White horses are less attractive to horseflies [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
In the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf rides upon a magnificent white stallion called Shadowfax. White horses have been greatly prized in human societies as a sign of wealth and dignity, largely because their bright coats are both pretty and rare. There are reasons for that. In the wild, the same conspicuousness that inspires legendary tales also makes white horses vulnerable to predators and sensitive to skin cancer. But they have an unexpected benefit - they make horses less attractive to horseflies.
Anyone who has been bitten by a horsefly (formally, a tabanid) knows that they're much more irritating than your average midge or mosquito. Rather than puncturing skin, their mandibles are designed to rip and shear. As a result, their bites hurt and they can drive grazing animals to distraction. They can also transfer serious diseases, including Equine Infectious Anaemia, parasitic worms, and even anthrax.
Now, Gabor Horvath from Eotvos University, Hungary, has found that white coats are more horsefly-proof than darker ones. They reflect very little polarised light - light vibrating on a single plane - and it's this light that horseflies use to track down their next blood meal.
On a sunny June day, Horvath watched two horses - one brown and one white - as they grazed in a local field. Both were almost continuously attacked by horseflies and had to defend themselves by tail-swishing, kicking, shuddering, head-swinging, biting, licking and even rolling on the group. But the white horse had the better time of it - photographs revealed that, on average, the brown horse had 3.7 times more horseflies on or near it. Eventually, the attacks were so irritating that the horses were driven into a nearby shady forest, where they gained a temporary respite. Again, the brown horse was always the first to cave and spent longer in the shade.
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Eureka! Neuron Culture goes Sally Field [Neuron Culture]
I was thrilled this morning to learn that this humble, erratic blog was named one of Top 30 Science Blogs by Eureka, the new monthly science magazine recently launched by the Times of London. I find myself among some most admirable company, including giants, longtime favorites of my own, and a few blogs new-to-me-but-presumably-really-good-anyway.
Given my history of ambivalence about blogging, my sporadic rhythm, my not-best-practice of ranging far and wide, and my generally low traffic, I find this recognition a surprise, but a happy one. I feel a bit like I've been upgraded (possible in this one context) from Sean Penn to Sally Field.
It's also gratifying in two other ways. As I make most of my living writing for print, I find it heartening as well to get this recognition from a wonder of wonders -- a print monthly that just launched, despite much noise about (and evidence for) the demise of serious print journalism. That it comes from the UK, where I'll likely be moving later this year to work on my new book for a while, makes it that much sweeter.
So thanks, Eureka, and thanks especially to regular readers -- and welcome to new ones.
The Yellowstone Earthquake Swarm of 2010 marches on [Eruptions]
Steaming, gurgling mudpots in the active hydrothermal system of Yellowstone.
For those of you following Yellowstone (I think there might be a few of you), I've plotted up the earthquakes since 1/27 (see below) - and sure enough, although there is a lot of scatter, they are getting shallower - however what this exactly means is unclear. You can see my plots from 1/22-28 here. As many of you have mentioned, a caldera like Yellowstone is a big interconnected system, so a solely tectonic source of this is still possible as the displacement migrates through the fractured caldera rocks.
This all being said, YVO's current status statement still reads:
"
At this time, YVO scientists and their collaborators have detected no anomalous ground deformation, strain, or increased thermal activity that could indicate precursory activity to phenomena such as steam explosions or volcanic eruptions. As such, the Volcanic Alert Level remains at Normal (Aviation Color Code of Green)."
So, again, without abundant evidence to suggest otherwise, the swarm has shown no indications that this is magma related. The earthquakes are shallower right now, but again, we need to look at this information with an abundance of caution. YVO posted yesterday a summary of the current earthquake swarm and an brief history of swarms to put this one in context along with a description of all the monitoring that occurs at Yellowstone - so if you are concerned about the swarm, be sure to check it out. This caldera is not solely a magmatic feature - the process of caldera-forming itself involves breaking the crust along a ring fracture. This means that the area is littered with thousands (millions?) of fault systems related to the caldera. Trust me, I'd be fascinated by the idea that a new dome might be erupting at Yellowstone (i.e., NOT A SUPERVOLCANIC ERUPTION), which is the mostly likely scenario, but until the evidence tells me otherwise, this doesn't look like it.
Why does the gunslinger who draws first always get shot? [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
In Western films, the gunslinger that draws first always gets shot. This seems like a standard Hollywood trope but it diverted the attention of no less a scientist that Niels Bohr, one of history's greatest physicists. Taking time off from solving the structure of the atom, Bohr suggested that it takes more time to initiate a movement than to react to the same movement. Perversely, the second gunslinger wins because they're responding to their opponent's draw.
Now, Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham has found that there's something to Bohr's explanation. People do indeed have a "reactive advantage", where they execute a movement about 10% more quickly if they're reacting to an opponent. Of course, ethics committees might frown on scientists duelling with the pistols in the name of discovery, even if the people in question were graduate students. So Welchman designed a laboratory gunfight, played out using buttons rather than guns.
Two opponents faced each other and had to press a series of three buttons as quickly as possible. To begin with, they held a central "home key" with their trigger fingers and they had to wait for a short spell before before starting the round. The point where they were allowed to begin varied from trial to trial and the players weren't told how long it would be. There was no starting pistol or countdown. Either player could start the race but if they went too soon, an alarm would sound to signal a false-start.
These button-mashing duels revealed that, on average, the players completed their sequence 21 milliseconds faster if they reacted than if they initiated. That's an improvement of around 9%, and most of this advantage came at the very beginning, when they pressed the first button. It's an interesting result and like all good scientists, Welchman systematically considered and ruled out several possible explanations for it.
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Copenhagen Failed, Mexico is Already Doomed – What’s Next? [Casaubon's Book]
An unsurprising but still deeply depressing article from the Guardian observes that not only was Copenhagen, billed as "the last, best hope for change" a dismal failure (duh) but that Mexico City is already a dismal failure.
Dozens of politicians, diplomats, economists, scientists and campaigners contacted by the Guardian agreed that while a global, legally binding treaty remains by far the best way to prevent global warming wreaking havoc on our civilisation, the chances of that treaty being achieved in 2010 are almost nil.
The energy has gone out of the negotiations, said some, with the momentum that drew well over 100 global leaders to the Danish capital in search of a deal now lost. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which runs the negotiations has drifted into a procedural vacuum and its head, Yvo de Boer, has lost all credibility, said others.
The list of problems cited was long: the US political machine is unlikely to pass the climate laws other countries want as proof of intent; the willingness of China and India, the new climate change superpowers, to compromise is unclear; the erstwhile climate change leader, the European Union is failing to lead. And all the while, what climate secretary Ed Miliband yesterday called the "siren voices" of climate sceptics sing more loudly, encouraged by leaked emails and dodgy details in important reports.
Simon Retallack, head of climate change at the Institute for Public Policy Research, reflected the thoughts of many: "We need to be honest and recognise that the national political conditions in the countries that matter most on climate change just weren't conducive to a deal in Copenhagen and if anything they have become worse since."
The truth is that short term national interest is primary in every nation's agenda. While all nations have an interest, in the long term, in preventing climate change, none of them have an interest in bearing the costs of dealing with climate change - and the fact is, those costs are substantial. And herein lies the problem - because most nations, and indeed, many people, recognize this to be true. The lie accepted by almost all climate thinkers has been that the shift to more renewable energies and green jobs will be a happy thing, fueling a new economic growth. This story has been told over and over again, but its falsity can be seen in the fact that no nation seems to want to take part in this remarkable new economic opportunity.
The truth is this - almost analysis that estimates that we can make money and not take an enormous hit by addressing climate change fudges the numbers - the begin from old political targets like 450ppm or even 550ppm, rather than the ones supported by contemporary science. They then postulate a world that is not enduring an economic crisis (counterfactual) and a whole lot of optimistic scenarios. Yale, for example, has a friendly program that will show you how we get richer the more emissions we regulate. The problem, of course, is that it isn't true - the assumptions that underly the program are just false. Given that the aggregate of the evidence is that climate change is proceeding more quickly, rather than less than expected, the odds are that the economic cost is higher even that we would expect if we did an honest analysis today.
Almost no one (James Hansen and George Monbiot are useful exceptions) wants to admit the blunt truth - that dealing with climate change will cost us, and cost us big time. It will require sacrifice on a tremendous scale. And IMHO, climate activists who refused to acknowledge this, who fudged the numbers to promise an economic benefit that no one really believes in did more harm than good. I understand the attraction of the politically palatable - I really do. But when the politically palatable solution is unviable, the only solution is to pave the way for the politically unpalatable. It was always tremendously unlikely that nations would work together when told they had to make tremendous sacrifices until some crisis was already present - but setting the stage for that reality couldn't have produced fewer results than this did.
For simple honesty's sake, it is time to abandon the unadulterated bullshit that we can get rich mitigating climate change - dramatic reductions in emissions, if ever undertaken, will hurt the economy. The only argument for making them is that it will hurt the economy vastly more to edure the realities of climate change - and odds are, that's what we're going to do.
Short of praying for volcanic activity to mitigate the harm of climate change, the best options are these. First, tell the truth, even when it sucks. Second, at least start paving the way for an ethic of sacrifice, so that people who are eventually forced by either events or the sudden arrival of new political realities - or most likely, both - actually have had a little time to prepare and are not wholly betrayed by the realization that this will cost us. Third, since the international political sphere has failed us, we've got to stop kidding ourselves. I find it desperately unlikely that grassroots response will transform our society - but it is demonstrably not much less effective than international response. At least get the fuck off the planes and go home, turn down the heat and plant the damned trees.
Sharon
Volcanic eruption in Pakistan? [Eruptions]
UPDATE 2/2/2010 7:30PM EST: Another report, this time placing the activity near Wham. This report is still vague about that is actually happening, saying people saw "flames of burning rocks on the top of the mountain over the last couple of days". The article also says the Headquarters of the Geological Survey of Pakistan has not returned any inquires on the event. My guess (and I emphasize guess) is this might be a misconstrued forest fire ... but this is about as strange a report of a volcanic eruption as you can get.
UPDATE 2/2/2010: A little bit more detail - the "volcano" in question is called Torghar Mountain. There is a blurry, unidentifiable picture that sort of looks like a scoria cone deposit or spatter cone deposit in another report that says the "eruption" started on Sunday night.
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Anybody want to help me on this. I just read a report of a volcanic eruption in Pakistan. Here is the link to the report, which offers few details, including, well, the country that this is happening. I'm guessing it is Pakistan based on the source and the names.
The full report:
A mountain in Charri located near Ziarat has begun to spew molten lava, creating panic and fear in the locality.
Talking to journalists, DCO Ziarat Siddiqui Mandokhel said that that he had personally surveyed the site of occurrence, and said that emittance of chemical gases had begun last night, after which it spewed out a molten lava, the size of a meter.
He also said that that special (scientific) survey teams would be arriving soon to study the lava, which had thankfully not reached any credible population in its environs; which is already scarce.
He assured that despite all natural immunity, safety measures had nevertheless been taken, and a fewer homes located in the environs of site, have been or were in process of being relocated.
It is pertinent to note that during last year this region had been subjected to severe seismic jolts, resulting in calamitous loss of lives and property; while aftershocks are still continuing.
Seismologists have already marked the region being in quake zone (redzone), while locals are fast relocating, due of any further anticipatory calamity.
I'll try to find more information, but this is a big question mark to me right now.
Ways to Connect [Casaubon's Book]
I've got a couple of speaking engagements and another class coming up, and I thought I'd let you know where I'm going to be and when.
First, on Saturday, March 6, I'll be in Concord, NH at the NOFA-NH Winter Conference. The Northeast Organic Farming Association has been so powerful in creating conditions for small scale organic agriculture in our region that I'm thrilled to be doing the keynote for this conference. I'll be speaking mid-day on "Making a Place at the Table" and doing a workshop in the afternoon on low energy living with kids and teens. And I can't wait to attend other workshops! You can find links to early registration here http://nofanh.org/winterConference and I hope to meet some of you there!
Also, on Tuesday, March 9, from 6-8pm I'll be appearing on a panel exploring "Case Studies for the Way the Way Forward" at the public forum (free and open to the public) of the annual NESEA Building Energy Conference. With Linda Wigington (of the Affordable Comfort Institute, which works on Passivehaus-style home retrofits) and Tina Clark of Transition, we'll be talking about what a sustainable society might look like. You can find information and register for the conference here: http://www.nesea.org/buildingenergy/conferencecontent/
Also, Aaron and I are offering our Farm and Garden Design Class beginning Thursday, February 18. The class will cover all the basics of starting up a garden, expanding an existing one, extending your garden's season, seed starting, making good use of small spaces, basic livestock husbandry, soil fertility and garden design. The class will give each participant a chance to work up a full garden plan and the tools to implement it. The class is offered over 6 weeks beginning in mid-February, and is asynchronous and online - ie, you don't have to be online at any particular time to participate. Cost of the class is 0 or equivalent barter (email to discuss) and we do have several remaining spots on scholarship (provided by us) for low income students. We also welcome donations to allow us to grant additional free spots to low income households. Email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com for more info.
Finally, after the raging success of my first apprenticeship weekend, I'm going to be running another one for families and kids (you are more than welcome to come if you don't have kids, but just be warned there will be a lot of wee ones running around and family-style programming in part - and yes, I will do another adults-only weekend at some point.) This one will be run at my house over Memorial Day weekend, May 28-31. Payment is by donation. I will have 3-5 (depending on housemate issues) rooms where families could sleep together, or there are local accomodations available at various motels and B and Bs. It will be spring and we'll have new kids (goat, not human), chicks, bunnies and ducklings in the barn, dirt to dig in, garden work galore and we'll cover a range of topics appropriate to adults and to kids.
Among them will be dairying and goat care, poultry keeping, animal raising for kids, garden design and implementation, herbs for tea and tincture, low energy life with kids and several other things - I'll send around a list of topics closer to the time. All children, obviously, must be accompanied by at least one adult 
. I've also got space for 1-2 people who would like to come for free and trade their skills at leading kids through fun projects and keeping the chaos under control for a spot in the weekend. We have a gigantic playset, a fenced yard, lots of climbing trees, a creek for playing in and space to run, so this should be fun for everyone. Email for more details (and don't be surprised if I don't get back to you in the next day or two - I'm offline a lot, but not ignoring you!)
Sharon
Sci-Fi Makes the Grade at the Oscars [The Primate Diaries]
My favorite novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, once complained about the treatment of science fiction by critics in his book Wampa, Foma and Granfalloons:
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since [publishing Player Piano], and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
Science fiction films have often received the same treatment. However, two of the surprise nominees for Best Picture this year are none other than James Cameron's Avatar and the South African alien apartheid action film District 9. While my money this year is on Precious, it's nice to see science fiction films getting the serious attention they deserve. Avatar received nine nominations (including Best Picture and Best Direction), District 9 racked four (including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay) while Star Trek grabbed four in the technical categories. While I may be the only one on the ScienceBlogs network who doesn't have a review of Avatar (though I hosted Four Stone Hearth that had a number of Avatar themed entries) I do have an in-depth review of District 9:
Inexplicably, a UFO appears over one of Earth's remote cities. Hovering a few hundred meters above the terrified citizens, a government mission to board the craft is executed only to find the strange beings living in disease and desperation. A decision is made to save their lives and relocate the aliens to the city's outskirts. In that moment, what seemed to be a compassionate action develops into an outdoor prison reminiscent of the worst crimes of colonialism.
While there are problems with both films, it's certainly nice to see some examples of smart science fiction having their file cabinets moved out of the outhouse.
Cottage Gardens and Swept Yards: Recreating a Vernacular Horticulture [Casaubon's Book]
At first glance, swept yards, derived from Africa, at one time traditional in the south and now mostly the province of a few, aging African-American southerners; and Cottage Gardens, invented in Britain under the feudal system and now evolved into a trendy " flower garden style" meaning mostly a mix of abundant plants and mulched paths as seen in any supermarket magazine, have nothing to do with one another.
But looking past the obvious, the two of them have a great deal in common indeed. Both emerged from the need to make good use of a comparatively smaller piece of land for a family with subsistence needs. Both responded to climate and culture and evolved over time in keeping with their climate and the needs of the people that grew them. Both allowed for a substantial variety of activities and plant life in a small space. Both made use of what was available, valuable and abundant, offering a sense of plenty and abundance. Both responded to inadequate housing by transforming outdoor spaces into living spaces. And perhaps most importantly, both took pragmatic traditions and made them respond to two equally important needs - the need for food and medicine and subsistence from one's garden, but also the need for beauty, peace, and respite and a place to express one's artfulness.
In his superb history _African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South_, Richard Westmacott tracks the origin of the swept yard back to West Africa, and explores how it changed over centuries, from slave yard to a now-dying way of life in the rural south. Instead of attempting to grow grass or other ground covers in the hot south often on red clay, rural southerners would sweep and tamp down that clay until it baked hard as a rock, reducing dust tracking and making the space suitable for yard work. Houses, hot during the day, were abandoned and people moved outside to shaded yards where they could do the washing, cook, eat, butcher animals, and do other heavy work in the shade of trees. The gardens, a separate but often connected space, contain the crops - and the pig area, the chickens and other livestock. The yard was seperate from the garden, often marked by an enclosure, and as Westmacott observed had originally been marked by medicinal herbs and dooryard plants, but gradually transitioned to largely ornamental flowers. Westmacott observes of the sustainability of the whole of traditional southern rural yards and gardens:
"It might be argued that a vernaculture garden must also be sustainable. Gardening is an adaptation of nature, and for gardening to become indigenous to an society, it must be sustainable. In most African societies, sustainability is intricately associated with religious beliefs. As has been shown, most of the gardeners in this study expressed alarm at the changes they saw occurring in the environment, and many lifestyles were remarkably self-sufficient and sustainable."
A yard swept bare of plant life may not sound very pretty, but in reality, it made wise use of what there was - it allowed housekeepers to manage the clay and dirt, while transforming the dooryard into the "outdoor rooms" that ornamental garden books like to praise but rarely actually succeed in creating. And it wasn't an empty space - containers and marginal areas were planted with trees and shrubs, where water could be focused. Recycled materials and scavenged ones made a remarkably creative yard full of planters made from abandoned materials - themselves artful. Moreover, there is, in the photos in Westmacott, a seamlessness to the transition space between yard, garden, livestock and field. Indeed, although I refer to this as an African-American tradition, it was so successful that before the advent of warm weather grass traditions, the swept yard was the norm in much of the rural south in white and black households, regardless of class.
I recently emailed Aaron Newton, my co-author on _A Nation of Farmers_ and my guide through southern life. We've been working together for four years now, and over the years have spent a lot of time politely and not so politely explaining the realities of our respective regions to one another, so I wasn't surprised that my query about whether anyone still swept their yard in his region of North Carolina was responded to by "Does anyone still wear tricornered hats up by you?" I took that to be a no - it is, as Westmacott documents, a dying tradition - supplanted by warm weather landscape grasses, by people spending more time in air conditioning and less in their yards, but the homogenization of garden design and by the destructions of the informal economy and subsistence activities. But a lower energy, less wealthy society may yet find uses for some of the things that the swept yard did well.
Most interesting to me about the swept yard is how they made space for both ornamental and food gardening. Westmacott observes that traditional African-American yards were often a riot of flowers and plants - but not organized as most white gardens were. First of all, the emphasis was on vigorous and abundant production and self-seeders. Flowering plants, instead of being organized by color and form were interspersed with one another, with a preference for bright colors. Until recently, few shrubs were involved - because of the high cost of woody plants, most woodies were food producers, rather than purely ornamental. Medicinal herbs would have been mixed in with flowers grown for scent and beauty. Because of the high cost of plants, annuals and seed grown plants were preferred and were shared widely. In this sense, the vernacular traditions of the rural south sound very much like the cottage garden.
In the early 1950s, Eudora Welty introduced the writer Elizabeth Lawrence to market bulletins published throughout Mississippi where gardeners sold perennials, herbs and ornamental sto one another. Lawrence took up a correspondence with dozens of women and men (mostly women) who divided and shared seeds and plants for a small fee, and generously offered advice and told stories of their origins. In their gardens were plants that were otherwise lost to the seed trade, being spread about and preserved in household gardens, and shared for pennies among men and women who valued them for the art and expression they could create. In _Gardening for Love_ Lawrence observes that these gardeners were minimally compensated for the considerable time and effort they spent in preparing and shiping plants, and explaining how to grow them - and most of them worked long hours doing other work. The compensation was the spread, the abundance, the increase in beauty and the preservation of the plants.
In contrast to the swept yard, at least superficially, the cottage garden is booming. Googling "cottage garden" got me a bazillion entries. The problem is that all of them are a watered down version of the cottage garden - but very few of them have anything to do with the cottage garden as it existed before it was taken over by the affluent who had no reason to grow anything but flowers. I have a fondness for Gertrude Jekyll too, but for those of us interested in vernacular gardens, she did everyone a disservice by taking up the cottage garden. Yes, they are very beautiful - but their beauty in reality lay in the way they combined aesthetics and subsistence - and the subsistence has been erased.
But the history of the cottage garden has as much to do with bees and pigs and vegetables as it does with wisteria and foxgloves. The recasting of cottage gardens as an intentionally informal style to be propagated by comparatively affluent ornamental gardeners obscures the fact that the cottage garden grew up among people just as poor as many of the rural African-Americans who preserved the swept yard.
Christopher Lloyd's and Richard Bird's _The Cottage Garden_ offers a concise history and at least an attempt to draw us back to the mixed use garden with a heavy emphasis on food plants and herbs. He observes that John Claudius Loudon in the 18th century attempted to help cottagers with reduced land access (as a result of the destructive enclosure laws) to use cottage style gardening to be able to feed a famly of five on 600 square yards of garden. Pigs, chickens and bees were essential to this project. They track back the ornamental elements of the kitchen garden to the Elizabethan dooryard and the herbs that lived in it. As in the African-American yards in the South, at first medicinal and other functional herbs predominated but they too had ornamental value, and it was hard to tell if tall spires of hollyhock were central because of their medicinal or ornamental utility.
The presumptions of the cottage garden were much the same as the African-American yard despite the radical difference in climate and culture - that much had to be gotten out of small space, that one needed a place to live and work outside when the weather permitted, that the ornament and utility were not incompatible, and that the best plants were abundant self-seeders or easily grown annuals. It had the additional virtue of using vertical space well - which some African-American gardens had as well, particularly in the use of scavenged articles as trellises. The ubiquitous cottage garden image, of course, is of a cottage covered with ivy or wisteria.
As the cottage garden was adopted by more affluent people, and transferred away from the real cottages of low income farmers and workers in Britain, the cottage garden changed, and became what we see today - a garden style, more heavily invested in perennials, with more shrubs and almost no emphasis on plant utility. The romanticization of the cottage in both gardens and literature worked to the detriment of the actual cottager - now that people longed to live in them, admired them, they became harder to actually live in for most working people. In _Sense and Sensibility_ Jane Austen's romantic Willoughby jesting threatens to tear down his estate and replace it with a cottage. But the cottage imagined in the romantic imagination was erased of subsistence functions, because, they were unromantic. In Georgette Heyer's superb _A Civil Contract_ the overly romantic, affluent Julia declares she would be delighted to live in a cottage, but her mother clarifies (in a terrifically funny passage) this fantasy for what it is - a sanitized dream.
<
em>"Could you be happy in a cottage? I could! How often I have longed to live in one - with white walls and a thatcheed roof and a neat little garden! We'll have a cow and I'll learn to milk and make butter and cheese. And some hens and a bee-hive, and some pigs.""Oh, won't you?" struck in her unappreciative brother. Well, if you mean to cook the meals, Lynton will precious soon want something more and who is to kill the pigs and muck out the henhouse."
..."Lady Oversly, having removed Julia's hat, had clasped her in her arms and was tenderly wiping the tears from her face, but she looked up at this and expalined: "Live in a cottage? Oh, no, dearest you would be very ill-advicsed to do that! Particularly a thatched one, for I believe that thatch harbors rats, though nothing, of course, is more picturesque, and I perfectly understand why you should have a fancy for it! But you would find it sadly uncomfortable: it wouldn't do for you at all, or for Adam either, I daresay, since you have both of you been accustomed to live in a very different style. And as for hens, I would not on any account rear such dispiriting birds! You know how it is whenever an extra number of eggs is needed in the kitchen: the hen woman is never able to supply them and always says it is because the creatures are broody. Yes, and they make sad noises whic you, my love, with your exquisite sensibility would find quite insupportable. And pigs,"concluded her ladyship with a shudder, "have a most unpleasant odour!"
The beauty of the cottage garden in many ways was its success, and thus its downfall - while beauty was always part of the project of creating the garden, always intertwined with utility, its very success at being lovely made it ripe for the erasure of its utility. But it is possible to come back to the cottage garden - to the yard as proximate space that extends the kitchen and the household outwards, brings us outside and into a riot of color and forms that are both beautiful and useful. There is still a place for the herb garden, and the cottage garden and the traditional African-American yard remind us to value plants that may be both ornamental and useful, that are vigorous and energetic.
The swept yard and other southern vernacular garden elements don't much suit my climate, but for thousands of my readers, they could be useful. This publication by cooperative extension suggests strategies for implementing some of the traditional design elements of African-American yards
In my wet climate, the cottage garden model makes a lot of sense. I may have 27 acres, but I also have a yard - a space outside my kitchen door that I have gradually been converting to herbs, flowers, vegetables and fruiting trees. Looking at the cottage garden model, I can think of ways of better integrating aesthetics and practicality.
The reality is that a shift to subsistence in a densely populated world will require us to draw upon all of the things we have learned about how to meet our needs - for food and beauty - in smaller spaces. There are thousands of traditions to draw upon from all over the world, and all of them will have things we can take and make use of. As we cast back upon our collective history, the answers to how we will feed ourselves - and feed our souls - is contained in part in stories from our past.
Sharon
Activity increasing at Tungurahua in Ecuador [Eruptions]
Tungurahua erupting in an undated AP photo (although I think it is the current 2010 activity.)
It hasn't really made it to much of the English-speaking news, but the current eruptive activity at Tungurahua appears to be on the up-tick. Hugo Yepes of the Geophysical Institute of Ecuador suggests that a larger eruption is not out of the question (link in spanish), but right now the activity is confined to explosions (vulcanian?) and ash fall around the region, specifically on Pillates and Choglontus overnight (2/1) from the ~ 2 km / 5 000 foot plume. Looking at the specifics (link in spanish), the Geophysical Institute is reporting 32 explosions, 30 long-period seismic events and 20 episodes of volcanic tremor in the last 24 hours. Government officials have issued a number of warnings for people living near the volcano and began preparation for evacuations. You can listen to Hugo Yepes report here (in spanish).
One of the few articles in English media regarding Tungurahua was a report about the difficultly of getting people to evacuate in these situations. We've heard this before, where people don't want to leave their home/farm because thieves will steal their meager possessions and livestock. Now, that might seem crazy to you and me, to be (as one of the commenters on the article says) more worried about possessions than life, but many of the residents of this area in Ecuador live a very scant existence, so losing their livelihood (such as their animals) is tantamount to, well, death.
{soapbox}This is where the rose-colored glasses of Americans and Europeans is most maddening - these people literally have nothing if they lose their home or livestock. It is not like they have insurance on their home, or well-off parents to support them if they fail or even a rich government to kick in disaster relief money. So, sometimes you have to roll the dice and think that the likelihood of getting killed by the volcano is smaller than getting robbed if you evacuate - and in all honestly, most of the time the former is less likely than the latter. The problem lies in the few times that you're not right - and that is the part that volcanologists try so hard to predict. It is not like they enjoy calling evacuations when they are not needed, but right now our ability to pick out the exact last moment before you should evacuate is not too sharp - it is close to trying to do surgery with a sword instead of a scalpel. Sure, it might get the job done, but the collateral damage ... The long and short here is that there is much of the world where the decision-making process you might have when you evacuate your nuclear family from your beach home in Wilmington NC for a hurricane - when you can pack your car with possessions and lock the doors and set the alarm for your possessions (but not your livelihood, because you don't live off the land of your home or have livestock most likely) is very different than someone evacuating on foot with what they can carry (most likely not much) with their children and extended family. {/soapbox}.