It’s been on my mind all week. There’s been a pie chart depicting the 2010 U.S. Discretionary Budget sitting on my desk. It’s printed on a postcard from NotMyPriorities.org. In bright red, the lion’s share is glaringly obvious: Pentagon. Turn it over and the card asks, ”How much do we need to spend to defend ourselves?” I’ve really been wondering. And according to this today’s headlines, I’m not the only one:
I’m grateful that instead of sitting in the House Chamber discussing the federal budget this weekend, I’ll be in my garden, moving mulch. As a mindful/prayerful citizen, I will do my best to use this time to reflect on the human drive to defend territory. It certainly can get a little out of hand. While I would never want any harm to come to underfunded U.S. troops, I do think scaling back our military might be a reasonable thing to do.
I have this feeling, like there’s an idea or a concept out there that relates to defense that would help lawmakers understand, not just how to reduce, but how to transform the Pentagon’s budget. Like, how to make it more sustainable. It’s clear that pruning is called far, but what shape will guide the shears?
Maybe someone reading this will know what I mean. I can offer this analogy, that this “concept” is to defense as the Volterra principle is to agriculture . . .
Garnett did admire a well-set orchard, he’d giver her that much. He liked . . . how the trunks lined up for your eye as you walked through: first in straight rows and then in diagonals, depending how you looked. A forest that obeyed the laws of man and geometry, that was the satisfaction. Of course, those trees had been planted by old Mr. Rawley back in ‘fifty-one or so, while she was off at her college. If she’d done the planting, why, they’d surely be all higgledy-piggledy like trees in a woodland glade. She’d have some theory about that being better for the apples.
He knew for a fact she was putting in a new section of trees in the field on the other side of her house, though he hadn’t been over there, so he couldn’t say if they were straight or not. She’d mentioned that they were scions cloned off one of the wildings that had sprung up in the fallow pasture on the hill behind her orchard. That field looked awful, the way she was letting it grow up, but she claimed it was her and the birds’ big experiement and that she’d discovered a particularly good accidental cross up there, which she’d patened under the name “Rachel Carson.” What did she think she was doing, patenting a breed and grafting out a whole new orchard? Those trees wouldn’t start to bear apples for another ten years. Who did she think would be around to pick them?
Garnett’s plan today had been to go right up and rap on her screen door, but on his way up the drive he’d spied her ladders and picking paraphernalia scattered around out here in the orchard on the west side. He crossed over just below her big vegetable garden which looked well tended, he had to admit. By some witchcraft she was getting broccoli and eggplant without spraying. Garnett didn’t even plant broccoli anymore – it was just fodder for the looper worms – and his eggplants got so full of flea beetles they looked like they’d taken a round of buckshot. He inspected her corn, which was tasseling nicely, two weeks ahead of his. Did she have corn ear-worms, at least? He tried not to hope so. He’d gone almost as far as the line fence that separated their fields when he heard her humming up in the foliage and saw her legs on the ladder, sticking out below the ceiling of green leaves overhead. This is how a duck must look to a turtle underwater, he thought wickedly. Then he took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to dally around here.
“Hello! I have some news,” he called. “One of your trees came down on me.”
Her dirty white tennis shoes descended two rungs on the ladder, and her face peered down at him through the branches. “Well, you don’t look that much the worse for it, Mr. Walker.”
He shook his head. “There’s no need to behave like a child.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you, though,” she said. “Now and then.” She climbed back up in to the boughs of her apple, a June Transparent – he could tell from the yellow fruits lying on the ground. She was picking June apples in the middle of July. It figured.
“I have a piece of business to discuss with you,” he said sternly. “I would appreciate talking with you down here on solid ground.”
She climbed down her ladder with a full apple basket over her arm, muttering about having to work for a living instead of collecting a retirement pension. She set her basket on the ground and put her hands on her hips. “All right. If you’re going to be sanctimonious about it, I have a piece of business to discuss with you!”
He felt his heart stutter a little. It aggravated him to no end that she could scare him this way. He stood still, breathed slowly, and told himself that what he beheld was nothing to be afraid of. This was no more daunting than a piece of ground that needed plowing – a small female terrain. “What is it, then?”
“That god-awful Sevin you’ve been spraying on your trees every blooming day of the week! You think you’ve got troubles, a tree came over on you? Well your poison has been coming down on me, and I don’t just mean my property, my apples, I mean me. I have to breathe it. If I get lung cancer, it will be on your conscience.”
Her hail of words stopped; their gazes briefly met and then fell to the grass around each other’s feet. [His wife] Ellen had died of lung cancer, metastasized to the brain. People always remarked on the fact that she never had smoked.
“I’m sorry, your thinking about Ellen,” Nannie said. “I’m not saying your poisons caused her to get sick.”
She he thought it, though, Garnett realized with a shock. Thought it and put it about so other people were thinking it, too. It dawned on him with a deeper dread that it might possibly be true. He’d never read the fine print on the Sevin dust package, but he knew it got into your lungs like something evil. Oh, Ellen. He raised his eyes to the sky and suddenly felt so dizzy he was afraid he night have to sit down on the grass. He put a hand to his temple and with the other reached for the trunk of a June Transparent.
“This isn’t going well,” Nannie observed. “I didn’t mean to start off hateful, right off the bat. I thought I’d give us a some room to work up to it.” She hesitated. “Could you maybe use a glass of water?”
“I’m fine,” he said, recovering his balance. She turned over a pair of bushel baskets and motioned for him to sit.
. . . She reached between her knees and scooted her bushel forward so they faced each other directly, within spitting distance. “What we need is to have a good, levelheaded talk about this pesticide business, farmer to farmer.”
. . . “It’s middle of July,” he said. “The caterpillars are on my seedlings like the plague. If I didn’t spray I’d lose all this year’s new crosses.”
“See, but you’re killing all my beneficials. You’re killing my pollinators. You’re killing the songbirds that eat the bugs. You’re just a regular death angel, Mr. Walker.”
“I have to take care of my chestnuts,” he replied firmly.
She gave him a hard look. “Mr. Walker, is it my imagination, or do you really think your chestnuts are more important than my apples? Just because you’re a man and I’m a woman? You seem to forget, my apple crop is my living. Your trees are a hobby.”
Now that was low. Garnett should have called on the phone. Talking to a brainless [answering] machine would beat this.”I never said a thing about your apples. I’m helping you out by spraying. The caterpillars would be over here next.”
“They are over here. I can keep them under control my own way, normally. But your spraying always causes a caterpillar boom.”
He shook his head. How many times do I have to listen to that nonsense?”
She leaned forward, her eyes growing wide. “Until you’ve heard it!”
“I’ve heard it. Too many times.”
“No, now, I haven’t explained it to you right. I always had a hunch, but I couldn’t put it into words. And, see, last month they had a piece on it in the Orchardman’s Journal. It’s a whole scientific thing, a principle. Do you want me to get you the magazine, or just explain it in my own words?”
“I don’t think I have any choice,” he said. “I’ll listen for the flaw in your reasoning. Then you’ll have to hush up about it for good.”
“Good,” she said, shifting her bottom on the basket. “All right, now . . . there are two main kinds of bugs, your plant eaters and your bug eaters.”
“That’s right,” he said patiently. “Aphids, Japanese beetles, and caterpillars all eat plants. To name a few. Ladybugs eat other small bugs.”
“Ladybugs do,” she agreed. “Also spiders, hornets, cicada killers, and a bunch of wasps, plus your sawflies and parasitic hymenoptera, and lots more. So out in your field you have predators and herbivores. You with me so far?”
He waved his hand in the air. “I taught vocational agriculture for half as long as you’ve been alive. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to surprise an old man like me.” Although, truth to tell, Garnett had never heard of parasitic hymenoptera.
“Well, all right. Your herbivores have certain characteristics.”
“They eat plants.”
“Yes. You’d call them pests. And they reproduce fast.”
“Don’t I know it!” Garnett declared.
“Predator bugs don’t reproduce so fast, as a rule. But see, that works out right in nature because one predator eats a world of pest bugs in its life. The plant eaters have to go faster just to hold their ground. They’re in balance with each other. So far, so good?”
Garnett nodded. He found himself listening more carefully than he’d expected.
“All right. When you spray a field with a broad-spectrum insecticide like Sevin, you kill the pest bugs and the predator bugs, bang. If the predators and prey are balanced out to start with, and they both get knocked back the same amount, then the pests that survive will increase after spraying, fast, because most of their enemies have just disappeared. And the predators will decrease because they’ve lost most of their food supply. So in the lag between sprayings, you end up boosting the numebrs of the bugs you don’t want and wiping out the ones you need. And every time you spray, it gets worse.”
“And then?” Garnett asked, concentrating on this.
She looked at him. “And that’s it, I’m done. The Volterra principle.”
Garnett felt hoodwinked. How could she do this every time? In another day and age they’d have burned her for a witch. “I didn’t find the fault in your thinking,” he admitted.
“Because it’s not there!” she cried. “Because I’m right!” The little woman was practically crowing.
“The agricultural chemical industry would be surprised to hear your theory.”
“Oh, fiddle, they know all about it. They just hope you don’t. The more money you spend on that stuff, the more you need. It’s like getting hooked on hooch.”
I don’t want to ruin what is really an extraordinary book, but Mr. Walker does, in time, warm to a few new ideas.
Hopefully our government will do the same.
I remain open to yours . . .
