Showing posts with label water. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water. Show all posts

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Earth Air Fire Water and Trees

The ancient Greeks discerned four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (the ancient Chinese subdivided them into five, "Earth" containing both mineral and vegetable -- metal and wood). Today, here, we lack Water. Water which is the source and medium of life -- 3/4 of the content of our own cells, washing up and down plants, swirling in 15 year cycles through ocean currents, evaporating into the skies from forests and back onto Earth as rain ...

Our environment lacks this medium of life, because we syphon it away for development and plumbing in housing, industry and factories. Maybe it is to make up for that that in some strange human geometry of balance, we turn to a surfeit of Fire. For some reason, while the landscape dries up (and we limit access to Water for people's gardens, the place where nature still tries to thrive in cities), we are now in love with Fire. We are interested in the elements still in abundance (everybody likes abundance).

Is this the reason for the current attraction to the burning of forests and meadows? And for the pious belief that someone "indigenous" did it before so it must be okay (different)?

Nature knows when to use Fire. When lightning strikes, it strikes. When it does not, we should not play with matches. We cannot renew what we have abused and we cannot keep abusing it without destruction. We cannot ignore a deficiency in one element of the whole by turning to the workings of another. We cannot expect to scorch the Earth in the hope that she will somehow renew herself by short-circuiting the destruction we have already caused. We do not know the how, the when and the where of Fire (let's keep in mind the myth of Prometheus?) Stealing Fire, we merely burn alive living animals, insects, birds, dens and nests. Sometimes soil needs Water, sometimes Nature brings on another element. Our job is to keep out of the way. In practice, that would mean preserving large swathes of wilderness where humanity does not go, wherein Nature can renew herself in her own way. We cannot make up for human-caused destruction (which has been going on for millenia before European colonization) by the fantasy of wiping the slate clean. We need to stop playing with tools of destruction, like Fire, under the guise of "soil renewal." Fire sends organic litter on woodland and grassland floors literally up in smoke, and what may return to soil composition in ash depends on availability of sufficient water, which may not be available in the "fire season." Have we forgotten that we are not the only creatures in the woods? Usually we are merely murdering other individuals mid-life-cycle by setting fires. Why? What are we hoping to accomplish?

Thursday, August 6, 2009

More on getting high on grass

Some thoughts from a commentator on Mother Jones -- something to consider as municipalites on Vancouver Island forbid people keeping their world green (by imposing garden-watering restrictions):

"We have evolved from the savannas of Africa to need green grass. When grass was lush and green on those long ago savannas food was plentiful, life was good. During droughts the land turned brown, food became scarce and homo sapiens turned violent....

To stop watering lawns or eliminating them altogether is to go against nature completely. To do that is to increase crime, increase depression, and to ultimately destroy society as we know it. We should close all museums, all art galleries, eliminate all art and music from our lives long before we eliminate green grass. To go against our basic nature is an abomination."

-- Raindance Richard

(See "Lawns are good, keep them green," on June 8/09, Treewatchvictoria)

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Why Do Victoria City Councillors Hate Gardens? (1082 Richmond)












It's the hottest day of the year so far -- 30 degrees in the shade, and some of the shade on Richmond Street was provided by the grand mature chestnut tree which presides over the garden shown above, and over the public sidewalk next to it, giving walkers a moment of welcome relief from the heat. The owner of this heritage house and garden however has applied for permission to destroy them and replace them by a denser strata development.

Council members discussed the loss of rental units and wondered whether the house could be removed to a Gulf Island, thereby being saved. But what about the garden? The chestnut and other trees, the shade, the green space of Victoria? How can Victoria's green space be saved if gardens are continually paved for "densification"?

Every large tree taken out creates more holes in the urban forest canopy. The result is an urban "heat island" -- another of those which dot the planet as global warming hot spots.

Life on Earth began in the oceans. As plant life forms evolved, the cells they were made of learned to live on land, and as they migrated they enclosed and took their ocean environment with them, cells being 80% mineral-filled water. Now, 84% of life on land lives as or within trees (e.g. the 90,000 fungus species, 900,000 insect species, and so on) -- taking all that water with it. Less tree cover = less life supported = less water = a dried up Earth. Life is Gaia's greatest transformative tool: spreading life forms transform geological landscapes, trees make clouds and rain, plants make oxygen. Imagine how the planet must have looked before all those water-filled life forms spread across it.

Now, humanity is reversing the process, banishing space for natural life forms, extending deforestation and desertification, expanding the heat islands from the cities outward. That is quite a process for a City Council to agree to become part of. There can't be a single gardener among them.


Monday, June 8, 2009

Lawns Are Good; Keep Them Green


One of the pleasures of summer in the city is walking barefoot across a thick springy green lawn, under the shade of leafy trees. It used to be an innocent pleasure, but seems to have been reframed as a guilty one. To some minds the lawn has become the enemy because to remain green grass requires water. But it is water well-used, for when you look across a healthy green lawn you are looking at a carpet of photosynthesizing plant life, which means at oxygen entering the atmosphere. In photosynthesis chlorophyll converts the energy of sunlight into plant mass (carbohydrates), but photosynthesis also maintains (and originally created) the oxygen content of the atmosphere on which the evolution of animal life depended.

"Clean Nova Scotia" (http://www.clean.ns.ca/) promotes the benefits of green lawns because they:

- Have a cooling effect, equal to an average of about 9 tonnes of air conditioning (a home central air unit has a 3-4 tonne capacity);
- Generate large quantities of oxygen and remove carbon dioxide and harmful emissions from the air;
- Reduce run-off and water contamination by effectively absorbing rainfall;
- Discourage noxious weeds and harmful infestations by insects and rodents.

Photosynthesis removes CO2 from and puts oxygen into the atmosphere, but as Brian Capon says in Botany For Gardeners, "mankind's wholesale destruction of Earth's great forests and other floras in recent times runs contrary to natural principles."

The atmosphere extends outward 2400 km from Earth but it thins as it goes; 99% of it exists within 30 km of the ground, supporting life processes. When you lie on a lawn you can reflect that all around you the life processes being enabled by the grass-air interchange are happening literally under your nose and eyes -- an invisible, silent, intense, charged chemistry. Grassy, weedy, mossy fields and lots are not empty space waiting for us for "develop" them. They are zones of Gaia's life-force.

Thus when you remove a lawn, you are eliminating a site of photosynthesis and oxygen production. We remove lawns to make room for building -- extending the human as opposed to natural habitat -- and wherever that happens another segment of Earth's life-support system is gone. Now we even remove lawns because we don't want to water them. Municipalities have persuaded home owners to restrict water use because it must be shared among a population expanding without control. We are advised to replace the green photosynthesizing grass with native plants which have a short springtime bloom and then turn brown. But brown means dead, brown means no oxygen-producing photosynthesis. "Drought resistant" plants resist drought by going dormant. They are not photosynthesizing, and this is not actually a "green" or environmentally sound option in a planet too much of whose surface is being covered by desertification or by pavement.

Most of us remember that first life-stirring "smell of the grass" in spring, or the pungent grassy air of the first school track practise each year. The heady perfume of newly mown hay goes straight to the pleasure-centre of the brain. No wonder: it is the smell of life, which is why millions of grazing animals make munching their way through grass their life's work.

Scientists discovered that on the Seregeti Plains grazing wildlife actually promoted denser growth of grasses, a marvellous mutual benefit between grazer and grazed. Lawnmowers have the same effect as grazers on residential lawns. They clip off the leaves above the stems of the plant (the part we see, stretch out on, take tea on or play croquet on is a carpet of growing leaves), leaving the stems to keep growing and the root masses below to densify in a rich ecosystem of life for insects, worms and micro-organisms underground, out of our sight but to nature's benefit.

When we rip up lawns in an excess of water-parsimony, we are destroying this life-carpet. We are replacing it with areas which will henceforth become either dust or mud, depending on the season. They will not be as usable as the lawn for recreation, for the "outdoor room" so pleasant to inhabit in summer. They will not add to the fresh, cool feel of neighbourhoods, which actually have consistently lower temperatures in summer if they have mown and watered lawns. These were exactly the reasons that lawns have historically been found in the most desirable residential areas of towns.

Words, like plants, have roots, and the word "grass" shares the same Old English root as the words "green" and "grow". We should keep that in mind when we decide on the ground cover of our gardens, and we should remember David Suzuki's words (in The Sacred Balance): "air quality depends ... on the dynamic interaction between life and the atmosphere." And dynamic life depends on water. It is false ecology to starve neighbourhoods and gardens of water so that municipalites can permit a rate of development beyond what the natural resources of an area can sustain. If each property in an area needs to suffer water shortage and brown-fielding, then too much building is being allowed in that area. The answer is not water-restriction, which is nature-restriction; the answer is development-restriction.

So let's think again about giving up the portion of our water use that supports green gardens. Let's rejoice in those shimmering emerald slopes (without recourse to pesticides; a little work is enough to maintain a healthy lawn). And let's remember that if we want the grass and other ground plants to survive the summer heat we need to protect them by maintaining large shade trees throughout the city.