Wildflowers

Polar bears, frogs, butterflies, whales. Rain forests and wetlands. Glaciers and reefs. In spite of decades of generous contributions to environmental organizations, and extraordinary efforts by those organizations to protect the natural world, Nature retreats everywhere. The health of the entire living system worsens. We feel exasperated. Often afraid.

Meanwhile the majority of people find it less stressful to disregard environmental worries, and to enjoy the fruits of prosperity while they last. Let Earth take care of herself!

How did we get ourselves into the bizarre predicament?

The first step in human ‘progress’ may have been a stone laid beside another to form a permanent, weed-free path. Ever since, permanence was a societal priority. We built stone houses, bridges, forts, plazas and pyramids. We baked clay into bricks for walls and tiles for roofs. We poured concrete into foundations and melted sand into glass. We invented thousands of ways to assemble inorganic materials in barricades that separated us from the animate world.

Then, starting 100 years ago, we began to aggressively attack the natural world outside our houses and beyond our towns. We sprayed billions of tons of herbicides and insecticides onto forests, fields, crops, lawns and wetlands, killing trillions and trillions of animals, most of which were beneficial, all of which were integral to the Living System. We flushed millions more tons of antibiotics and ‘life-saving’ drugs into waterways, drugs that protected us because they disrupted or damaged natural processes. By 2000, man-made chemicals, medicines, plastics, exhausts and wastes had entered every crevice of the planet.

We had overrun the Earth.

A recent turnaround, an awakening - everything from international climate summits to individual reductions in greenhouse gases – indicates that humans agree: we need Nature, and need her much more than she needs us. If only this new global consciousness could tell us what to do, how to bring back Life?

I hold in my palm a quarter pound of wildflower seeds. They’re about the size of the building blocks of our economy, that is, the size of computer chips, plastic pellets and grains of sand. But unlike the latter, seeds are alive. They are Life itself. Strewn on the ground, onto even modestly fertile soil, they’ll germinate, grow and produce mini-habitats, tiny pockets of diversity, fragrant patches of colorful hope. The inorganic materials of economic 'progress' can’t do that no matter what ‘green’ solutions they’re assembled into. Seeds alone proclaim the truism: only Life can bring back Life. Only the animate can rehabilitate the world.

My supplier assures me that the seeds in my hand are organic and free of insecticides; bees won’t be carrying nerve poisons back to their hives . . . at least not from my flowers. The project is community-wide. Neighbors must select organic, pesticide-free flowers for their beds. Lake Oswego Parks must buy completely organic, insecticide-free plants. And local suppliers of flowers and seeds must be on board as well.

Come spring, I’ll scatter these seeds in my front yard for the summertime enjoyment of pollinators, insects, birds, my neighbors and my wife. I have no idea where this unorthodox whim might lead. But what if a meadow of wildflowers at this time were like that first stone in that first path that eventually inspired others to build cathedrals? Now there’s a dream!

I know only this, that wildflowers cost almost nothing, that they affirm Life, and that they do no harm. So why not?