Wildflower Stew

Now that a lot of people are into backyard gardening, the next thing that comes to mind is “why not have a few chickens, too?” Since many cities have laws about not keeping livestock, there is actually an underground urban chicken movement. As you can imagine, trying to keep a yard-full of cluckers and squawkers quiet is pretty hard to do. Let’s not even talk about the cock-a-doodle-do at 5 AM. But now thanks to grassroots activist groups like Backyard Chickens more cities from Maine to Colorado are passing ordinances to allow a small number of legal hens in the yard.

When you grow your own, buy local, go to a farmer’s market or join a community supported agriculture cooperative (where you pay a set amount at the beginning of the season and get a boxful of farm grown veggies and fruit every week) farm-fresh eggs - or backyard-fresh eggs - just make it better.

It also makes it possible to not go to WalMart for your food.

In this urban apartment where I live, most of the people have had gardens, a lot of us have also had chickens, before ending up in the city. We would like nothing better than to tear up the parking lot, put in rows of corn and beans and have some chickens for eggs. It would improve the quality of everyone’s diet, too! I also took a poll of who would quit using the dryer in the laundry room if we had a clothes line and every single person said - “oh, yes! I really miss hanging my clothes on a line.” Maybe we’re a little old fashioned over here in our corner of Austin but I suspect there are a lot of people who miss the old ways even if they are too young to have actually experienced them.

Children learn valuable lessons by connecting with their food source. One of them that comes to mind is the time that a friend of mine had just received a box of newly hatched turkey chicks. It was a very cold December evening and she was worried about keeping them warm through the night. We decided to put them in the oven with only the pilot light on so it was a toasty, comfortable 80-something degrees in there. Just right for the chicks. We put them in a big roaster pan and just as we were slipping the chirping little guys into the oven, her 3 year old came hauling round the corner into the kitchen, saw what we were doing and starting screaming bloody murder! After we calmed him down, we all had a good laugh but I’ll bet he remembers that to this day.

The thing I love the most about living this way is how life flows with the weather, the seaons, and the unique character of each day. There is a close and personal connection between the earth, the sky, what you eat and how you feel. It is a feeling of completeness and reciprocity with the natural world. When you watch the rain fall on your early spring garden, when you’re on first name basis with the hen who laid the eggs you’re eating for breakfast - you get it. No words are needed. It might just be the most healing thing we can do and in the process take back control of one of our most basic needs.

Another helpful website I found was from a group in Albuquerque called Urban Chickens They are building a network of urban chicken keepers and offer help with establishing pro-chicken ordinances and laws. They also have a blog and some really down to earth advice on all things chicken.

Maybe when we turn off our dryers and put up clotheslines, put some solar panels on our roofs, dig up the front yard and put in corn and beans and run a few chickens in the back - even in the cities we can start living like we belong here again.

Many of the people who evacuated ahead of Hurricane Ike ended up here in Austin. There are about 30,000 people in shelters and while things are infinitely better than the Katrina debacle, there are some problems. Not enough food and water. No cots in some of the shelters. The Red Cross running out of money. People talking about “disaster fatigue” -!

We have thousands of National Guard trucks rumbling down the road, helicopters, humvees, all kinds of heavy equipment, disaster management “command centers” that look like the space program launch centers, talk of martial law and forcing people who stayed behind to abandon their homes in the aftermath of the storm . . .

And then we have the grassroots: American Rainbow Rapid Response (ARRR). It’s a lively, all-volunteer, non-profit organization that many got to know through The New Waveland Cafe after Hurricane Katrina, a cooperative effort of evangelicals from Texas, friends from Burning Man and Rainbow Gatherings, the folks at Organic Valley, and some runaways from Red Cross who got tired of the bureaucratic delays, among others.

For the full story of ARRR on today’s DailyKos, go HERE - and to volunteer or donate to ARRR, go to their website at http://www.americanrainbowrapidresponse.org/ and click on the paypal button or dial 1-800-339-9941. Extension #1 is for large resource donations, extension #2 is for financial or in kind donations, extension #3 is for individual volunteers or groups. Please leave your location, any available equipment, and the dates of your availability.

Thank you.

Copyright: Good Nature Publishing Co.

I’m reading The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, a book by Richard Preston about the last remaining coastal redwood trees of Northern California and Southern Oregon. Old-growth forest means really old. Redwood trees live for thousands of years. In 1850, there were about two million acres of old growth forests between Big Sur and the southern tip of Oregon. Only about 4% of them remain.

It is difficult to imagine just how big an ancient redwood tree is. The tallest one is believed to be 370 feet tall. National Geographic called it “the Mt. Everest of All Living Things.” The Wild Trees is about an eccentric group of botanists, biologists and climbers studying a grove of redwoods, the largest of which is named Iluvatar.

Redwood trees are not just a simple configuration of one central trunk that is very very tall with horizontal branches sticking out. Many of the horizontal branches thrust out smaller “trees” that grow vertically, parallel to the trunk, and look just like the main tree. Horizontal branches on these small versions thrust out even smaller versions. Iluvatar had 220 trunks of smaller and smaller trees in six levels of heirarchy. It had become “a forest inside a forest . . . and one of the most structurally complicated living organisms that has ever been discovered.” It is, as Preston describes it, “an architecture made up of nooks and crannies and shaded, moist spots and fertile pockets where all kinds of living things can become established and can interact with one another.”

This is the home of the marbled murrelet, an elusive little member of the auk family, similar to the penguin in many respects, who spends most of its life in the ocean but who flies (so far, so fast that researchers use a radar gun to track them) up to 70 km inland to nest 140′ in the air in the lichen-lined “nooks and crannies” of old growth trees like Iluvatar, carrying very small fish in their tiny curved beaks to feed their young. These little birds, who mate for life, have become a very endangered species. I have been following the saga of those who struggle to pull them back from the brink of extinction for three years now and finally there has been an historic breakthrough.

The California Supreme Court has given new protection to the marbled murrelet and the magnificent old growth forests by throwing out an open-ended long-term logging plan for 200,000 acres in Humboldt County that the California Department of Forestry had approved - delegating the completion of the plan to protect endangered species to the logging company! Justice Carlos R. Moreno ruled that the Department of Forestry “failed to proceed according to law.” This decision grew out of lawsuits that followed the historic Headwaters Agreement, a 1996 pact between Pacific Lumber Co. and the state and federal governments.

In early August, the new management of Humboldt Redwood Co. (HRC) which was previously Pacific Lumber Co., met with activists and assured them that old growth groves on HRC land will be permanently protected. This is a wonderful victory for the dedicated activists who have put their lives on the line for the forest. This video from North Coast Earth First! shows what was involved in protecting these trees, this habitat and the marbled murrelet.

Local activists are going to keep on organizing, holding non-violence trainings and action camps, and North Coast Earth First! Media will continue to exist, releasing more videos and continuing to keep the public awareness of local issues as high as possible. There are other local lumber companies who are still clearcutting, and there may even be some hidden old growth out there, so organizing and actions will continue, until they are no longer needed. And that will be a wonderful day, indeed.

The most recent stories in Wildflower Stew on the saga of the marbled murrelet are:
Miracle of the Marbled Murrelet
Protecting the Marbled Murrelet
More Good News

The poster of the beautiful watercolor of the two marbled murrelets by artist Ram Papish is available from http://goodnaturepublishing.com along with many other visual delights of the natural world.

When I was a kid, there were certain things growing wild that we knew it was okay to eat. Wild mint and watercress down by the creek, baby dandelion leaves, and a flowering shrub with bright red flowers you could pick and suck the sweet nectar from the end of the trumpet-shaped blooms. We knew never to eat china berries or hack berries. I don’t remember how we knew. Someone must have told us. There were huge oleander bushes lining my grandmother’s driveway. They are extremely toxic. We never went near them. We just knew.

At the right time of the year, there would be wild onion, wild carrot and something that looks (and tastes) like asparagus. All these things were available to an observant child growing up in the country, close to the natural world. There are worlds more of edible foods, herbs and wild crafting supplies for the taking out there - for an amazingly complete rundown on surviving on wild plants see: http://www.wilderness-survival.net/plants-1.php

These days it is becoming popular in some neighborhoods to turn up the front yard and plant a garden. Excellent idea! The kids get to see where some of their food comes from, for one thing. But what about the back yard - or whatever area you have around you where you live? Can you find a spot to turn from landscaped (water-intensive, chemical dependent) back to the wild?

As more and more land gets put into play for humans - agriculture, subdivisions, golf courses, etc. - less and less is available for the critters. People start seeing wildlife in their backyards, coyotes in Central Park. Where else can they go? And then there’s the crazy weather and floods and fires. I read about the wildlife in the fires near Big Sur running toward the ocean to escape the flames. What will they do when they get there?

I know that in the places I’ve been the last few years, even urban areas, the birds and animals are coming closer. I don’t know if they are losing their fear or just doing what they have to do to survive. But I know that it feels right to try to make some room for them too, in whatever way we can, as we all try to cope with our suffering planet. The payback may be waking up to watch deer graze out your bedroom window just before dawn or attracting the most beautiful butterflies, the migrating birds, the best chorus of frogs after a rain.

I was lucky enough to spot a hummingbird nest (no easy task - they are very small) and show it to my grandson when he was two and we watched as the parents fed the extremely small babies and saw them take off in their tiny perfection when they were fledged. How can you compare that with a manicured lawn that has to be mowed with a gasoline powered lawn mower which sounds like some kind of demon from hell?

Cities have all kinds of ordinances about these things as do neighborhood associations. In Austin your grass can’t be more than 12 inches high. Period. That requires lots of mowing. Maybe we should pass an ordinance outlawing lawns!

Then the hummingbirds and butterflies and possums and deer and red tailed hawks could share our space with us and we’d all be a lot better off.

The National Wildlife Federation will certify your very own backyard wildlife refuge if you register with them. They have been offering the certifications since 1973. By the spring of 2008, there were almost 100,000 National Wildlife Federation certified habitats in backyards, schoolyards, just down the road, coming to your neighborhood soon.

I live in an apartment house that’s shaped like a “U” around a central courtyard that we all share. Some of us have flowers. Hibiscus, jasmine, roses, coleus, elephant ears, petunias, spider plants, geraniums, aloe vera, and tall red canna lilies. But this year some of us have taken on growing a little food.

Among with the tomatoes and squash and peppers and beans one of my neighbors has plunked one little strawberry plant in a large pot filled up mostly with marigolds. Everyday I’ve been watching the tiny white star-shaped flowers turn into little green nubbins and then blush red as they gradually ripen. Everyday I taste the sweet memory of strawberry as I watch them grow.

I think of the morning when I was a very young child visiting my aunt and uncle and I slipped out at dawn, alone, and feasted on my uncle’s strawberry patch, plucking every red one in sight! I think of the story of the zen monk about to either be eaten by a lion or fall off a cliff whose last act was to reach out and pick one sweet strawberry - and savor it!

I think of the strawberry pie I invented when I was the baker for a restaurant. Everybody loved it. I wouldn’t tell them the secret recipe. It was strawberries, cooked up with a pinch of cornstarch to make it hold together, poured in a baked pie shell and chilled, served with a dot of whipped cream. Nothing else. But they were really good strawberries. They wouldn’t have believed me.

This one little plant wakes up all my strawberry stories like nothing in a basket from the store can do. Then one day the two strawberries that I’ve been watching are gone. Were they sweet? Were they savored? How precious were those two berries?

We used to joke about our ten dollar tomatoes when I was growing food for my family. When you count the hours, the hard work, the garden tools, compost, mulch, seeds, water, prayer and deer fencing, it feels that way sometimes.

But there was much more to it than that. What I gained, besides the food, was exercise, wisdom, experience, pleasure, vitamin D and fresh air. I was also teaching my children (and their friends), sharing with my neighbors and inspiring anybody else who was thinking about trying it. I was improving the soil in that spot, too.

What I was not doing was putting more CO2 into the air because of trips to the store, gas for the trucks that brought it in, environmental degradation from commercial farming methods, and making more profits for big agribiz, wholesale food corporations and (gasp!) Monsanto.

So, I would say, in light of all that, that each homegrown strawberry is an engine of social change, a contribution to global healing and, of course, a celebration of the sweetness of life.

To plan for some sweetness in your life Seeds of Change is a good place to start. You can sign up for their newsletter, The Cutting Edge, and get a free catalog. Another good place to get (and give) the best seeds is the Seed Savers Exchange - a non-profit organization of gardeners dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.

If you don’t find what you’re looking for there, you can go to the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service and look under the Organic Seeds Suppliers Search, a very complete database of certified organic suppliers of seed. Good gardening - and seed saving - is a year round activity. Any time is a good time to start.

On March 5, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would not finalize a proposal to revise protected habitat for marbled murrelets in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. The proposal would have slashed protected critical habitat by almost 95 percent. But the FWS reversed its previous plans and agreed with conservation groups that it would not be appropriate to revise critical habitat for this elusive little seabird.

Today’s decision means that approximately 3.9 million acres of federal old-growth forest remain protected as murrelet habitat.
“This reversal, coupled with a recent court decision throwing out a timber industry attempt to take the murrelet off the endangered species list, should end the timber industry’s profit-driven and illegal attack on the coastal forests that murrelets need to survive,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney with Earthjustice.

Marbled murrelets are seabirds that use old-growth forests for nesting and rearing their young. In 1992, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the marbled murrelet population in Washington, Oregon, and California as a threatened species due to logging of its old growth habitat. Despite undisputed scientific evidence that murrelets are disappearing from the Pacific coast, the timber industry has set its sights on the small seabird in order to increase logging of trees over 100 years old. For more information on this issue in Wildflower Stew click here and here .

On February 26, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault officially opened. Seeds from all over the world will be placed in three caverns carved 130 meters into the permafrost outside the town of Longyearbyen on the island of Svalbard just 500 miles from the North Pole. Norway has provided the funding for the project and developed it in collaboration with the Global Crop Diversity Trust

Ola Westengen, operation manager, said the seeds include several thousand potato seeds from Peru, 30,000 samples of different beans from Columbia, 47,000 seed samples of wheat and 10,000 types of maize from Mexico, 30,000 seeds of mostly barley and wheat from the Middle East and 70,000 varieties of rice from the seed bank in the Philippines. The seed vault can hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all the known varieties of the world’s main food crops.

Twenty-three hundred people live on this Norwegian archipelago which was selected not only for it’s remote location far away from conflicts but also because of its climate. Even if the freezer system in the vault fails the permafrost will keep the seeds frozen and the fortified walls, recently tested by the biggest earthquake in Norway’s history, have been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks. The vault is also built 130 meters above current sea level, high enough that it would not flood if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt entirely due to global warming, and is protected by high walls of fortified concrete, an armoured door, a sensor alarm and the native polar bears that roam the region.

The thought that polar bears are the security guards for a doomsday vault containing the seeds of what might be the future of the human race, given a worst case scenario, and the fact that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct because of the actions of the human race, gives one pause. Or it did me anyway.

So, maybe we should go here and find out how we can help the bears stick around.

See previous stories on the Global Seed Vault in Wildflower Stew at: http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com/2007/06/04/saving-the-seeds/ and http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com/2007/03/20/we-need-this//

See more photos of the Seed Vault here.

Used with permission.
Copyright Michael G. Shepard

The timber industry, the Bush administration and a disgraced former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official have failed to remove the threatened Marbled Murrelet from the endangered species list. While the Government Accountability Office and the Department of the Interior’s Inspector General continue investigating wrong-doing on the part of the government, Judge John Bates of the D.C. district court on February 5, rejected the industry suit, partly because of the actions of Julie McDonald, the former Interior Department official who is accused of bullying agency scientists and influencing them to change their report.

The marbled murrelet is a small seabird that nests in old-growth forests along the Pacific Coast of North America. In 1992, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed murrelet populations in Washington, Oregon, and California as threatened due to logging of their habitat. Despite undisputed scientific evidence that murrelets are disappearing from the Pacific Coast, the timber industry continues to set its sights on the small seabird in order to permit the logging of trees over 100 years old. See previous article in Wildflower Stew at: http://goodwordswan.wildflowerstew.com/2008/01/01/miracle-of-the-marbled-murrelet/

Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the environmental groups who intervened through the Earthjustice law firm predicted the Bush administration would next seek to remove as much of the bird’s “critical habitat” designation as they can. The fight goes on.

The Buffalo Field Campaign is a non-profit grassroots coalition of Native American and non-Native environmentalists formed under the leadership of Michael Mease and Lakota activist Rosalie Little Thunder to stop the slaughter of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo herd, protect the natural habitat of wild free-roaming buffalo and native wildlife, and to work with people of all Nations to honor the sacredness of the wild buffalo.

Buffalo in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are not protected on their year-round habitat. Yellowstone Park does not provide sufficient winter range for the resident herds of wildlife. Due to the deep snow, animals are forced to leave the park in order to find adequate forage for winter survival. When the buffalo follow their instincts and migrate to lower elevations, they enter a conflict zone where the politics of Montana directly clash with their survival needs.

During the winter of 1996-97, the Montana Department of Livestock (DOL) slaughtered almost 1,100 Yellowstone buffalo when they crossed the arbitrary park boundary into the state. Ever since that winter the BFC volunteers have stood with the buffalo who are outside the park, every day from sunrise to sunset. Their daily patrols, their witness and their grassroots advocacy have made it clear to the DOL that they will be held accountable for their actions.

Over 3000 people from all over the country and around the world have volunteered to help stop the buffalo slaughter. Volunteers patrol for buffalo by skis, snowshoes, or cars. Everyone communicates by a network of hand-held radios, and also carries a video camera.

You can watch the video below and then you can go to http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/index.html to find out more about how you can help stop the slaughter of the Yellowstone Buffalo.

I’ve been working on a post about my heroes. Haven’t finished it yet but Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherds is one of them. I got this press release today and couldn’t wait to share it with you. You can contact them at http://seashepherd.org

Sea Shepherd News
News Releases

01/31/2008

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society Needs Your Help to Return to the Southern Oceans to Defend the Whales from Illegal Japanese Whalers
THE WHALES NEED US TO RETURN TO THE SOUTHERN OCEAN WHALE SANCTUARY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT TO DEFEND THE WHALES

Crew Needed:

For long Hours, cold weather, dangerous mission, spartan vegetarian meals, rough seas, icebergs, whalers, high seas pursuits, and the satisfaction of saving the lives of hundreds of whales.

We need volunteers with the following skills:

Shore Engineers to help repair one of the main engines in Port
Diesel Engineers
Navigators
A Medical Officer
Cooks
A Computer Expert
Photographer
Some Passionate unskilled volunteers

We also need to secure the following:

200 tons of fuel.

All the vegetarian food we can get - canned, dried, frozen.

The ship will arrive in Melbourne on February 2nd and will return as soon as we secure the fuel and complete repairs.

The Japanese whalers have two months of killing time left. We’ve stopped them for three weeks and we can stop them again and every day that we stop them from killing whales is a victory.

email: captainwatson@seashepherd.org
phone: +1 (360) 370-5650
fax: +1 (360) 370-5651
website: www.seashepherd.org