that you are smarter than everyone else, and smarter than nature.

2. Enviousness - Believing that the "other" is always "better" - it's better over there over that hill, the grass is always greener, etc.

3. Pride (variation on hubris) - Believing that others are lazy compared to you

4. Self-centered-ness - Believing that every idea you have is new and unique in the universe (instead of a repeat of ideas had millions of times before in minds brighter than yours)

5. Need for control - Believing that by controlling resources you can therefore control people, and their hopes, dreams and aspirations

OK, this is getting repetitive, but you get the point. Given all of these human failings, all of this collective stupidity, it was inevitable that we would leave our happy peaceful life among the trees and acorns to come down into the valley and pound on the soil. What is perhaps more remarkable is that there were any people who didn't give in to stupidity and who didn't leave the trees until forced to (the indigenous people of California, Oregon and parts of Washington for example). Would they have walked away from their life of happiness and plenty given enough time? I'd like to think not, but what I believe about human nature tells me they would have.

We are hard-wired to not just hang out, relax and let nature provide in the way it always has and always will. We need control. We need to feel like we are in control of our food supply. And a small number of us need to feel like we are in control of others. The easy abundance of an acorn-based society does not allow a small number of people to control resources in the way that a grain based culture does.

We need to do things differently than they were done before - or at least believe that we are doing things differently than before.

We seem to need to believe not only that we must do battle with the Earth for sustenance, but even more remarkably we seem to believe that we can win that battle. Duh.

I better stop now or this will never get posted. But we’ll keep exploring the question of Why? in future posts. It is no doubt a combination of things – overpopulation and overuse of resources in some areas, boredom and wanderlust in others, dispersal by war and force in others – but I now have no doubt that underpinning any and all of these is the simple, sadly inevitable and infinitely repeated – fact of human stupidity.

They say that the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. We need to collectively and individually realize how stupid we have been in walking away from tree crops in favor of grains. Only then can we begin to change and regain the paradise that we lost.

And most of all: Never, ever let stupidity get in the way of the life you’re intended to live.
Apropos nothing.

* OK, that wasn't anonymous. I'm the one who said that.