We Can Solve It

We Can Solve It

What I should be doing is writing to my friend Kayiwa Fred in Uganda. Kayiwa saw that I had mentioned that I was having a hard time locating his blog One Reaching Another and messaged me with the link in Google Chat. At the time the blog I was looking for was about a youth football league he's instrumental in called Kampala Junior Team. Actually both blogs are in my blog reader. I also had subscribed to an earlier experiment and never removed it from the list. Somehow when went to that outdated URL from my blogreader it blinded me to the presence of his current blogs. A friend of mine calls the tendency for men not to see what is right in front of their eyes, Male Pattern Blindness.

I should be writing him because he asked some specific geek-like questions. I'm no geek, and have told him as much. But his questions are such that I will learn a bit as I try to form some answers. Earlier in the evening I did a bit of research, and it's going to take a bit of work. Maybe I'll write him tomorrow. Ha, but at least I linked to his blogs which is something I've been meaning to do for a while. Hey, maybe I'll even update my blogroll one of these days.

I was looking for a specific post the other day at The African Uptimist and was shocked and embarrassed to see this blog on his blogroll. It's much easier for me to operate under the assumption that nobody reads this blog. The fact is that hardly anyone does, and that hardly makes a big difference. African blogs are of great interest to me and I value the bloggers who take the time to write them. It's about time that I contribute too. The wonderful thing about blogging is it's about connecting and community building.

My friend Pingting has quite gently told me I would do well to edit: less is more. Mercy, I'm afraid I've never gotten beyond the free writing style. As a result, only after a mountain of words do I get around to explaining the link at the top of the post. The link is to a video of highlights of a speech that Al Gore made in Washington on Thursday about energy. I like the determined optimism of We Can Solve It referring to the energy crisis and global warming, but it's hard for me to muster feeling really optimistic. Geez, when I went to YouTube less than 800 people had watched the video. Everybody knows that global climate change is a really big deal, but most of us seem confused that there's much we can do about it. An out of town friend called me up this evening. He likes to talk politics and the first thing out of his mouth was about Gore's speech. Then he asked about T. Boone Pickens. I've developed an aversion to Texas oilmen lately. My stomach also churns thinking of billionaires who think that water is the new oil. So I was happy the conversation turned from politics to the big news that my friends have rescued an unwanted pet.

My avoidance of the issue of carbon-based energy really is pathological. The word is out: "We're addicted to oil." So avoidance fits the pattern all addicts play in denial. When it comes to addictions, I suppose a good dose of resolve and some optimism are necessary. The first step is to admit there's a problem and we'd probably never get on the road to the first step without them. Ah, but right the first step in AA is not only admitting that our lives are in a mess, it's also admitting powerlessness over alcohol. Using AA as a metaphor, the road to recovery from addiction involves re-contextualizing the system of us and oil. And there's some higher power involved there too. Hum, not sure where this leads, except to say I strongly suspect that solving the addiction to oil will require much more than optimism and resolve.

Elizabeth Kolbert seems mighty clear-eyed from this oil junkie's perspective. At least she's well on the way to understanding the how dire the consequences of carbon-based energy really is. Her writing at The New Yorker on the subject is the best I've read in the press. It can be depressing reading nonetheless, but her recent piece The Island in the Wind was encouraging. Gore proposes that within a decade all electricity in the USA should be produced from energy sources other than carbon-based ones. That seems wildly optimistic, and yet Kolbert's report about the Danish island of Samso shows that's more possible than I imagine.

One of the bits in her piece was about the 2,000-Watt Society. It's a vision that stated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ten years ago, but I'd never heard of it before. Kolbert writes:

One way to think about the 2,000-Watt Society is in terms of light bulbs. Let’s say you turn on twenty lamps, each with a hundred-watt bulb. Together, the lamps will draw two thousand watts of power. Left on for a day, they will consume forty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy; left on for a year, they will consume seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours. A person living a two-thousand-watt life would consume in all his activities—working, eating, travelling—the same amount of energy as those twenty bulbs, or seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours annually.

People in the "developed" world have got to get on this diet in short order, and for carbon-based energy addicts like me that means big changes.

I opened this post citing my laziness about not writing to a friend in Uganda. I am lazy. The more important part to me is my friends. Over the years via the Internet I've developed friendships with a few people in Uganda. These friendships mean a lot to me. The negative effects of global warming will impact everyone. But the cruel injustice is that already poor people will be very disproportionately affected. Having friends means I cannot slough that off. Most of my friends in Uganda consume much less than the 2000 Watts. As we in the West move to reduce our energy consumption for a sustainable future, the many in the rest of the world need more energy. We all need to invent ways of living within limits, and these inventions maybe implemented locally but must have a global focus.

I've got some things to say about injustice and responsibility, but I'll spare you until another day.

Layers

Bloggers make a lot more sense when they blog a lot. I don't make sense, but suspect it would be worthwhile for me to start blogging more often. I do post fairly frequently within a social network called Ned. For many reasons it's hard to take stuff from one context and place it in another. Blogs seem to have a fairly inclusive context and social networks more exclusive. So it's a matter of finding the right pattern of correspondence. I suppose I won't find what's the right sort of stuff to put here unless I start putting stuff here again.

The many blog posts I read, and the conversations generated by them contribute much to my day. Among the bloggers I love reading is Phil Jones and his several blogs. Ethan Zuckerman has generated a great conversation about homophily; i.e. birds of a feather flock together, on the Internet. It's quite a stretch to say that Phil thinks like I do. Phil Jones is a computer scientist, I am so not. Then again, a recent post of his Why Geeks are doomed in a Suit world raises some points in one context that I'd been thinking recently about in another context.

Phil begins his post pointing to a critique by Joel Spolsky of Java-oriented Computer science education. Spolsky thinks that some culling of students from CS studies is necessary, not only for the future of Computer Science, but also for the happiness of would be computer scientists. Some people will never be happy in the field. I knew that for myself never even having to venture into a demanding CS class.

If you know about computer programming, I urge you to read Phil Jones. I don't know anything about it, but this caught my attention:

The Geek's job is to make the abstraction levels fit together. Of course the only way to achieve this is with an understanding of both the higher and the lower levels : simultaneously. And the easy shifting from one to another.

Via 3Quarks Daily a fantastic blog where I get a steady fix for my xenophilia jones, there was a link to an artcle by Paul Ehrlich in Seed. Cultural Evolution has the snippet at 3Quarks along with the smart comments there, and Cultural Evolution: Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do? is the link to the whole article.

I have enormous respect for Paul Ehrlich as a scientist and public intellectual. But this article seems so wrong and sloppy in so many ways. That alone probably wouldn't have bothered me much except for Ehrlich thinking that the article describes good science towards answering his question: Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do? I emphatically don't think what he describes is good science. That puts me in a peculiar position, on one hand is Ehrlich, an esteemed scientist and on the other is me, some blogger in a basement. Who will you believe?

Oh boy, where to start. Well, Phil's observation about making abstraction levels fit together very succinctly gets to the nub of my disagreement with Ehrlich's study. Ehrlich is interested in the question of whether human culture evolves via natural selection. Ehrlich begins:

If we wish to understand and predict culture change generally, viewing culture as an evolving trait in analogy with genetic evolution is a very useful place to start.

This seems very reasonable to me. But as Ehrlich proceeds, it seems obvious that he's not very careful about the in analogy part. In analogy seems a very particular level of abstraction. It's one thing to say, "Her hair is as soft as a mink's coat." and quite another to begin collecting her hair to make a mink coat.

Ehrlich's article proceeds to tell the story of some of the ways that cultural evolution has gone off the rails into absurdity by following too closely on Darwin's heals. I suppose that's necessary to assure us that he had no intention of falling into the same pits. He asserts:

There are clear patterns in cultural evolution, which are just as prevalent as those in genetic evolution.

Then he proposes that what's necessary is a simple hypothesis which can be tested. Rather implicit in what comes next is that Ehrlich has forgotten entirely the in analogy part; that is, his hypothesis presumes that natural selection works as the engine driving cultural evolution. My head is beginning to spin because I'm not sure what culture means to Ehrlich, for example on what scale, i.e. French culture as distinct from US culture. I'm also not sure at all what exactly culture is analogous to in genetic evolution. Is it analogous to the phenotype of an organism, to a species, to an ecological system, or what? Apparently I'm dense, because there is no attempt on Ehrlich's part to make this part of the analogy clear. Is it obvious? If it is, then surely the analogy must be that culture is a kind of species. Without thinking too much about it, that analogy will break down for many purposes. In any case at this point in the article a warning is flashing in my head: Abstraction level confusion!

Here is the hypothesis that Ehrlich came up with along with Simon Levin:

We believed that the evolution of technological norms would generally be more rapid than that of ethical norms.

It concerns me that "technological norms" along with "ethical norms" seem hard to rigorously state. What exactly are they? Can you look up a list of those somewhere? But the main problem is there is no attempt to connect what "technological norms" and "ethical norms" might be in cultural evolution in analogy to genetic evolution. What are they like? Perhaps organs of an individual of a particular species?

Ehrlich then describes his false starts in looking for data that might be used to test their hypothesis. He writes:

Unfortunately, ethnographies are written more like novels than scientific studies, and it is impossible to be certain of all the crops grown and the counts of deities.

My first thought was that was just a gratuitous zinger directed towards anthropologists--They're not real scientist! Unfortunate that Ehrlich seems not to wonder why he encounters stories, and finds it justified merely to judge them unfortunate. Where there are stories it's a sure signal of relevance. The judge inquires: "Quilty or Not Quilty?" It's no good to reply: "Your honor, I have long hair."

Ehrlich was determined to ignore all complications, and locates some data about the canoes of Oceania. With that data Ehrlich has a colleague analysis it into functional traits and symbolic traits. I'm wondering what are canoes to culture in analogy to genetic evolution? What do symbolic decoration on canoes tell us about "ethical norms" and how would we know? I have several more questions, but it appears that Ehrlich is content just to have these two invented categories of canoe traits to test his hypothesis.

The conclusion after studying changes in canoes over time is the decorations change much more frequently than the functional traits; ergo

The original Ehrlich-Levin hypothesis was rejected.

Even at this point I would have been happy with the piece if Ehrlich had stopped to wonder even a little how two famous ecologists could have muddled things so thoroughly. But no, Ehrlich concludes:

We directly tested a theory of cultural evolution. Our work has helped to uncover a piece of the larger, more complex process of culture change and has shown that it is reasonable to think of that change as evolution.

How has this research shown that it is "reasonable to think of that change as evolution?"

At every stage of this inquiry it seems to me that Ehrlich has paid little attention to levels of abstraction. And then having produced a muddled mess shouts "Proof!" It seems nuts to me, really nuts.

It's too bad that Phil's bosses don't appreciate where he's coming from. He does a good service in pointing to a reason why. I'm lucky I'm not a geek;-) It is quite upsetting to read an article by an eminent scientist discussing inquires into the nature of things with another very eminent scientist, enlisting colleagues from a prestigious University in a terribly flawed study and that along the line nobody said this is BS.

I flunked out my first go round in college. Logic was one of those culling courses Spolsky refers to, and I got culled, twice. So I'm not so sure about my abilities in handling abstractions. What I am sure is I expected better from Paul Ehrlich!

Human Rights

The Right to Be

May 15th was a day when bloggers around the world wrote about Human Rights. I was going to, but didn't. I got stuck. Here you can find a list of some of the posts. The 27th Comrade who did an excellent round-up of posts in the Ugandan blogosphere.

The real reason for not posting was I got distracted. But thinking about a post was harder than I thought. It's easy when I'm stuck about writing simply for me to ignore the blog. Daisy of Daisy's Dead Air tagged me with a meme and maybe it's just the right prodding to get unstuck and back writing on the blog. While I don't think too highly of any of my posts, I'm extraordinarily fond of the many blogs I read. It seems only fair to participate.

Seven Songs Meme

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring-summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Oh Happy Day--From Sister Act 2
Shostakovich - Symphony No. 11 `The Year 1905' Mvt.4(2/2)--NHK Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yukio Kitahara.
Lapowny--Geoffrey Oryema
Please Send Me Someone to Love--Jeff Buckley
Harvest For The World--The Isley Brothers
Redemption Song--Bob Marley
All Along the Watchtower--Sungha Jung

I'm all for crediting parents when their children grow up well, but am slow to blame parents when children go awry. There are many influences. I can hardly blame my parents for my many shortcomings. They tried very hard and both gave me so many gifts. Among the gifts I treasure from my mother is her lesson that everyone has a right to be.

Daisy blogs in Greenville, South Carolina. We moved there in the early 1960's and when my younger brother star started primer, my mother began teaching. It was the era of school desegregation, so in a way the dialog about race which Barak Obama speaks about in his speech A More Perfect Union (YouTube video) engaged me early on.

A memory from my mother came to me when thinking about human rights. She taught first grade at John Street School which probably isn't there anymore because it was an old school then. Her first year the school district went to a "freedom of choice" plan. What that meant for the John Street School is it went from being all white to mostly all black in a single year. The memory must be from the second year my mother taught there, and I must have been in sixth grade. Towards the end of the year she organized an excursion for her kids to the city park and I was brought along. Among the treats was a box of cupcakes with bright blue-green icing roughly applied provided by one of the children's mother. I must have looked at them with a scornful look because my mother said to me:

If you so much as say one unkind word about those cupcakes, I'll spank you in front of everybody.

I don't actually remember ever being spanked by my mother. She didn't believe in spanking in school, but certainly didn't believe she should take spanking out of her arsenal at home. Punishments at home were not very ritualized, and I'm grateful about that. In any case I knew my mother well enough to know she didn't make idle threats. And when I remember this, a face of a little girl with corn rows in her hair and missing her two front teeth is grinning widely at me. The feeling I get along with a picture of her in my head is her grin reflected schadenfreude; the teacher's boy got yelled at. It's probably just projection, I doubt my mother said that to me so she could hear. The message was clear: My mother loved every single one of these kids, just as she loved me. Beware hurting anyone my mother loved! And that's why the girl was grinning!

A song popular a year or two latter that always moves me, and I've listened two several times recently is "Oh Happy Day" by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Here's great version from the movie Sister Act 2 that captures something of the awkward joy of cultures interacting. The students and parents of the children she taught brought her great joy. As a child myself the great sin as she showed me was not to take joy, especially for stupid reasons of racism.

Racism is partly what got me stuck trying to write about human rights. Racism can be a personal characteristic, but there are also so many racist structures built into everyday existence. In R. D. Laing's book The politics of Experience, he writes:

It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence.

Keguro writes brilliantly and he has helped me to understand better this "wolf in sheep's clothing" quality of American politics--politics including how Americans ordinarily act. Mulling that sent my head spinning. I don't know how to deal with the cruelty my country perpetuates, but surely I can't expect my righteous indignation about other countries will wear well.

Earlier this month I went to the symphony with my father for a performance of Shostakovich - Symphony No. 11 `The Year 1905'. It was a moving performance. That clip is from the 4th movement. The reviewer criticized the balance and the brass as too loud. So you can see that the whole piece is not as quiet as the selection posted. In the quiet parts I thought of Gorecki Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Music is one way to be captured by sorrow and to heal.

I do feel sorrowful often these days, so some of the songs I've been listening to lately reflect that. I loved Geffrey Oryema's Lapowny when I first heard it. This is a great live version. It's worth checking out some of the other videos of Oryema too. From the album notes:

This song is about a school teacher whose body was found lying in a school compound. He was struck by lightening and died on the spot, just as he was getting ready to head home. He had a pile of exercise books which he was supposed to correct at home. As a tribute to their beloved teacher, the pupils composed a song that they entitled Lapwony. It rained heavily on the afternoon Lapwony died. Someone found his farewell letter, the ink all but washed away.

When I'm feeling down the great Percy Mayfield's song Please Send Me Someone to Love comes to mind:

I lay awake night and ponder world troubles.
My answer is always the same.
That unless men put an end to all of this,
Hate will put the world in a flame, (oh) what a shame.

And also this song: The Isley Brothers - Harvest For The World. The keys are, I suppose, love and gratitude. I so often am neglectful.

I am grateful that I got to see Bob Marley perform live here in Pittsburgh. Redemption Song is rather permanently in my head, and I love to hear it in all sorts of cover versions. When I think of human rights, of course I want rights of all to be respected. But rather quickly the problem those that have power over come to the fore. So the question of rights leads to how to do right. Marley's answer always moves and inspires me: "All I ever had are these songs of freedom. Won't you help me sing?"

I can't find a link, I'm almost sure that there is one at Tim Boucher's site, but I can't find it. In any case somewhere I read that when G. I. Gurdjieff was asked what we can do in the face of evil, he replied:

Create something good.

I like that very much.

One of the things I like most about YouTube is seeing people's creations. There is a young South Korean guitar prodigy named Sungha Jung. I love to watch and listen to him play. It's hard to pick a favorite, but his rendition of All Along the Watchtower is surely a favorite.

That's seven songs that have been meaningful to me lately. I won't tag anyone, I hardly know any bloggers well enough. I also know that YouTube is useless where bandwidth is low. But I would love it if others, especially in Africa, take up the meme and let me know you have.

Bloggers for Human Rights

Photo: Indybay 2007 Anti War Action.

BloggersUnite has set May 15th as a day for bloggers around the world to blog on Human Rights. Human Rights are essential so I could use the nudge to blog about, and to learn more about ways to promulgate Human Rights.

I never know what I'm going to write, but today I've been musing about politics as I've been turning the damp ground. Hardly an expert on American politics, I follow it a bit obsessively. Obama in the race and Clinton nipping at his heals has raised some interesting dynamics among people I know who vote fairly reliably for Democratic Party candidates. And one of those dynamics are about the awful subject of race.

In the printed version of this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the front page was a story: Obama putting One-Drop Rule to test; online the heading is: Obama candidacy raises old questions about what is black which strikes me as a somewhat less obnoxious headline. The article made me squirm. It's written by L.A. Johnson and I've no idea whether L.A. is black or white, a woman or a man. I do know that Johnson has tackled the tangled subject of race in America for the newspaper before. In the fall, readers were able to spout off about being race 'ambassadors' which I thought was pretty cool because basically everybody said "What's with that?" or something to that effect. (Searching the archives for a link, I discovered that when L. A. Johnson gets and AP byline it's Linda A. Johnson, so I guess she's a woman.) I don't really fault Johnson that the article made me slightly sick, the problem is Americans in general are strangely warped about race and ethnicity and the article simply reflects that.

I'm just some blogger in a basement, and I'm identified as white. I self-identify as white simply because the option seems untenable. While I deeply resent the racism of the society in which I live, my anti-racist credentials are slight. Obama running has helpfully made the endemic racism of the USA so visible, but as a people we're still grappling for ways to discuss race.

Ethan Zuckerman is taking the month of May off the computer to recover from eye surgery. I wish him a good recovery and will miss his posts. One of Zuckerman's blog categories is xenophilia. Your Dictionary defines xenophilia as:

attraction to or admiration of strangers or foreigners or of anything foreign or strange

zuckerman is a proponent of xenophilia and has recently been engaging in blog conversations about homophily (use his xenophila category link. Homophily doesn't refer to gay people and issues, but rather the old adage:

Birds of a feather flock together.

In his post Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia he wrote:

I’ve been talking and writing about homophily as one of the concepts that helps explain the challenges and issues that surround Global Voices and my larger media attention work. It’s my contention that living in the 21st century requires understanding what people think, feel and want in different parts of the world, given that both the challenges and opportunities of next several decades are global, not local ones.

One of the advantages of reading a few Ugandan bloggers is getting to know a bit about how others view the USA. And I am especially grateful to The 27th Comrade for taking the time to specifically point out to me that the view of the USA from there isn't often rosy.

All of this long wind-up is to remark about an issue of American politics. The President of the United States under the Constitution must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." It is abundantly clear that president Bush has not done his duty in this regard. The list of law breaking that we know about is astoundingly large. The administration also has gone to great lengths to bury the evidence and to stretch reasonable interpretations beyond all recognition. Their is a Constitutional remedy for such a president; i.e., impeachment, but the Speaker of the House--where a bill of Impeachment originates--has taken it off the table. So most observers assume that he will follow his father's precident and pardon members of his administration for their crimes before he leaves office.

I agree that he probably will. But it occurred to me today that such pardons may not be the panacea imagined. The reason I believe so is because among the many crimes this administration has committed are War Crimes which are violations of International Law. It's true that the United States has refused to participate in the International Criminal Court. It also seems the case that Americans turning over those accused of committing crimes against humanity seems far-fetched now. However so damaged is the good opinion of the world about the USA, and that increasingly in the future a good opinion will be keenly in the national interest, that demands for the USA to be held to account may well be difficult to resist.

If the President uses his powers to pardon crimes against the United States, those pardons will most likely make prosecution of those implicated in crimes against International Law, impossible, or nearly so within our legal structures. Upon refusing to prosecute, the International Community, might demand extradition to the International Criminal Court. It's easy to predict that even a Democratic Party controlled government would refuse. However so extreme are the violations, for example torture of detainees being coordinated in the White House with the approval of the President, by highest ranking American officials, such refusal would severely undermine the myth of American goodness.

For so many in the world today, the myth of American goodness was debunked long ago. But it is a powerful myth for Americans and much depends on it. I believe that in the future Americans will want to sustain the myth.

So my argument to Bush not to grant pardons at the end of his term boils down to the notion that it's so likely that Americans will treat American officials leniently, perhaps even something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission where amnesty is nearly assured. This hardly would reverse world-wide condemnation, but would have some mollifying effect. I probably would go a long way to shoring up American perceptions of ourselves as good.

Such thinking probably "outs" me as a hypocrite. I'm not very comfortable with that, but on the other hand very much believe that it's good to be good. Nothing in politics is ever very pure. I suppose I'm simply grasping at straws to imagine some way that my country can move from our embrace of the dark side towards the light. There is precedent in our history. Martin Luther King observed:

“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Many outside the USA are demanding that we as a nation be held to account, if for no other reason than there can be no reconciliation until we as a people acknowledge our transgressions. Not all Americans are so blind. Humanity shares an obligation to bend towards justice. My hope is that Americans more generally will become concerned about human rights for all and work to make those rights real. Together we can create something good.

May Day

That's not a recent picture, I'm just not very good at taking pictures. I do like to look at pictures of the garden over time because they are a useful reminder of the changes taking place. My father did use the rototiller in his garden on Monday, so one of the garden plots looks just like that. Every fall he plants a crop of rye and then tills it into the soil in the spring. I'm not such a fan of rototilling as he is, so that lower garden bed hasn't been tilled in years.

One of the reasons I call myself an incompetent gardener is that in general I seem to make decisions that seem a wasteful or foolish to others. I'm quite accustomed to people not taking me seriously, which is quite a gift in the sense that it relieves pressure to take myself very seriously. So for example my father can't figure out why I don't like my garden beds runover with a tractor pulling a rototiller. The simple explanation is that it seems so much work. With a hoe and a rake I can plant what little I want and plan on some scheme for tending it. The tending part is what gets to me and long rows mean a lot of tending. I seem to get more done with smaller plots, planted one at a time. The beautifully planted farmers' fields of corn, wheat, hay, and oats seem all the more an accomplishment to one who's put a spade in the ground. The efficiency is remarkable. But when it comes to small gardens, hand tools seem the right tools to me.

The farmer who plants the fields plants in rotation. We've lived here for almost thirty years and over the years the front edge of the property bounding on the fields has been a question. My mother always imagined a fence. My father never wanted a fence, probably in no small part because of the expense. I've wanted to plant along the edge. Part of my reasoning for the planting is an idea that it's a good plan to design from the boundaries inward, or at least for many years doing just the opposite that's the conclusion I've come to.

Then again I'm pretty unrealistic about so many things in the garden. Lots of the soil around here when dry has the consistency of cement, and in the rockier places more like concrete. But the idea for that front boundary planting was nixed years ago.

The farmer is getting up in years. Last year while plowing a lever of the plow was down and he didn't notice making a furrow along the front edge of our property. I thought he did it on purpose to mark the boundary, but he insisted it was just a mistake. This year he had a young guy plow and when he plowed a field close to the house he seems to have used last year's furrow as a mark. The problem is that the tractor turning on our little stretch of ground busted up the sod with the tires, and harrow and left a very uneven line of disturbed soil along the edge. This made a big problem to mow with my lawnmower.

This is a dilemma for me: For more than thirty years the farmer has turned his tractor on a little stretch of our property. In the past there has been minor damage and inconvenience, but nothing really to speak of. This year's problem really stems from plowing just a few feet closer than they have in the past, but the damage was considerable from my perspective having to deal with it with garden tools, as opposed to farm-scale equipment. I told my father I was going to plant along our line in response. The prospect rather horrified him, but I don't think he really imagined I would; because it requires so much work.

I've got the sod removed from a section about 150 feet long by about 6 feet wide. There's an old white lilac in the front that had suckered under a tall canopy of fir trees. I've dug some up some of the suckers and planted them closely along the front edge of the bed. Last night he came out and his jaw dropped.

I haven't told him my plan to plant sunflowers all along the edge yet. Probably my favorite seed company is J. L. Hudson. This year they're offering a Russian variety, Peredovik, grown for making vegetable oil. They may not be the most fashionable flower, although I'm sure they'll look good, but will provide a useful seed for saving. The birds, of course will welcome them too.

I've still got about half the line to prepare, and it's slow going. The soil is compacted, and the best approach seems not to till all the grass into the soil. One reason is the sod with most of the soil shook loose is quite useful for adjusting the grade in another section of the boundary line. A second reason is there's a good deal of rhizomous grass and annuals like dandelions in the sod and tilling simply increases them.

I won't have enough of the lilac seedlings for the whole line as close as I'm planting them. Next year, if all goes well, I can dig up some of the lilacs, spacing them a little further apart to complete the whole line. I'll probably seed grass on the field side next spring too, so I'll have a narrow swath to mow on the public side of the hedge.

In several years, one May Day someone will look out from the road and see a hedge of white lilacs, a football field's length. It will be a splendid vista. It' isn't quite fair to say I planned it. Basically, I was mad about work the farmer's plowing caused me this Spring and wanted to do something to prevent it in the future. I spied the available plant material, the white lilacs, and set about to make a hedge with them. The plan make sense to me, even imagining the mature lilacs gives me a feeling of excitement. I also know that mostly people will think it a crazy or stupid idea, at least now the lilac seedlings look very insignificant. But the line is marked, something I've wanted for a long time, and never found a persuasive reason to argue about it in the past.

Most of the world celebrates May 1st as Labour Day. Through a quirk in history Labor Day here in the USA is celebrated in September. May Day is a wonderful holiday and a chance to reflect on and be grateful for the improvement in all our lives solidarity between working people has made. I wish everyone a wonderful May Day.

Qualifications

I have one face time friend who occasionally reads this blog. He pointed out that the word amateur means doing something for the love of it. I guess the incompetent gardener moniker which came up in my last post didn't seem quite right to him; i.e., incompetence implying that I'm really bad at gardening.

I had a couple of things in mind when I wrote that last post, and I suppose I'll get around to them in this post. But first I'll say a bit more about The Incompetent Gardener.

When I started to write about gardening as The Incompetent Gardener many years ago, I think what I had in mind wasn't so much being a bad gardener, as it was being a gardener without proper qualifications. One definition of qualification in the American Heritage Dictionary is:

Any quality, accomplishment, or ability that suits a person to a specific position or task.

Looking back after all these years, I suppose I was uniquely "qualified" to make my garden, but certainly I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't really even set about to make a garden.

Mostly what I've done is to try to solve problems. When we first moved here almost thirty years ago the grass and bramble was high and the place littered with remnants of a once productive farm. There were fallen down out buildings all over, the rusted body of and old egg truck, and a similar wreck of a combine or some such piece of farm equipment hidden in the weeds and debris. There were literally tons of debris. So the garden started out by way of clean up.

There's a story told, although I can't remember where I heard or read it, of a woman who every year for several years was enticed to buy seed packets by the lovely pictures of flowers on them. Every year for several years she got no flowers. then one year a packet also included a picture of what the seedlings look like. The picture looked familiar, and it dawned on her she'd been meticulously weeding out the flower seedlings. Once she let the seedlings grow the flowers seemed all the more wonderful for her years of fruitless effort, and she got hooked. Somewhere along the line I got hooked on gardening too.

Part of what I mean by calling myself an incompetent gardener are surprises similar to her misstep; where as much as we try to teach the land and flora a thing or two it's the land and flowers that teach us. Over the years I've written about my garden, and one place or another I can find a lump of this writing.

I've been in contact with a group of students at Makarere University in Kampala who have formed an organization to write and publish textbooks for use in Uganda. They hope to make them available to students cheaper than what's available now. The pressing challenge is some money to get this balloon off the ground. But that's just one of the many challenges.

I have thought to pull some of my garden writing together in a book published by the on-demand publisher Lulu. The organization has set some modest and attainable goals, foremost the acquisition of a computer. So I thought that sales of a book, The Incompetent Gardener, might be something I could do to assist them. that was the brainstorm anyway.

The idea for the book fits together with several other ideas. One of the issues is finding ways to use information and communication technologies to further education in Uganda. I'm so excited about the organization, they call themselves Science Publishing And Community Elevation, SPACE, because it's Ugandans making educational materials that will fit in Uganda. But the members are only just exploring computer software and Internet collaboration. So I thought to make the preparation of the book public and online, so that the members of SPACE could get a look at some of the ways of using online tools. And in the back of my mind the thought occurred to me that perhaps there are other authors who might consider using sales of Lulu published books in support of their effort in the future.

I haven't figured it all out yet, but that's what I was thinking about when I wrote about puttering in the garden. I still am puttering, the weather has been beautiful and spring in Western Pennsylvania is lovely. I'm not very good about getting my camera out, so the picture was taken several years ago. I chose it because now many of the white daffodils are in bloom. The ones in the picture are called Thalia or the Orchid Narcissus. They have a lovely fragrance, as do many of the later blooming daffodils. My favorite is the Poet's Narcissus, probably my favorite flower fragrance of all. They are so willing, that is they increase or naturalize easily. And the ones blooming now were planted long ago by former inhabitants here.

Puttering

Spring is here. There are daffodils blooming all around the garden and they cheer me. Most of the daffodils come from spreading about bulbs from a patch that's about the same size in the picture, in fact you can see that very patch in the distance in this photo. The daffodils are all around, but I'm disappointed that I can never seem to take pictures that capture the yellow riot of color. There are an incredible number of daffodil varieties. I've planted several which extend the blooming season considerably. I've not a clue as to this variety's name, but they are early and clearly naturalize well. I bet all of them have spread from just a few bulbs planted fifty years ago or more.

I like gardening very much, but I'm an incompetent gardener. I don't really mean to be self deprecating when I say that. My garden is a source of exercise, curiosity and delight, so I value the garden and gardening highly. I say incompetent more in defiance of formula, and in favor of and attitude of "go ahead and take a stab at it."

My mother was fond of naming what she spent a great deal of time doing as "to putter." The AH dictionary--the tattered First Edition by desk--notes that to putter in the way my mother used it is chiefly British: "To occupy oneself in an aimless or desultory manner." I'm more apt to say "putz." That word isn't in my book copy of the dictionary, but means much the same as putter. Putz is Yiddish. Not clear at all how it became part of my lexicon, nor whether it has a similar etymology to putter. Nevertheless, putz is vulgar slang for penis and I've never heard putter to mean that, although I suppose it may somewhere. Putzing in the garden is perhaps as masturbation is to copulation, and so like the distinction between an incompetent gardener and a real gardener. In any case, my approach to gardening is most certainly desultory: "Moving or jumping from one thing to another; disconnected; rambling."

In spring, I often also have the pleasure of working in other people's gardens. One friend gets my style and when working in her garden even encourages my rambling. Coordinating between vehicle availability and weather, she picked me up with her car so we had a chance to chat. The conversation turned to politics and I mentioned the current world food crisis triggered by rapidly rising commodity prices. As we approached our destination, she asked something to the effect: "Can we get out of this mess?" Or more to the point: "Tell me we're not doomed!"

Phil Jones points to two articles warning that food price increases will cause mass hunger. And he asks:

What are *you* doing to help produce more food and avert this?

I'm not doing enough, but at least the issue of famine is on my radar screen. Phil's question gets to the point, all of us ought take this challenge seriously and wonder what we can do.

Mostly what I do is to rearrange flowering plants in my garden. I've been gardening long enough to be happy I'm not dependent on my efforts for my food, it's not easy to raise crops.

My friend Nathan's CBO, the BSLA, in the Iganga is working with people in people in villages to form farmer groups. The particular emphasis is with widows caring for dependent children orphaned by AIDS. Education is a key component of the program, not just about HIV and AIDS but education especially about food production and post harvest handling. The BSLA provides help with inputs like fertilizer and seeds. They also conduct training in husbandry and other subjects at their offices in Iganga. This sort of community action is worthwhile, but difficult to find support for. I've got to give Nathan credit for sticking to the work even when the going gets really tough as far as finances go. Slum Doctor Programme a small non-profit in Washington State is providing generous assistance.

The current food crisis is precipitated by world economic events. But by in large the solutions to famine must be local developments. In 2005 I wrote a post titled But Let Us Cultivate Our Garden taken from the last sentence of Voltaire's Candide. I searched for the post as an easy way to find a quote from a wonderful Adam Gropnik review of Ian Davidson's Voltaire in Exile:

By “garden” Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action.

The modest help I'm able to lend to Nathan's BSLA program is important to me because I think it's helping. Yet I'm frustrated I don't do more in my locale. I do cultivate my garden. By doing more, I think I mean to encourage others nearby to cultivate their gardens too. Our gardens are indeed a proper answer to Phil's question about what we can do.