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.

There is so much news these days of things that are going wrong. It filled my heart with joy to hear about something that’s going right.

The Wild Sky Wilderness bill protecting a 106,000-acre Wilderness in the heart of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state passed the U.S. Senate with both Democratic and Republican Senators giving unanimous approval and was signed into law by President Bush. The area includes low-elevation old growth forests home to black bears, bald eagles, mountain goats, wolverines, cougars and spotted owls. The wilderness designation eliminates logging, mining, off-road vehicles, even cars. Virtually all motors are prohibited. You can’t even fire up a chain saw. Wheelchairs would be allowed, and the proposal calls for a 2-mile former logging road to be converted to a wheelchair-accessible trail.

The area is already visited by thousands of people every year. Many people come just to watch the salmon runs. They also enjoy hiking, climbing, rafting, fishing, and in the winter cross country skiing. Several picturesque small towns in the area directly benefit from this steady flow of visitors.

The bill was sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rick Larsen, both D-Wash.. It is the first new federally designated wilderness in Washington since 1984. The Wilderness Society worked closely with the Wild Washington Campaign to preserve this unique area for future generations.
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I Know You Wild Skykomish

Rebecca Swan
May 2008

I woke up this Earth Day in Austin, Texas, to a light rain washing the air clean of city pollution, at least temporarily, and giving the newly leafed-out trees and the wildflowers the morning blessing of water. Recently I saw one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on screen about water - the movie The Unforeseen. It’s about Barton Springs, a spring-fed swimming hole that wells up from the fragile limestone Edwards aquifer along Barton Creek right in the middle of downtown Austin and the battle between the environmental activists of Governor Ann Richards’ days in the early 90s and the destructive overdevelopment that followed under Governor George W Bush. It tells the story in poignant first person interviews of the developer who had it all and lost it in disgrace and bankruptcy, of the rancher still working his land in the midst of a jungle of new subdivisions knowing when he dies his land will be sold and subdivided and chopped up for even more houses.

The film opens and closes with lines from a poem by Wendell Berry, “The Unforeseen.” Using heartfelt, up close and personal interviews with Robert Redford, Willie Nelson, William Grieder of the Rolling Stone, the late Ann Richards among others - and the developer who talks about what motivated him to leave the precarious farming existence of his family in West Texas and come to the city to make his mark and the precipitous rise and fall that followed.

By the end of the film it is possible to feel the humanity in all the players. Well, with a couple of exceptions; a news clip of George W’s inaugeration as governor and a really creepy interview of a former lobbyist whose fingers are shown putting together model war planes as he describes his years beating out the environmentalists at the state capital. But this is the genius of the film. It shows the tragedy of human folly with compassion - which opens the door for healing. And it shows with exceptional photography the fragile beauty of the springs, how much we have lost, how quickly we could lose it all.

This is the Austin version of what is going on everywhere. It’s a beautiful film and deserves the many awards, including Sundance and The Independent Spirit Award, it has received. If you get a chance, I hope you will see it.

And happy Earth Day . . . thanks, mom . . . . .

Maybe one reason it doesn’t bother me so much to live in the city now is that I carry all the years I lived on the land around inside of me, running through my consciousness like a river, always close to my heart . . . the pristine beauty, the crisp first snowfall steps, the smooth river rock glistening, the gulf coast breeze in my hair. All the years of living close to mother in her many guises has given me something I guess I can never be separated from.

I haven’t forgotten the difference or gotten used to being in the city but I think for now I have accepted that my personal desire to live in pristine places is secondary to my concern about what is happening to all of us and I try to think what I can do, because I really am privileged compared to a lot of people, having a safe place to live, enough food and a computer even though I live way below the “poverty level” - for this country. So I advocate and I write because I am a writer. Maybe sharing my experiences and what I’ve learned will be of some help.

I think it is very very important for as many people as possible to live on the land in communities and become self-sufficient, growing food, securing their own water and producing their own power sources. The day is coming very soon when we will no longer have the option of driving around in personal gasoline-powered vehicles. Long distance hauling of goods, including food, will become prohibitively expensive. Power grids may fail or become outrageously polluting.

After almost 40 years of traveling, visiting communities and living in community, I am convinced that the most important factor in the success of a community is the combination of human energy - the personalities that make up the community, their common ground and the quality of their relationship to each other. The right combination can create a dynamic that can accomplish miraculous things. So I would say - if you are creating a community, put together the members as carefully as you would put together a band, or the colors in a painting, or the characters in a novel. When you have the right mix, you will know and your community will sing!

The next thing is - be prepared to work hard. Community building is not for the faint hearted. It requires fanaticism and deep love. It demands passion. Anything less and you will fall by the wayside. It also requires the discrimination to be able to say no when it is necessary, to know that some days are going to be hard and some days are going to be sad and be able to handle that, to be pragmatic and non-judgemental, to always come back to what is in the best interest of the community as a whole and to always look forward to what actions will secure the future of the community.

It takes years to get the soil right for an organic garden, years for those spindly fruit trees to bear fruit, years to get the hang of the seasons in your particular spot, when to plant, what pests to watch out for (see beyondpesticides.org ) and when to harvest before the first frost. Take time to lay the ground work well, make a place for the old folks and the children, get to know your neighbors. This is sacred work.

I fell in love with this book when I read the first three poems. The first poem, Ambassador Frog, really sounds like a frog.

he’s got important business,
down there in the bog -
he’s practicing speeches,
ambassador frog.

The second one, Angry Red Squirrel, sounds just like a chattering squirrel: he’s red. he’s angry. he’s a squirrel.

And the meandering, searching way a beetle goes along is reflected in the short stop and start lines of Beetle:

he rode the conveyor
belt along,
tumbling, getting up,
tumbling again,

I knew I was hearing the voice of a poet who had taken the time to sit down and listen and watch.

The poetry is many-faceted - the sadness of Intelligence, about agents from the future looking back at us and Invasion from a Friendly Planet, about invasive species: when they win everything else loses. The beautiful poem, Of Course which begins:

as we moved
further into their kingdom
of course we encountered them;
raccoon, possum,
red-tailed hawk, turkey vulture;

and ends:

it was then we longed for
our own place in the world,
and turned
to go back home:
it was no longer there!

And then there are the very funny poems - Support Your Right:

If I knew how to do it
I’d arm all the bears
so there’d be bear militias
in the mountains somewheres.

And the funny, bouncy The Prawn Speaks:

I used to be a kid prawn
now I am a big prawn

There is This is Your Planet Talking which comes off as poignantly true and Rivets Popping about the global airlines going down which sounds terrifyingly true. The poet expresses the natural world not as some ethereal romantic Eden but as the place where we live, the place we encounter in the natural world right now, as it is.

The book has delightful cover art of the earth as national park and sketches at the beginning of each section by Joye Chizek. The poems are in alphabetical order and the book itself is nicely put together by publisher Poetry Vortex Publishing of Crescent City, CA. http://www.poetryvortexpublishing.com

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.

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.