Mutualism

My happy bean plant. 

Even in organic gardening and permaculture circles, typically the only thing you will hear about is the benefits of these methods for human beings. For US. Better food for US human beings and less damage to the ecosphere that WE all need to be living in. And those things are great, don't get me wrong. However, what you don't hear is what plants get out of the deal. Even in these circles, there is the tacit assumption that plants are insensible carbon machines. That we shouldn't take THEIR interests into account, though of course their interests are generally served better by such natural approaches rather than conventional agriculture. One would think though that people who spend so much time thinking about plants, would hold them in higher regard. 

Plants are not mere photosynthesis machines. They are beings, and they are the beings that every animal on this planet depends on for their continued existence.

Of course, we historically have a hard time dealing with food organisms as BEINGS under any circumstances, even in the case of animals very similar to us such as pigs. We encourage pigs for instance to regard us with trust, and then we kill them. One of the most traumatic things I ever saw was an episode of a reality TV series on public television where several families agree to live like pioneer families in the 1800's. The child of one of the families gets attached to the pig, and of course the pig has to be slaughtered. Many tears. So the dad of the family calls the pig over, and the pig comes over wagging its tail and happy, completely trusting, and BANG. Shot, writhing in its death throes, just like that.

To me, any scenario like that would be morally wrong. That dad did a morally wrong thing in my opinion and gave an abysmal example to his son, unless a negative example was what was intended.

Betrayal, of any life form that has been given reason to place trust in you, is one of the highest evils in my worldview. If you gave them reason to trust you, you are BOUND by that trust. You are OBLIGATED to take their interests into account in a serious manner. Even if they are non-human.

Even cold blooded murder is less evil than betrayal, because the one you kill has no reason to suspect anything but evil from you. You could make an argument that hunting people (assuming that they have no reason to trust you) is morally acceptable as long as you eat them. ;) Certainly you would be sparing the ecosystem all the destruction that this one human life would bring, though I would not recommend human beings as a healthy food source. ;)

Bear in mind, I do not believe in rights. I don't believe in animal rights or plant rights because I don't believe in human rights. If you are in a situation where you absolutely have to kill and eat an innocent person to live, I would say you are justified to do it, because biological necessity trumps just about everything. What I do believe in, is respect for all beings. That you kill any organism only because of need, not desire. I also believe that you never, ever betray any life form. If you gave them reasonable cause to regard you as a friend rather than an enemy or neutral, you don't use that trust to betray them. I believe that in some cases this should even overrule biological necessity. 

These two principles, respect and non-betrayal, inform my views on ethical relationships with plants and animals that are used for food. In this view, it is far more acceptable to hunt for food than to raise animals for food, because the animals you hunt have no reason to view you as anything but a predator. Also, until their deaths wild animals live free and not in cages. In the same way, foraging wild plants is relatively ethically uncomplicated (as long as you do it in a sustainable manner). You need to eat.

Lets get back to plants, which even ethical vegetarians (those that are vegetarians for ethical/animal cruelty reasons) tend to disregard as beings of ethical importance. Every animal on this planet is ultimately a parasite on plants, since only plants can use sunlight to create food energy. Every animal on this planet would cease to be without them. I think that is something worthy of our respect. In the case of some animals, their benefit to the plants is at least equal to if not greater than their cost to the plants, such as in the case of honeybees and earthworms. In the case of earthworms, it is practically all a benefit to them, since they take already decayed plant matter and turn it into more accessible forms of plant food. Predators of all sorts, from predatory wasps to tigers, are also beneficial to them since they kill herbivorous life forms and the energy they take has already been stolen away from plants anyway. Some animals benefit some plants and hurt others, cows and sheep for instance promote grasses and discourage other plants, since grasses are better suited to surviving grazing than other plants.

Creatures like bees and earthworms who provide equal or greater value to plants than they take away, are the only animals on Earth that don't deserve to be called parasites. We humans fully deserve to be called parasites, a virus not only on plant life but the entire planet.

Ironically, we are also the one animal that has the capacity, seldom used, to build up diverse and robust ecosystems that give the maximum benefit to all the plants and animals that live in them. Typically wild unmanaged ecosystems have always been taken as the most complete, sustainable and diverse ecological systems possible, with the greatest possible biomass for that particular place. I genuinely don't believe that this is always the case. I think that in many cases, a human-managed ecosystem can be more diverse, more tolerant to adverse conditions and with greater overall biomass than wild ecosystems, but to do this requires knowledge and skills and attention spans that most people don't have. It's not an undertaking for stupid people, it's an undertaking for smart perceptive people who pay attention to what an ecosystem is doing and how it responds to what you do. A sensitive, perceptive human intelligence is perfectly equipped to undertake this goal.

We have the ability to learn and apply knowledge to our actions, and we have generally used that power to become the most mercenary, piratical and parasitic creature that ever existed. As Agent Smith said in the first Matrix movie, we are like a virus. Humans control, humans destroy, humans enslave. But we could, if we wished to, use our intelligence to build up ecosystems for the benefit of all who live in them. Including but not limited to us. To increase the overall energy flowing through the system and all the beings in it, and to encourage the increase of diversity which builds resistance to adverse conditions. To do so would be an honest occupation for human beings, really the only honest occupation open to us. To give as much or more value to the overall biological system as we get. Not only for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all the life forms which depend on the local ecosystem under our influence.

Part of this, to me, is to embrace true mutualism with plants. The respect of plants as beings, which our culture has a hard time with but many tribal cultures understand. To be a true steward of an ecosystem means stepping out of a human-centric worldview into a multipolar worldview in which all the organisms that live in a place have their interests which should be respected to varying degrees. Even garden pests should be allocated a certain amount of respect in their proper place. The most respect should be given to those which we depend on the most, the plants that provide us with food and which we have entered into a relationship with. This to me is not an interaction between a person and a photosynthesis machine, or between a master and a slave, it is an interaction that should be mutually beneficial between one being and another. For this reason, although I like to eat them, I won't grow radishes or beets because the utilization of those plants for food entails the death of the plants before they are able to reproduce. Foods like tomatoes, squash, eggplants, berries and so on can be eaten without any serious harm to the plant, even lettuces and other greens can be picked without pulling up the entire plant. Some plants, like peanuts or potatoes, are harvested when the plant is at the end of its life and has started to die. I don't think prolonging their lives in such a case is doing them any special favors.

For plants whose seeds we eat, like corn or wheat or legumes, many of these plants produce hundreds or even thousands of seeds and the survival of all of those seeds is not a physical possibility. Therefore as long as the perpetuation of that plant is assured by saving some seeds and planting and tending them to further their survival, the rest can be eaten. You are not hurting the interests of the parent plant by doing so, in fact you are promoting their interests in reproduction. And that is another aspect: plants like people have a biological imperative to reproduce, so to me seed-saving is part of the mutually beneficial relationship between myself and food plants. If a plant produced well for me and was healthy, I help their genetics to continue to the next generation. This also tends to produce plants that are more adapted to the local environment, which furthers the plant's survival and our food supply. They win, I win. They get offspring that are well cared for, I get food. Everybody gets a reasonably fair shake out of the deal. That's the way it should be. That is the only way that humans can rightly shake the title they have thus far eminently deserved, that of a useless parasite on this ecosystem Earth. 

To do so would be an honest occupation and an honest way of life, really the only honest way of life open to us as humans. To stop being Homo Raptor, plundering man, pillaging man, and become Homo Curator. Man the steward. Man the caretaker. 

Plants are beings and should be respected. When we grow plants to produce food,
the interests of the plant should always be taken into fair account along with
our own interests.

Three Sisters

My hopi blue corn and haricot tarbais beans making happy music together

There is so much plant knowledge and so many plant varieties that were lost in our headlong dash towards uniformity, marketability and "scientific agriculture" that we no longer know how much was lost. Many of the varieties were lost in the last hundred years, about 93 percent of all vegetable varieties (not species but variations within that species) that existed at the turn of the century are gone. Most of them not because they weren't good, but because they didn't fit in with the new industrialized food schema, which required fruits and vegetables that shipped well, ripened all at the same time, were adaptable to the new chemical and mechanical agriculture and were uniform in shape and size. Flavors we now will never know. And we never paid a lick of attention to the fact that it was happening.

The knowledge eroded even more readily. Native American farmers used companion planting and fertilization techniques that were completely ignored when European farmers came to this land and made their straight rows of monocultural grains and vegetables. The knowledge that the European farmers once had about the importance of such things as growing hedgerows to promote pollinators was not regarded as terribly important by the intellectual elites who would later invent chemical agriculture in complete obliviousness to the reality of soil as a living thing itself. They created a form of agriculture made in the image of the era of Big Oil and Big Chem, but when the oil is gone we will find that we can't eat gasoline any more and will need the knowledge and diversity which we so casually cast aside.

The good news is that new varieties can arise from a new agricultural culture that embraces natural processes, local adaptation, local consumption and genetic diversity. All we really have to do is invent a new farm reality and those new varieties and that diversity will follow on its own, in time. The knowledge will arise too, only awaiting those who seek it and seek to put it into practice. Plants are very good teachers, they will quickly tell you that you are messing up if you actually take care to watch and listen. 

I have a garden plot that I wanted to plant with the traditional Three Sisters companion planting of corn, beans and squash. Except I didn't really see the point to the squash much. The corn and beans I understood, the beans climb up the corn and beans don't take nitrogen out of the soil that the corn needs (and over the long haul adds nitrogen to the soil too). I already have a container with acorn squash in it and another with lemon squash which I companion-planted (experimentally) with sunflowers. In the Three Sisters plan the squash is supposed to act sort of like a living mulch and the corn and beans are supposed to shade the squash. Well I figured, I already have mulch on my corn and beans, and I have enough squash planted already. 

Well it turned out that I should have planted the beans about a month after the corn because these beans grow faster than the corn. I wound up having to put up poles and strings for the beans to climb up, to distract them from clinging to the corn. Next time I might hold off a month before planting the beans. They were both flourishing however, and if I am allowed to speak unscientifically I think they like being together. They certainly seem very happy. 

And then I got to thinking about the varmits. ;) I have already had problems with squirrels digging up the melon patch looking for their nuts, and we have raccoons in this area. And I hear tell that raccoons love to eat corn. So I started hacking down some prickly vines (pricking myself many times in the process) to act as a sort of organic barbed wire to protect my corn. Raccoon feet are very sensitive. So sensitive in fact that they don't even like walking on the more subtle prickles of... squash vines. ;)

And so I came full circle to what undoubtedly the Native Americans figured out long ago. Even though the prickles of squash aren't that intimidating to humans, they suffice as a pest deterrent especially to the sensitive raccoons. And so I hurried out to the yard to get some squash in on the sides of my corn and bean patch, a bit later than I would normally do for planting squash, and I didn't plant the more suitable lemon squash (big leaves and vines, more sprawling) but the slightly less suitable but more useful for me acorn squash. I really like winter squashes better. Still, I hope that by the time the corn becomes raccoon-enticing, the leaves and stems and vines of the acorn squash will act as a deterrent to them setting their sensitive little tootsies on my corn bed. And so now through practice and thinking ahead to future problems, I understand why all three were always planted together. ;)

And, completely "unscientifically" of course, I believe that they feel the familiarity of long centuries of being planted together. I think they know, that their fates were intertwined a couple thousand years before Columbus ever set foot on these shores. I am glad I could bring them back together again as it should be.