Organic seeds - save your money

TPP went to his favorite garden shoppe to buy a few packs of seeds, some lettuce & spinach to put in his cold frame for some early season salad. And there, prominently displayed, was an entire rack of "organic" seeds. Now other than the absurdity of the name (the alternative is inorganic?) this is nothing but pure green-washing, marketing for the sake of making money from people who don't know much but want to do the right thing. There is not one single biologically relevant difference between organic lettuce seed and "inorganic" lettuce seed. The one real reason for considering foods produced by organic gardening is to reduce pesticides in the environment and their residues in your food. This is a real and valid concern, but mostly the danger is greatly exaggerated, but still, OK, go with organic if you choose. It is better for the environment, and without question pesticides are overused and many times needless. If you think fertilizer is the issue, and again it is overused, plants don't know or care where than nitrate ion came from. If you think organic foods are more nutritious then you are among the gullible who just might pay more for organic seeds even though this will have no impact what so ever on your raising and eating of these crops. You don't need organic seed to garden organically. The only meaningful argument is again organic farming is better for the environment, and this is quite small segment of agriculture when measured against the whole, and a reasonable cost-benefit analysis is that they aren't worth the difference in price, which may not be justified at all by differences in the cost of production. So then who is pocketing that difference in price? Yes, by all means, do the right thing, but no reason to be a sucker in the process. Oh, yes, over there are the organic tobacco cigarettes.

Wildlife friendly lawns - Not!

Yes, everyone needs money, but in general you don't see money buy such strange bed fellows as Scots Miracle-Gro and the National Wildlife Federation, so you figure a pretty hefty corporate donation was involved to allow Scots to brandish the NWF logo around in a pretty blatant type of greenwashing.  Let's face it, when you think Scots, you think of products that you use as little as possible to be friendly to wildlife, and when you think Scots you think of "beautiful lawns", barren monocultures of diagonally mowed grass for the aesthetically handicapped.  This is even bad if it were a table cloth.  You might as well pave paradise and paint it green.  Turns out my violets and creeping charlie hardly need any fertilizer at all because nobody knows ecological lawn care any better than the Phactor.  HT to Garden Rant. 

Earth Day – 1970 and 2010

Well, it’s been 40 years since my first Earth Day which I attended in my senior year in college. Unfortunately the impact of Earth Day was over shadowed by political events, the anti-war demonstrations culminating in the Kent State shootings and wide-spread student strikes at colleges and universities, including mine. As a graduating senior, I was more concerned about 1. graduating because that was a bit uncertain given the strike and crossing student picket lines to finish biology courses needed for graduate school that fall (having just been accepted), and 2. getting drafted and shipped off to Vietnam in the interim was a real possibility even though the Phactor was a “winner” in the 1st draft lottery by having a fairly high number assigned to my birthday. It had been a decade of considerable turmoil for people my age. At the height of the cold war this teenager helped friends build a bomb shelter in their basement and had my Father explain why that wouldn’t matter if the Russians dropped the big one. That was followed by involvement in social justice and integration straining race relations and landing me in the middle, quite by chance, of one of the race riots that left a city burning. Then fast forward to the Vietnam War and the loss of too many friends. For some reason a good grade in English literature (and many other subjects) just didn’t seem all that important.
And now Earth Day doesn’t seem as important any more either, and it's not because things have gotten a whole lot better, although many things have gotten worse much slower, and a few things like wild turkeys and the like are more common than they were. A lot of green-washing is going on; everyone is trying to cash in, our capitalist system at work, but the type of big changes needed do not seem to be in the offing. The average citizen, the type mesmerized by simple-minded rhetoric and easy-to-shout slogans, truly fails to recognize the types of changes and the magnitude of changes really needed to preserve our environment. It isn't plastic bags and water bottles that will make a difference, although they may be symbolic of the type of thinking needed. Most people wouldn’t think of water as our biggest resource problem, but it probably is, and we continue to waste it blightly in spite of rain barrels becoming a bit more common. And if people really understood the concept of a tipping point, climate change would scare the crap out of them because by the time to can convince the nay-sayers and politicians, it will be too late.
But mostly I'm reminded of a poster from 40 years ago that still speaks volumes. To quote Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” (Earth Day Poster, 1970)