Note

Hello, Readers,
I have not forgotten you, I've just gotten distracted by life, and have not been thinking about books much lately. But I'll get back into the swing of things with a post for you sometime next week. Ok?
-best,
C.

Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England., by Tom Wessels

Ok, in point of fact, I don't think everyone really needs to read this book, but I certainly needed to read it, and many people have found it both enjoyable and transformative. Maybe you will, too.

But I bring this up because the author, who is both my teacher and my friend, had his retirement party yesterday, and this post seems a fitting tribute--because this is the book that made him more less a star. A very woodsy and homey star, to be sure, but the man has a Wikipedia entry. This is also an appropriate book to follow the three books on restoration landscaping I've just recommended, because this is the book that inspired my interest in suburban ecology--though I'd be surprised if anyone who doesn't already know can identify the connection. This is a book about the woods, as the name implies.

Basically, it is possible to walk into a wooded area, look around for a while at the plants and the ground, and figure out the history of the area going back decades or even centuries. This book will tell you how to do that, or at least give you a taste of how you might do it, if you keep at it long enough. More importantly, this book is a way for people to connect more deeply with the landscape...you read it and you start to notice more. It's written for central New England, and a lot of the details (which tree species mean what) will be different in other areas, but the method can be adapted to any forested area.


It's a fun book, easy to learn from, with wonderful pictures (thanks for them go to an illustrator I have never met), and I've found myself quoting from it, or at least using ideas and information from it, in person or print, often over the years. So I guess I have to take that back--I DO think everyone needs to read this book, or at least learn what it has to teach. If I didn't, I wouldn't keep passing on what I learned from it every chance I get.


Wessels, T. (1997). Reading the forested landscape: A natural history of New England. Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press.

Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens, by Douglas W. Tallamy

People interested in ecologically sensitive landscaping are generally interested in native plants, but hardly anybody has a good definition of "native," nor any clear explanation of why nativeness is important.

This book, Bringing nature home, is the exception.

Natives, we often hear, are important because exotic plants can become invasive, or because they are not well-adapted to their new homes and so need extra water, extra fertilizer, and so on. Both are quite true, and both are very good reasons for avoiding exotic plants, but clearly they can't both be true of the same exotic plant species...explanations like these, and there are others, don't really get to the heart of the matter. They are reasons to avoid some exotic species, reasons to plant some natives, but they don't provide any cohesive justification for preferring natives categorically. These reasons do not help with questions such as are naturalized plants native? Are plants from another part of the same continent native? Are plants that were historically present on this exact spot before the climate zones moved still native?

Nobody has clear answers to these questions--except Dr. Douglas Tallamy.

Dr. Tallamy is an entomologist, and he therefor tends to see plant/insect interactions from a perspective the rest of us tend to miss--the insect's perspective. Some years ago, he noticed that exotic plants tend not to be chewed up by insects as badly as natives usually are--he wasn't the first person to notice this. In fact, one common explanation for how fast some exotic plants can grow is that the native insects don't know how to eat them. But Dr. Tallamy didn't look at the uneaten plants and think about the growth of vegetation; he looked at the plants the insects hadn't eaten and he thought about hungry insects.

Being a scientist, Dr. Tallamy didn't simply take his own word for it, of course; he conducted a series of experiments and found that, yes, native insects don't usually eat exotic plants. And yes, yards with a lot of exotic shrubs have fewer butterflies--and fewer songbirds--than yards landscaped with natives (songbirds mostly raise their chicks on insects, so no insects means no chicks).

The thing is, here on Planet Earth, all energy ultimately comes from the sun and is soaked up by plants. From plants, the energy goes through a series of animals, and makes the whole world go. Generally, the bulk of the plant-eaters are insects; insects are what a lot of other animals eat, either directly or indirectly. Planting a lot of plants insects can't eat is the same thing as shutting off the flow of energy from the sun.

Dr. Tallamy saw all this, and, alarmed, he started talking to everyone who would listen about landscaping with native plants. The people who listened asked if he could given them anything on the subject to read, so he wrote this book.

So, now that I've told you the moral of the tale, as it were (grow bird food: plant natives!), why do you need to read this book?

First, Dr. Tallamy delivers his message better than I do. He is one of the few writers I know of who can write well for both academic and popular audiences, and Bringing nature home actually follows all the major rules of good academic writing (clear, simple, and properly cited), while still being enjoyable to read--even if you're not an ecology geek. On the page (and in person), he is the very opposite of intimidating.

Second, there's other important stuff in the book; helpful plant lists and tables, beautiful pictures, and little hints at the mind-bending complexity of ecology. We are so used to thinking of good bugs and bad bugs, good plants and bad plants, and the real world doesn't work that way. For example, Dr. Tallamy describes finding a caterpillar eating one of his plants. He was on the verge of killing to protect the plant, when he noticed it had been parasitized by wasps--and the wasps had been parasitized by something else. If he killed all of the caterpillars, then the wasps would have nothing to eat and they would fly away. Then, when new caterpillars moved in (they always do), no wasps would be there to keep their numbers in check. But if nothing ate the wasps, the wasps would kill all the caterpillars themselves. So in order to protect his plants from the caterpillars, Dr. Tallamy not only had to actually have caterpillars in his garden (to provide food for caterpillar-killers), he also had to have caterpillar-killer-killers, to protect the caterpillars from the caterpillar killers, so enough caterpillars would be left to provide caterpillar-killer food.

This is how ecology works; there are no good guys and no bad guys, only a system of interactions that is only as stable as it is complex. Simplify the system--add exotic plants insects won't eat, remove insects that eat the plants, whatever it is, and something will go wrong.

See, this provides both a definition of "native," and a reason why native plants are important; a native organism is one that belongs to a complex web of relationships. If those relationships are missing, then it doesn't matter how long the plant is been here, and it doesn't matter how nearby its home is; it isn't native. And planting non-natives will jam the ecological web, like throwing rocks into the gears.

And of course, it's more complex than that. There are circumstances where exotic plants appear to be a good thing--places where exotics are the only known food of an endangered native butterfly, for example. See, insects don't read the scientific literature. They don't know what they're supposed to eat or not eat.

But wrapping ones' mind around this kind of complexity, and finding out a little more about what we do know, are more than enough reason to read this book. It could change the way you garden.

Tallamy, D.W. (2007). Bringing nature home: How native plants sustain wildlife in our gardens. Timber Press: China.

Planting Noah's Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology, by Sara Stein

Last week I recommended Noah’s garden, by Sara Stein. This week I’m recommending the sequel, Planting Noah’s garden. Actually, there are three members of the series, a kind of gardener’s memoir. The first of the series is My weeds, which I haven’t read. But the latter two members of the series are fantastic. Read them, please.

Noah’s garden is Ms. Stein’s account of converting her property from an unusually large version of a standard suburban yard (six acres) to something more like…recovering wildness. The book is a brilliant introduction to ecology by way of explaining why she did what she did to her yard. The sequel, Planting Noah’s garden, explains how she did it—and how you can do it. There’s garden planning and how to order bare-root stock and where to buy seeds. There’s how to rescue plants from development and how to organize a plant buying club. Most inspiring, the memoir continues and we get to hear what happened after the previous book was published. What happened was a gardener who happened to be a writer became an in-demand speaker and teacher and then—one day at the end of one of her classes the students refused to leave. Within a few minutes they had become a different kind of gardening club, a group people working together to rehabilitate their yards and, by the way, have a blast.

The take home message here is if you set out to do something—fix your yard, say—and keep going with it, you can become someone making a real difference. There’s quite obviously nothing Ms. Stein did that the rest of us can’t do (except she was an uncommonly good writer). And yet David Mizejewski—the simple thing for you to do is Google his name, he’s kind of a big deal in wildlife-friendly landscaping--credited Sara Stein as a major influence.

See, I love practical dreamers. They’re my favorite kind. You think of something you want to do and you find some small part to start working on, and you keep going. Do you know, everything that’s ever been done has been done by people doing stuff?

And Ms. Steins dream is one dear to my heart; it’s also mine, or one of them (I have lots of dreams). See, the issue is that the non-human part of the world is running out of room. That’s an issue, first for the obvious reason, and second because we need the rest of them for our own survival. It’s true; you can look it up. Anyway, eventually humanity is just going to have to shrink some to get more in proportion to our resources, but since I’d rather it be by attrition, that’ll take a while. In the meantime, the more of the land we can get to do double-duty the better. Suburban yards that also work as wildlife habitat is one of the tools we have—and if you have a backyard, you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to do it.

And the memoir continued, and ended with a tribute to Ms. Stein’s husband, Marty. It’s a quiet little tribute, involving a large rock that this evidently marvelous man wanted, an extravagant and simple tenderness particular to him. I love that story. And oh, how I wish this story had not ended. Everyone, plant a little wilderness in memory of this woman.

Stein, S. (1997). Planting Noah's garden: Further adventures in backyard ecology.

Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards, by Sara Stein

Ok, first of all, I really, really like Sara Stein. She is a science writer, and began as a children’s science writer when her children were small. As her children aged, so did her target audience, until she was writing accessible and personable popular science books for adults. I’ve only read one of her children’s books, The evolution book, which I acquired and first read when I was ten. I went on reading and rereading for years, until I actually cited the book for a major college paper (for which I got a really good grade). Anyone who can respect the mind of a ten year old that much wins my respect in return. Aside from the more specific reasons I think you should read Noah’s garden, the book makes a clear and interesting introduction to certain aspects of ecology.

Sara Stein died two years before I set out to try to talk to her. Ultimately, biology claims us all. Having become familiar with her writing, and with some of her work between the writing, I can say we lost a great woman.

So, on to this book that I think everyone should read. The title is fairly self-explanatory. The Biblical Noah, of course, is our archetypal conservationist; the rising tide drowns the animals, except for the breeding stock preserved aboard the Ark. The Ark is not a permanent solution, but as a temporary refuge it makes the difference between the end of everything and the possibility of survival. During our current flood of ecological destruction, where are our arks? There are parks, of course, and zoos, but no one boat can float breeding stock for all the animals and plants there are; no dozen arks can. We need lots of arks. We need big ones and little ones, country ones and city ones, desert ones and forest ones and prairie ones. We need professional arks and we need amateur arks. So if Noah had a garden-ark, rather than a boat-ark, a garden plot planted to ride the metaphorical sea, what would it be like?

Read this book; find out.

I should say that you may have encountered the idea of the wildlife garden already. Landscaping for wildlife is getting kind of popular, and the principle has its organized advocates. Among the largest and most organized is the Certified Wildlife Habitat Program, run by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and its affiliates. Some affiliates use the older name, Backyard Habitat program, and there are other, similar, programs run by people like the Audubon Society. Basically, you fill out a form listing all the ways your yard is friendly to wildlife, send in a small fee, and get a sign for your yard stating that it is certified habitat. Walk around a suburban neighborhood and you’ve got a pretty good chance of seeing one of these signs. The yard behind the sign will usually be a glorious riot of shrubs, flowers, and decorative grasses attended by happy bugs and happier birds.

The thing is, though, when I interviewed the former head of the Certified Wildlife Habitat program, he said that the thing that first really inspired him to get involved with backyard ecology was reading this book by Sara Stein.

The organizations do a definite public service by popularizing the idea of restoration landscaping. Their advice is generally simple and flexible—you don’t need to do a lot of research to get started, so more people will go ahead and get started. But Ms. Stein went further. She went deeper. Ecology, as my thesis adviser likes to say, is not rocket science; you can send a rocket to the moon and back with a single equation, but there’s nothing that simple in ecology. Floating a workable garden-ark ultimately requires engaging with that complexity, and Ms. Stein does. In this book, Ms. Stein provides a lot of interesting information and ideas, but even she cannot provide a simple and complete set of instructions, a kind of ark-in-a-kit. There’s no way to avoid the process of discovery she went through. Instead, she provides herself as a role-model for that process.

And, if you’re not ready to build a whole ark, maybe Noah’s garden will inspire you to let at least some of your lawn grow long. After all, some kinds of lightening bugs need long grass to grow up in. They eat slugs there. More long grass means fewer slugs and more wonderful little beetles that glow. I used to be really good at catching them when I was little, before I started needing glasses.

An example; “Imagine me,” says Sara Stein, on page 107, “in the grip of conversion, reading the radical literature of ecology.” After reading up on aphids (she tells us that they are “polymorphous, polyphagous, viviparous, parthenogenic parasites of plants,” before helpfully explaining what all these words mean), she discovers that while aphids damage plants we like, and hence might be considered bad, and certain ants protect aphids and hence might also be considered bad, aphid ants also drive away any competing plant pests and accidentally protect the larvae of certain aphid-eating wasps—and so might be considered good (and, of course, if aphid ants are good, then so are the aphids that support them…). It’s not that Ms. Stein runs herself into paralysis in little intellectual circles of run-on sentences like mine. It’s that she ultimately concludes that even a garden is beyond our capacity to sort into good and bad. We can’t play favorites among organisms without getting way over our heads and probably making things worse. What we can do is be gardeners of a whole ecosystem. What we can do is maintain and guard the integrity of the ark.

Near the end of the book Ms. Stein asks if all of this will really work; will the animals whose habitat was destroyed by development come back if we plant the world that can contain them? I’ve been asking the same question (remember I mentioned having a thesis adviser?), and almost twenty years after the publication of Noah’s garden, I am in a position to answer with a definite maybe. There are still no clear-cut answers, still no way out of detailed research and educated guesses and discovery, no blue-prints for an ark-garden. But Ms. Stein’s answer to her own question still appears to be the right one:

Perhaps wild turkeys can return; perhaps they can’t. But when each of us, alone and in community, on acreage and in small back yards, for reasons of ecology, economy, or style has done all that can be done to restore the abundance of the land, many other animals will surely rejoin us.

Then it will work. Then there will be plenty. Then we will have reason for thanksgiving.

Stein, S. (1993). Noah’s garden: Restoring the ecology of our own back yards. Houghton Mifflin: New York, NY

The Letters of John and Abigail Adams, by Abigail Adams and John Adams, edited by Frank Shuffelton

Five years ago, I was vaguely aware that there had once been a President John Adams, but that was about it. I picked up this book largely because I thought someone else would like it, and read it mostly because that's what I do. I read books.

I was living in Vermont, for work, while my then-boyfriend lived in Maryland, for work. We wrote letters, made phone calls, missed each other, and planned to get together for his birthday, in July.

I saw this book in a bookstore and grabbed it. My guy liked history, and I'd heard vaguely that the letters were romantic, and his birthday was coming up. That was all. And from such humble beginnings, oh, what a romance has blossomed!

Since that day, we've both read this book, seen the HBO mini-series, the A&E two-part special (which isn't very good), toured their house, read a separate biography of John and Abigail each...and I, who read faster, have read a second biography of John, a book about the Revolutionary War, and some of the collected letters of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. We're kind of besotted. Oh, and we've gotten married--I'm not sure if that's related, but maybe the Adamses helped.

There are three reasons I'm recommending this book to everybody in the world. First, doing so gives me an excuse to tell you all that we've just had our first anniversary, and I love my husband dearly. I think the Adamses would approve of my using them as the (something of a stretch) reason to celebrate that. Second, many people saw the HBO mini-series, and it had some shortcomings. If you saw the series, you really should read up on the Adamses. Although this book doesn't cover the part where the series was weak, it's charming enough to get you interested in reading about this family. Third, both John and Abigail Adams did just about everything right that a person can do, and as such they are important role models.

I don't mean that they never made mistakes. John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were patently unConstitutional, wrong, and stupid, and he should have known better. Abigail Adams refused to write publicly, as she considered her writing poor and her opinions less important than her husband's, neither of which was true. She actually begged John to burn her letters, which he obviously did not.

But they were excellent parents, loving partners, great friends, and they changed the world. We could all learn a thing or two.

Abigail--it is impossible not to think of them in familiar terms after reading this book--gets a lot of press as a kind of proto-feminist. She is, certainly, a feminist hero for good reason. She was, for her day, extremely radical in her advocacy for women's rights and in the assertive way in which she lived--especially toward the end of her life. Further, she was a shining example of female excellence. She was a business woman and farm manager in a time when women were expected to be neither, she spoke three languages (English, French, and Latin), she could quote long passages of literature from memory, she could argue coherently about the Constitutionality of party caucuses (among other issues), she raised four children to adulthoood, and in a day when slavery was still legal in every state, she had the gumption to ask General Washington if perhaps his military problems were divine punishment for the sin of slavery. Remember, Washington was a slaveholder. AND she had only a third-grade education.

But she did not believe men and women were, or should be, equals. She might well have been scandalized by the idea of the Women's Movement, if she could have known about it. She was a woman of her time, as he was a man of his time. That means racism and sexism mild only in comparison to what was typical of their day. We must see them wholly if we are to respect them.

But man were they brave. You see that here. John, as a signer of the Declarations of Independance, would have been hanged if the revolution had failed. Abigail spent many nights, early in the war, lying awake listening to cannons. Both lived through the war, and they were both quite old when they died, she of typhus, he of a stroke, but in a very real way they gave their lives to their country with a selflessness and faith few people have. There are writers who see their modesty as a fiction they used to cover their ambition, and certainly they were ambitious in some ways. John, particularly, wanted to be noticed and remembered for his service. But I think the modesty was also genuine. They just really liked this country. They were the real deal.

And in this book, you get to see the ordinariness inside that strength. Philosophy, politics, spirituality, and which kid took a puke this morning and the horribly high price of butter these days. This is the nuts and bolts of greatness. This is how it works.

And it IS romantic, at least sometimes. Like when Abigail says she's spent all morning with John, meaning that she's been rereading his letters, and says that if she can't have real pleasures, at least she can have her thoughts. Or how he often addresses her as "my dearest friend."

Or, when Abigail finishes a letter with;

"Heaven grant that I may continue to receive its blessings. One of its greatest is that I can subscribe myself wholly yours."

Exactly.

Adams, A., Adams, J., (2004). The letters of John and Abigail Adams. Penguin Books: New York, NY.

Our Ecological Footprint, by Reese and Wackernagel

There are advantages to being a writer named Wackernagel, and chief among these must be shear memorability. Some years ago, when I was explaining the concept of ecological footprints to my then-boyfriend (now, husband), he, in frustration, demanded to know where I'd gotten this stuff.

"Mathis Wackernagel!" I retorted, proudly.

This sort of thing is very encouraging for writers with strange names. If mine ever comes up in an argument with your mate, it's easier to pronounce than it looks; A lan thus. The "i" doesn't do much, so you can ignore it.

Anyway, the idea of the ecological footprint starts with the fact that a certain portion of the Earth's surface is dedicated towards your personal upkeep. Imagine that you are a subsistence farmer, and that all the water you use falls as rain on your farm, all your fuel wood comes from your farm, all your waste is composted there, and so forth. In such a scenario, your ecological footprint is the area of your farm. If you start buying hay from your neighbor, then your ecological footprint, or EF, grows to include part of your neighbor's hay field. If you sell produce to raise money with which to buy hay, then part of your vegetable garden is transferred to the EF of whoever buys your produce, and tracing the location of your EF very quickly becomes impossibly complicated. It is still possible to calculate the rough size of your EF, however, if you know how much land is necessary to support all the things you do. For example, If you eat a loaf of wheat bread every week, you can calculate the size of the wheat field necessary to make your bread, because you can find out the average yield per acre of wheat.

The reason ecological footprints matter is that there is a finite surface area of the Earth. The total surface area of the Earth is the maximum total ecological footprint. Dividing the Earth's total surface area by the total human population yields the "fair Earthshare," or the size that everyone's EF would be if resources were distributed equally. If your EF is bigger than a fair Earthshare, then either someone else is using less, to subsidize you, or you are borrowing against the future by using resources too fast. It has nothing to do with how much you deserve, how good a person you are, or how much you care about the planet, it's just a measure of how much you use in comparison to how much there is. It's just math. Ecological footprint calculation is a way to make ecology personal.

This book is an introduction to the concept, and also a detailed description of how to calculate your own footprint. You can also get a rough estimate of your footprint through any number of online EF calculators, though the online calculators simplify the calculation by making a lot of assumptions, which may not be relevant in your case. Reading this book will give you the context to understand that calculators better. Ecological footprint is different from carbon footprint, by the way; your ecological footprint includes your carbon footprint in that one of the things you need Earth's surface area to do is to re-sequester the carbon emissions freed by your lifestyle. EF distills your entire ecological impact to a single measure; surface area.

The book's descriptions are clear, and the pictures are thought-provoking and funny. The authors explore a number of different implications of the EF concept, far more than I have space to summarize here. If the authors have a weakness, it is their tendency to announce periodically that EF calculations are fun! which they aren't, but at least the whole thing is important food for thought.

And no, ecological footprint calculations are not as simple as the online calculators, or even this book, make it seem. For example, the carrying capacity of an acre quite obviously varies, not only across space but across time. A degraded ecosystem can't support as many people as it once could. A related complication (and one the book does address, at least in part) is that resource use is rarely about absolute amounts. Sustainable resource use is a matter of rate. It's a bit like finance, to use a metaphor Wackernagel and colleagues also use. If you've got $100,000 invested and earning 1% interest per year, then you can spend $1000 every year forever. If you spend $2000 a year, you will eventually run out of money. With environmental decisions, the big question is always are you spending the interest or are you spending the principle? Since not all acres on the planet have the same sized endowments, and the size of the endowments changes as the principle is spent, calculating a sustainable rate of use that is valid all over the planet and then expressing that rate as an area is at best an estimation tool.

There are other complications. The ecological footprint is not a tool one can use without a great deal of thought--but that's not really the point.

The point, first and foremost, is that ecological limits may be complex and difficult to understand, but they are not arbitrary or subject to debate. It's like driving a car (and this is my own analogy). If you hit a patch of ice on the highway, what happens next to your car has nothing to do with how much you deserve to have a good day or how important it is for you to get where you're going. What happens to your car is a matter of physics, and physics dosn't care what you think. Environmental issues are equally non-negotiable. There is only so much of the planet to use, and that's all we get.

Secondarily, the concept of the EF gives environmentalism a clearly defined goal, at least in theory. Much of the talk of "green" living these days is entirely relative; you hear about saving so many trees or keeping so many tons of greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere, but there is really no way to put any of this in context. On a bad day, it's possible to conclude that no one can ever be green enough, so why bother? On an entirely different kind of bad day, it's possible to conclude that since you recycle and do other "green things" periodically, you're already doing enough. EFs are the antidote to this kind of relativistic thinking. If your EF is equal to your fare Earthshare or smaller, you're done! You're sustainable! You've arrived! In practice, you might not be able to work through the various complications well enough to define your EF that precisely, but at least that finish line exists, and you can approximate it.

And in the process of finding your way to living within your fare Earthshare, you'll probably make it easier for the people around you to find their way there, too.



Reese, W.E., Wackernagel, M., Testemale, P. (1998). Our ecological footprint, by Reese and Wackernagel. New Society Publishers.