Wheat, as of July 17

Far more importantly, though, I started the garden this spring at the new house.  Fortunately, the new house is just a mile and a half from the old house, so it wasn’t too hard to maintain during the ten weeks between first seeds and the actual move date.  And because this year has been so much better, weather-wise, than last year, I’ve been able to delight in the outdoor work and reap some delicious rewards for it.

Perhaps my favorite crop this year is the wheat. Red, hard, winter.  I’ve never had enough space to grow things like wheat before, but I’ve wanted to be part of a grow-out for a while, so this move was the perfect opportunity.  And it’s beautiful!

Although the wheat still has a ways to go before it becomes the base of bread, a lot of the veggies are harvestable right now, including (at last!) the peas. And we have a ton.  Last January, I ordered golden pea pods and two kinds of shelling peas.  Okay, so I ordered a third kind — a sweet heirloom called Tom Thumb that you grow in pots indoors — but it turns out that cats like those pea shoots, and so we won’t be having any this year. Perhaps in some psychic anticipation of my Tom Thumb debacle-to-come, one of the seed companies kindly sent me several experimental seed varieties, including one of peas.  Naturally, I couldn’t resist planting an experimental mystery.  ”Experimental pea 712″ has turned out to be the most tendril-dense variety I’ve ever grown.  Maybe that I’ve ever seen.  And the other varieties did well this year, too, so for the next few weeks, we’ll be devising sundry ways to sneak peas into every meal.

edible golden pea pods

"experimental pea," avec tendrils

What I’m really struck by today, though, is that much of the work I’ll need to do this week is hot & steamy, not because of the mid-summer mugginess, but rather because it is getting food ready for winter.  Peas may be the platonic ideal of a summer food, but since we have so many and since they are a delight in winter, I’ll be spending some time in the next week steaming and blanching them.   Just as I perused catalogs last January, and dreamt of summer, this week I’ll blanch the peas, so that come winter, we’ll be able to eat them and taste summer.  This time-shifting regarding summer and winter reminds me of a line from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in which one of the many narrator’s describes being out of synch with her environment — “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter” (l. 18).

But here’s the thing:  I definitely don’t feel out of synch.  To the contrary, I’m beginning to think that in order to be rooted in this place, tied to the life of the plants that surround us, I need to shift in time just as often as I need to resist the impulse to do so.  I remember learning that one hemisphere of the brain is responsible for enabling you to dwell in the moment, the other to anticipate and to recall.  For a while, I had assumed that being really grounded, being truly in time, meant strictly being in the moment, and that maybe my meditating task was to let an entire hemisphere grow quiet.  Now, though, I am thinking that the peas are telling me something quite different:  that the oscillation between being in the moment and being sensible of the work that needs to be done for another moment is not simply a regrettable by-product of our culture’s pesky commitment to post-industrial capitalism.  Rather, it’s basic — a holdover of our shift to agrarianism, and likely more basic than that — a nascent capacity in our forebears that was reinforced every time someone didn’t have to struggle to secure a good dinner.

Thanks so much Abi, and happy 8th birthday!!

We had a terrific  time, although we didn’t see nearly as many fireflies as we had expected to. It was, it turns out, a bit of a seasonal low point–the waning days of summer’s earliest fireflies, and very early in the waxing of the next species, whose time to spread their wings starts soon.  Still, we learned a ton–including the difference between photuris and photinus, and between boy flashes and girl flashes, as well as assorted details about the evolution of firefly glow and about their mating habits.

Equally captivating, to me, is what the fireflies engender.  As we tell folks about our interest in these beautiful bugs, people send us pictures or point us toward other artists also interested in them.  Two great images that came our way last week were from 19th century Japan.  Here’s one of them:

Many people in Japan, it turns out, have a profound affection for fireflies.  In fact, that ardor rises to the level of a being a general cultural appreciation of them. Sara had been in Japan earlier in the month, giving a talk at a scientific conference.  To her surprise, even lay people attended.  And not only did they listen avidly, they also asked great questions and seemed to fully appreciate the information being presented by the scientists.

In addition to the images that have come our way are recommendations of other pieces–like this haiku by the poet Issa, who lived approximately two hundred years ago:

A giant firefly:
that way, this way, that way, this -
and it passes by.

Michelle also told us about an artist she’s especially fond of, Canadian Michael Flomen. He uses photographic materials and a deep appreciation of light and chemistry (no wonder he likes fireflies!) to make his images–which are utterly literal and entirely abstract at the same time.    Rather than using a camera, he lets the fireflies walk on photo paper, for example, and leave their own trail.  Here are a couple of his collaborations with fireflies:

These, in turn, remind me of the work of Martin Prothero, who sets out carbon-coated glass plates and lets animals trace their own paths across them.  Here are two:

Firefly traces, animal tracks, human artworks — fleeting marks of lives being lived well.

High on the list of recent seeings were flowers and fish.  Low, unfortunately, were bees.

We’ve got a Hawthorn tree in our yard that is normally in full flower in the June-teens.  That’s late for Hawthorns in general, but right on schedule for ours and for this area.  This year, in keeping with its nickname, it commenced awesomeness on May 24, was at its peak around May 29/30, and has already noticeably faded.  Folks who’ve glanced at my recent folio, A Field Guide to Other People’s Trees, know that one of the things I most love about this tree is the week when it’s in flower because the bees cannot resist it.  The tree/bee dyad hums for days, a whirring that is visual and auditory as the bees shake free what they need.  But this year, while there were plenty of the teeny flies that also contribute to that stunning event, there were practically no bees.  Maybe the tree was too early for them?  I haven’t seen many yet.  Or maybe a sign of something more serious?

A quite un-dire event that took place Memorial Day weekend was a celebration at the fish ladder in Damariscotta, just a wee bit south of us.  The fish ladder there has been used by alewives to return from the sea to Damariscotta Lake for centuries, at least, in order to spawn.

Over the past few years, local citizens have worked to make it more amenable to their fishy needs — for increased human presence had altered the landscape and waterscape in ways that made it very hard for the fish to get back to their spawning grounds.  The people have spent a tremendous amount of money and effort building a ladder that the fish will be comfortable using.  And their work is paying off.  Twenty times as many fish climbed the ladder this year as did five years ago.  That means more potential spawn, a stronger alewife stock, and all the benefits that come with re-calibrating an ecosystem back toward its more normative state.  Of course, we can’t undo the changes — and this cement and re-bar laden fish ladder is quite unlike earlier versions.  But the generosity of people who opened their backyards to people to see the ladder, and who let the renovations happen there is encouraging to me.

Because the fish run had peaked a week earlier, we saw a modest number of fish compared to the zenith, but it was still impressive.  It turns out that the peak didn’t coincide with the fish festival dates because the fish were also early — lured by the warm and sunny conditions this May.  Their early arrival means a different disruption to the system, with consequences we can’t yet fully know.

Since I was six, I’ve been linked to a school — either as a student or a teacher, or sometimes both.  And so for all of my memory, the annual rhythm has been academic, a year that goes from September to December, then January to May, then June to August.  It’s been a reassuring cycle, one largely in accord with other rhythms, most especially the arrival of new freshmen, the departure of graduating seniors, the appreciation by all of the summer hiatus.  Now, paying attention to these shifts that creatures enact in response to the larger forces, I’ve been working to imagine what it would be like to be more fully in accord with the cycles — and the digressions from such fixed rhythms — that shape the physical world.  It might not demand huge adjustments, but I’m guessing that, in fact, it will….

We included more than a smattering of landscape work. And one student, a guy named Sean, was inspired by that work to write his final paper about the roles of beauty and language in landscape photography today.  Sort of a lot to try to cover in a 15 page paper, but Sean has ambition.

Sean also has worries.  He worries that beauty in a landscape photograph risks making the image part of the problem, rather than part of the solution in terms of the ways humans engage the rest of the natural world.  And he worries that pictures without words might be too malleable in the meanings that can be imposed upon them.  He cares as much about how people regard or disregard the physical world as he does about photography, and he wants to make sure his work–and work in general–doesn’t add harm to the world, particularly not inadvertantly.

I wish I’d known about the work of artist Kelly Poe during the semester, for it would have been a wonderful touchstone for a conversation about these issues.   Her recent project is described in the most recent issue of Aperture, in an article entitled “For the Wild.”

Apparently, environmental activists who break the law are classified as domestic terrorists.  And in the beefing up of security after 9/11, the jail sentences for their legal infractions also got beefed up.  A lot.  For this project,  Poe began corresponding with some of these folks, people serving multi-year sentences, and offered to be their eyes outside–to go to the natural places that the activists held close to their hearts, the kind of places they fought to protect, and to make photographs.  When they told Poe their important places, she’d go and make a bunch of photos with a small camera, and send them to the prisoners–who then selected the one that best matched their remembered sense of the place.  Then, Poe went back to the spot and made a final version with an 8×10 view camera.  These color images are then paired with facsimiles of portions of text from the correspondence Poe had with the person whose important place is represented.

I’m crazy about this project.  I love the way that Poe combines layers of seeing, layers of activism, layers of collaboration.  And I think it could (perhaps) go a ways toward persuading Sean that beauty can be a part of activist art.

It came to mind again this morning as I read economist Nany Folbre’s vaguely bittersweet reflections on Juliet Schor’s new book, Plenitude.  Schor there extends her arguments against maintaining the prevailing institutional and cultural norms of the US, as these norms “lead us to make decisions that are bad for us and for our ecosystem” (Folbre).  Folbre wants Schor’s proposal, which is that we cultivate greater self-reliance as step one in undermining the existing form of the economy, to be viable.  Sadly, she is quite doubtful.

Folbre begins to sketch out her concerns by saying that “by self-reliance, she [Schor] means less reliance on the market — increasing production of goods and services for one’s own consumption, such as growing food, building houses, even small-scale manufacturing.” However, she sees such self-provisioning largely as a luxury, and sees wage employment and urban life as potentially liberating and potentially far greener than their counters.  In these claims, she echoes Brand’s points in W.E.D.

Still, she recognizes many benefits that self-reliance generates–like strengthened social ties and the happiness that those ties tend to generate.

One benefit that she doesn’t mention cropped up in Jennifer Saranow Schultz’s piece in the Bucks blog this afternoon:  a link between some of these self-reliant behaviors and health.

In April, the market research firm Sentient Decision Science conducted a survey about financial behaviors, and asked about how frugality due to the economic downtown affected people’s actions, particularly those with health impacts.

According to the results, 45 percent of respondents said they have cut back in the last year by cooking at home more often; 30 percent said they were spending less on junk food; 13 percent said they have reduced driving costs by walking or riding a bicycle to work; 10 percent said they have reduced spending on alcohol; and 7 percent said they were growing their own food.

I was psyched to see those numbers, because cooking at home and growing one’s food are not only a frugal way to get healthier, they are also a way to get greener and more self-reliant.  Yet, far too often, they are posited as too expensive, indeed, as elitist.  Folbre herself observed that

sharp income inequalities and a shockingly high unemployment rate make our cultural fascination with amenities like slow food, folding bikes and hand-knitted sweaters seem almost cruel.

Such a critique arises in relation not only to Slow Food, but also to local food, organic food, etc. And despite the widely touted benefits of cooking at home, exhortations to make one’s meals are often deemed “unrealistic” given time constraints, availability of ingredients, etc. And thus, cooking dinner also gets coded as a luxury.

I shan’t rant about the ways that this argument is, itself, rooted in privilege.  Rather, I want to head right to the happy chase:  the “luxury” of eating home grown, home cooked food is being more widely enjoyed.  And not by folks who are regarding it as a luxury.  This is great news because eating thusly can alter one’s appetite for market food.  Yes, yes, a real tomato makes the ones we usually find in stores seem pallid; that’s the first outcome.  And while it’s in some ways no small thing, Schor is intimating that the result is potentially much more expansive.  It’s not simply that becoming more self-sufficient enables people to create a home-cooked version of a familiar restaurant meal, it’s that the premises about what constitutes a meal, a good meal, a satisfying meal, a perfect meal, all become fungible.  And changing those premises can help alter our relation not only to market food, but also to all manner of things that markets had seemed to define.

So let’s bring on the fun(gible)….

Like so many of the tasks I’ve taken up in the last few years, making dandelion oil is absolutely time-specific.  If I am too busy when they are in flower — which is a surprisingly short period in our part of the world — then I won’t have my favorite oil for soap-making for the rest of the year.  I love it because the dandelions impart color and nutrients to the oil, and those subtly imbue my soaps with the comforting residue of sunshine, still clinging to the pollen.

The actual making of the soap doesn’t have the same tie to time that making the oil does. But it offers its own time-dependent traits, for it is an exercise in planning and delayed gratification — involving a series of steps that have increasingly long wait periods.  The initial making only takes a few hours, but then the cake of soap needs to stand in its box for at least a day or two, and then it gets cut and cures for at least a month, to be sure the lye won’t sting.

I read somewhere that in the colonial era in New England, a new wife brought a year’s worth of cured soap to the marriage as part of her dowry.  That way, the soap she prepared during that first year of wedded bliss would have PLENTY of time to cure before the new husband had to risk his skin to it.

That seems plausible.  Our forebears made lye from wood ash and rain water, whereas I use anhydrous potassium chloride and distilled water, carefully measured on a scale that is accurate down to 1 gram.  Even so, in one batch, the lye precipitated out, leaving a caustic film that made the soap unusable.

For now, my summer soap-making is on hold until these beautiful dandelion’s give up their essence to infuse the oil.  I’m perfectly happy to wait.

. . . the rhubarb arrives.

It turns out, though, that “sustainable” is to educational/business-speak what “discourse” is to art-speak.  It means something—indeed often something very specific and clear—to each micro-community who speaks of it.  But it doesn’t mean the same thing to the sundry groups who comprise the larger community.  Still, I left the conference thinking that even if some folks think “trayless cafeterias = sustainable” and others think “LEED certified science buildings = sustainable” and still others think “3% growth per year = sustainable,” at least we’re all thinking about the notion that some practices are tenable, and others are not.  So that was heartening.

Then, sitting in the airport, waiting for my very delayed flight home, I read an article about NYU’s plans for growth over the next two decades.  They hope to expand their campus(es) 40% in the next twenty years.  Forty.  Percent.  Unlike many of the colleges represented at the conference, NYU is enjoying a tremendous increase in student population and an increase in national recognition.  And props to them for that.  I am sure that many of the board members I’d been with all weekend would dearly love to be in that position.

But here’s the line that has stuck with me all week, and makes me feel compelled to write about this proposal:  “By 2031, the university aims to have 240 academic square feet per student; it now has 160, according to its own study, compared to Columbia University’s 326, Harvard’s 673 and Yale’s 866.”

This set of comparisons in meant to suggest that larger teaching and learning spaces, bigger or single-purpose labs, enhanced performance spaces, etc. directly correlate to a greater level of excellence.  But that’s spurious.  Certainly, a state-of-the-art facility will have some spaces that other schools can’t afford to have, or nicer versions of other spaces.  Reading about square footage per student as, implicitly, a reliable and valuable indicator of overall educational quality on my way home from a conference where nearly everyone was trying to figure out how “to do more with less” made me feel cranky toward this seemingly McMansion-ish impulse.

Like his counterpart at many other colleges, NYU’s president signed onto the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment (ACUPCC).  It’s kind of like the Kyoto Protocols for colleges—a commitment by the signatories to “exert leadership in addressing climate change” in matters large and small.  Indeed, one of the things that the presidents commit to is a specific target date by which they will have their schools achieve climate neutrality.

It’s certainly not impossible to build big and be green, but it is hard.  And usually pricey.  To meet their promises to the ACUPCC will take tremendous creativity on the part of NYU.  And so even though I reject the premise that they need all that additional space to be a world class institution, I look forward to seeing how they grow in a climate neutral way.  If they can swing it, they will also have risen to the rank of world-class innovator in sustainability.

Fashion is my bete-noir, or at least one of them.  While I am a huge fan of good design, high fashion makes me recoil.  It’d be easy to attribute this to pique, for I’m a shape and height (and now an age) largely ignored by those who design clothing.  But that’s not it.

It’s that high fashion (and its trickle-down counterparts) embeds an ideology of planned obsolescence, of throwing out rather than wearing out.  The emphasis on perpetual consumption bugs me.  As does the tremendous, and predominantly negative, impact it has on the physical environment.

So high fashion as a site for calling attention to climate change strikes me as–at best–ironic, which is why this Climate Dress by diffus seems worth thinking about.  Fitted with LED lights that shine more when exposed to higher levels of ambient carbon dioxide, it’s a beautiful canary for our coal-mine world.  The creators explain that “the Climate Dress also contributes to the necessity of creating more awareness about environmental issues through an esthetical representation of environmental data. Different light patterns are thereby staged as dramatic ‘micro events’ embedded into clothes. They diligently and without concession tell us disturbing stories wrapped into a comfortable and reassuring cocoon de luxe.”

Two things captivate me about the dress.  First, the breakthroughs that the developers have made in terms of wearable technology are pretty great.  And second, they are pitting the attributes of a medium against itself, somewhat like Jeff Koons making stainless steel balloon animals.

But in the end, I’m still wary.  Though this “esthetical representation of environmental data” is engaging, it remains predicated on both a system of presentation and a method of production and display antithetical to behaviors that encourage real climate change.

To be sure, this wariness isn’t limited to high fashion; in some ways, that’s really just the “easy case,” the one I can face head-on.  Over the last few years, I’ve been struggling in my own art-making to find ways of working that are not simply about the environment, but that are also gentle with respect to the environment.

The effort remains challenging, perhaps all the more because I don’t have any shining LEDs to illuminate the way.