Gardening Within Mendocino

My wife and I are planning a move to a less remote area. Our realtor friend was here yesterday to discuss whether the house could be sold. There are a lot of issues with selling a remote rural home. The particular issue I'll discuss here is my peculiar landscaping and gardening style. It might not be attractive to potential buyers.

We came to the coastal area of southern Mendocino County, California in the early 1990s. At the time I had been active with Earth First! for about 5 years. The earth was already dying then, and it is dying faster now, and so when we bought a small piece of land (with the help of a mortgage company), I wanted to treat it in a manner consistent with my views. Which is not consistent with how most people, around here or anywhere, treat their land.

But let's go back even further, to a time when there were a lot less people (by about 50%) living on this earth, the 1960s. After 6 years of growing up on or near various Marine Corps bases, I was moved to suburban Florida. The lawns were mowed green grass. At my family's first home there were a few shrubs and 2 palmettos on either side of the driveway, but no trees. The second home had some nice trees: a hickory, an oak, a pine and a holly. But my mother was determined to grow some sort of grass species that did not like it there. Another, coarser grass wanted to grow, plus the usual weeds. For ten years at intervals I worked on the lawn project, pulling out undesirable grasses and weeds and raking up leaves (my older brother got the mowing job).

I cast a dim eye upon the entire Florida lawn project, and not just because of the mosquitoes, horseflies, deer flies and biting gnats. I cast a dim eye on a lot of stuff. Not as dim as my mother's famously dim eye, which was very conventional in its tastes and hatreds. But pretty dim. Why was the world watering and fertilizing grass, then cutting it, raking the cuttings up, and sending them away in the trash? Hadn't anybody read a biology book? Didn't they know that in nature you don't need bags of fertilizer to keep grass growing? But my mother's lawn was a precious symbol of middle-class respectability (she had grown up on a tenant farm). We had a grass lawn, but it was not to be played on. It was for looking at. And for weeding.

Nature has its cycles, its wheels within wheels. The land I now "own" is on the first ridge above the ocean. Almost certainly it was overgrown with redwoods and other large trees until the first logging took place sometime in the 1800s. Because it was a ridge, the soil was not thick, and the trees were not as big as the ones on the slopes below. But they were easy to cart to mills and then to San Francisco, and so they were cut. Then heavy rains eroded the soil. When the trees grew big enough, decades later, they were cut again. By then the soil would not sustain a redwood, so other species came to dominate: manzanita and madrone, bishop pine and rhododendra. Brush, not forest. Apparently there was a big fire in the 1950s, which was followed by more erosion.

So there I am, in 1995, with a parcel of land dominated by dying bishop pines (an at-risk species local to the area), covered with brush, and with only a couple of inches of mostly sandy soil in most places. Sucking up water from the septic lines there were some pretty big sequoia (the kind found around Yosemite) planted by the prior owners and there were a couple of coast redwoods, the bigger ones being less than a foot in diameter, and the smaller ones, also planted by the prior owners, stunted for lack of soil and water to mostly under two feet high.

People kindly made suggestions. The most common one was to buy a truckload or four of "good" soil and dump it on the land. Brilliant. Buy soil, which means ripping it up from somewhere and burning a bunch of petrol to place it somewhere else. That'll put a stop to global warming.

Instead, I started caring for the land, and under my care it has begun to heal. When a tree or shrub dies, which happens a lot since they grew up too close together and it usually does not rain between May and October, one of two things happens. It gets cut up for firewood, so that we don't have to burn propane of use electricity (much) for heat in winter. Or it gets left (perhaps after some chopping) to turn itself into mulch, which eventually turns into a tiny bit of soil. The mulch helps hold moisture in the soil. It furnishes nutrients. It is just what happens in a natural forest. If a dead tree is left standing, it attracts insects and then woodpeckers.

With regard to land care three kinds of people irritate me. I don't criticize them, but if they ask me why I don't do as they do, I explain my alternative practice. They rarely ask.

Burn Pile People. For some reason people in the country, including most people who move in from the suburbs or cities, love burn piles. They have the same appeal as fireworks. When a tree dies or just does something irritating like blocking the sun or an ocean view, it gets thrown in a burn pile. Sometimes people bulldoze brush (also known as rare California native plants) and small trees from a good sized area into a burn pile. Then they set it on fire. Construction scraps and garbage may to in to. Creating air that is as bad as you might find in Beijing or Mexico city. It gets the dead wood out of sight, but then they don't have mulch, so their soil gets thinner, with less organic matter. Burn pile people expect to dump bags of fertilizer on their land or haul in soil to get anything to grow. When those external inputs are turned into plant material, eventually they chop it down and burn it. It is a way of rural life.

English Garden People. I use English Garden in a general sense for a garden that is extremely orderly. I do find such gardens to be pretty: they are eye candy. But natural they are not. It does not matter to me if an English Garden is organic or heavy with pesticide: what you won't see is a decaying log or tree stump. I like decaying logs. I like lines that are not straight. I like wildflowers coming up in odd places. However, when I walk in an English Garden I just say "Those are pretty roses. What variety are they?" and the like. The better English Garden people don't say, if they see my garden, "why don't you move that decaying log?" They say "that pear tree seems to be doing really well!" I wish they would ask about the decaying logs, because I long to tell them how decaying logs are mini-ecosystems that support large numbers of species and, eventually, become the complex soil that makes my pears so wonderful.

Fire Hazard Paranoids. These are often also burn pile people. They are afraid their house will burn down if they leave a tree or shrub within a hundred yards of it. They look at my land and they say "But the fire hazard!" Now, as in most paranoia, it is true there is such a thing as fire, and there are forest fires (and brush fires), and occasionally a house burns down as a result. But of all the houses that have burnt down around here since I've been in the neighborhood, exactly zero have burned down because they caught fire from an external forest fire.

Your house is the fire hazard! There are three major sources of fire in a typical country home. There is the electrical system, the usual culprit. There is the gas (natural or propane). There is the woodstove or fireplace. I know of homes that have been destroyed by each of these. Another source of fire is vehicles: if you car or pickup or tractor catches on fire, there is a good chance your garage or barn is going to light up and take your house with it.

I'm not saying I pile up dry wood against my house. My house already consists of dry wood! I keep the area immediately around my house clear of dead brush, and I water the trees that shade my house, if necessary, to keep them green. Green trees can burn, but not easily.

So I have my ways. I don't use a chain saw, a lawn mower, or a weed whacker. I use my hands, my back, some simple tools, a wheelbarrow, and mulch. You might say that while I don't mind a good apple or pear or plum or snow pea, what I have spent nearly 20 years doing is growing mulch. It isn't for everyone.

And in another 25 years, this land will look great. Except I am likely selling it, and it will be up to the next person to decide how to treat it.

Bombing Syria, War Crimes, and Marijuana Priorities

Politics is first of all about lying, followed by deceit, then corruption, with the public good seldom coming in better than fourth in the list of politicians' priorities.

Two seemingly unconnected events happened this week. The Obama administration (but not Obama himself) announced it would issue instructions to federal officers and prosecutors that set new priorities for the federal enforcement of marijuana laws. This is largely the result of 21 states (if you include the city of D.C.) having legalized medical marijuana, with two, Washington State and Colorado having also legalized recreational marijuana.

It took Barack Obama only six years to figure this out. The preponderance of voters are now for marijuana legalization, and the Democratic Party has been taking a lot of heat on the issue for years. The new priorities for busting people are: when the weed crosses state lines; when it is sold or given to minors; when the proceeds are used to fund other criminal enterprises; when the entrepreneurs have not made donations to the Democratic Party. In theory at least medical marijuana gets a pass in the states where it has been legalized, as does recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington State.

Then there is Syria. Some group of people there (the lone gunman theory not being bought by anyone in this case) used some type of nerve gas agent on a sufficient scale to kill hundreds of people, who are usually described as civilians. It is generally agreed this happened to a neighborhood of Damascus that is pro-Rebel and anti-President Bashar al-Assad. But Bashar denies giving the order, and a U.N. investigation team has not formed conclusions yet.

Nevertheless, former law professor, now President Barack Obama wants to bomb Syria. It won't be to help the rebels, supposedly, especially since the rebels are now led by Sunni Islamic fundamentalists. It's just a sort of international spanking, grounding (economic embargoes) having not done the trick, so far. If Syrians just go back to killing each other with small arms, artillery and the occasional beheading, Obama will be alright with that.

War crimes are a funny (odd, legally peculiar) thing. War itself is a war crime, since all wars have to be started, and starting a war is a war crime. Once a war is started there are a set of rules both sides are supposed to adhere to. If the war has a winner, the winner usually prosecutes the losing side for war crimes. Winners usually don't prosecute themselves for war crimes, though in a few cases low-level soldiers or officers have been prosecuted.

Obama can't easily try Bashar for war crimes, not without a successful invasion of Syria. But there are all sorts of war criminals he could prosecute. He has simply not chosen to make that a priority for the Justice Department.

There are the Vietnam era war criminals, many of whom are still alive. They started a war with North Vietnam, which was a war crime. They killed vast quantities of civilians both in South and North Vietnam, which was a war crime. They used chemical warfare in the form of napalm and Agent Orange, which was a war crime. They also invaded Laos and Cambodia, also war crimes. They supervised the South Vietnamese murdering civilians and POWs, which was a war crime. These war criminals would be easy to arrest and not too hard to prosecute. But it isn't a priority.

Among the other war criminals milling around Washington, D.C. and the various united States are those who initiated wars on Grenada, the states formerly known as Yugoslavia, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya. I probably left out a few.

Perhaps this illustration of the importance of prioritization is a mere coincidence. After all, Obama did not time the nerve gas incident, unless it was the work of the CIA. You may not realize it, but for those who plan ahead, like politicians and their stockholders, this is the gearing up time for the 2014 elections. One-third of the U.S. Senate seats will be up for grabs, as well as the entire House of Representatives. While incumbents almost always win, you can never be sure. Fundraising is in full swing and potential opponents are calculating their odds. Primaries are only a few months away.

Here in Mendocino County, where Republicans are distinguished mainly by their having enough money to smoke more than their fair share of the dope, there will be a backlash against both of Barack Obama's policies. Only the most loyal of Obamacrats want him to bomb Syria. More important, everyone is nervous about the price of marijuana. It is bound to drop as more people enter the market. To some extent that can be compensated by growing more, but at some point trying to sell marijuana will be like trying to sell houses in 2008.

Some people might have to actually make money with their real jobs, instead of just using them to launder cash.

But it is not Mendocino County that the Democratic Party bigwigs are worried about. It is the districts where the two war crimes organizations known as political parties are about evenly balanced. The competitive districts that determine which party gets to spend the loot gathered from taxpayers.

Bombing Syria makes Obama look tough, which is generally considered to be a positive thing with the voters. But it might alienate the peace-loving wing of the Democratic Party. The new marijuana policy is meant to placate that wing.

Its hard to tell what dose will work out best. Just enough dope to get people to calm down and forget about all the ways Obama has disappointed the hopes they had for him. Not so much dope as to be too out of it to vote the Democratic Party ticket come election day.

Puff the Magic Obama

Mendocino County growers are excited by prospects of an economic turn-around based on a strain being grown this year: Obama Magic Puff. First grown in small quantities in 2008, and marketed in some quantity in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles after the fall harvest of 2009, it was a favorite strain to plant this spring.

"We've actually been hurt by medical marijuana and the recession; there is too much supply, and prices are down. Mendocino County is known for its organic farming and banning genetically modified organisms. We are building that brand recognition, but Obama Magic Puff is our bridge to the future," said Ten Miles Ted.

"What distinguishes Obama Magic Puff from other high-quality, Mendocino grown bud?"

"It makes you really, really hopeful. You imagine all sorts of great things are going to happen. Then you come down from the high, and nothing has changed. But you really want the high again," said Ted. "Users don't like the world they come back to, so they light up again. It really sells, and at a premium to other strains."

Which reminds me that this is One Thousand Day. The day over 1000 American soldiers have died fighting in Afghanistan. Note that we don't count our dead allied foreign mercenaries, or the dead police and soldiers of the Afghan war lord Karzai, or dead Taliban, or civilians. That is 100% pure All-American 1000 dead gunmen. Almost half of them have been killed since President Barack Obama took office, even though the U.S. war of aggression against Afghanistan started back in 2002 under now largely forgotten former President George W. Bush.

But there is Hope. President Obama is going to solve the problem by sending even more troops to prop up war lords Karzai & Co. Hopefully all those U.S. troops will force the Taliban (or perhaps we should call them Afghan nationalists) to negotiate. Or to realize that Apple Pie, Christianity and iPhones are superior to their inferior way of life, lay down their weapons, and open Burger King franchises.

I went to a party Saturday which included a sizeable bunch of former Obama supporters. They avoided the topic of politics. They still hate the Republican Party. If George W. Bush were doing the exact same things Obama is doing now — funding nuclear reactors, allowing new areas for drilling for oil offshore, sending more troops to Afghanistan — they would be frothing at the mouth and organizing lame demonstrations at the local post office.

Barack Obama is supposed to be a brilliant politician, and of course he knows if you are going to take hits you want to take them early in your term of office. He doubtless knows that he can get away with almost anything because the economy is bound to improve between now and the 2012 Presidential election.

The one thing he cannot do, politically, is lose a war. Even though most Americans are sick of the war in Afghanistan, there will be a stigma to losing it. If Obama had pulled out the first month he was President, the situation might not be so pregnant with disaster. He would have taken a hit on the right, but would have gained on the left by ending an unpopular war. Now he is married to the war; a divorce would be ugly.

Thus history repeats himself, as I predicted it would in Barack Obama: Will He Dick Nixon Us? [July 8, 2008].

Cultural notes

Puff the Magic Dragon [song released in 1963]

Barack, the Magic Negro [right wing parody, allegedly racist]

Organic Farming, Meat, and Mendocino County

Jan and I are thinking of moving to Seattle, at the request of Jan's son, my stepson Evan. On the other hand, he can't guarantee that he will stay in Seattle himself. I say this because it brings into question projects like Mendoday.com and California Democracy. I seem to be accumulating a large number of questions, although they still swirl about some pretty bedrock answers.

Last night I attended a forum at the Garcia Grange in Manchester, California, a tiny coastal hamlet a few miles north of Point Arena. The forum was sponsored by some Mendocino County organic farming groups, but the panel consisted of the four candidates for fifth district Supervisor. I am not neutral. I am volunteering on Dan Hamburg's campaign committee. The question before the forum was how could more small scale, organic farming be economically successful in Mendocino County. Also, how could we keep the money generated by economic activity in our county. Money tends to get drained out of our economy by the bigger players, who send it back to corporate headquarters, where ever that may be.

We talked about the need to get a slaugherhouse started in the county, preferably in the 5th district. There used to be one. Now, if a farmer (organic or not) wants to slaughter an animal, they have to transport it long distances, or do the slaughter under the regulatory radar. All four candidates, and the entire audience as far as I could tell, agreed that a local slaughterhouse would be a good thing.

This contrasts with the recent argument I had within the Green Party (specifically, within the California delegation to the Green Party of the United States). California's Green Party platform recommends that people "consider a vegan lifestyle." Vegans, for those of you who have not run into these annoying creatures, reject the idea that life is part of a cycle with death. They refuse to eat any animal products, including products that did not kill the animals like eggs, cheese, and even honey. They also won't use animal products; no leather shoes or clothing, etc. Some members of my delegation wanted to take the phrase from the California platform and insert it in the U.S. national Green Party platform. They also want to ban all scientific study of animals.

I put up a fuss, other members of the delegation joined me, and the "vegan" motion was defeated (if passed by us, it would then be considered by the entire national committee). But then the platform committee people started submitting a whole huge stack of revisions (our platform is way out of date). Less and less discussion happened with each proposal; the general attitude was to pass the new planks on to the full national committee, where they can be amended or rejected. Amidst this deluge the vegan plank appeared again, and the exact same people who had rejected it before, now passed it. They were tired of arguing.

Which reminds me of quaint historical phenomena. The Democratic Party, for instance, started having a racial civil rights plank way back when, during the New Deal if not earlier. But it was a sham. The Democratic Party was very dependendent on the South (former Confederate states), where African Americans were not allowed to vote, and all white people voted Democrat, thus assuring that between 1932 and 1969 all the presidents of the United States were Democrats except Dwight Eisenhower. The racist Democrats did not mind the civil rights plank to much because they controlled Congress; there was no possibility that it would be put into effect. President Lyndon Johnson finally forced enough Democrats in Congress to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to change things. It is often said that he did not run in 1968 because of internal Democrat opposition to the Vietnam War. But that was only a secondary reason. The main reason was the alienation of the white racist vote in the South. That is why George Wallace did so well in 1968 (he was a Democrat who sometimes ran as an independent).

The Green Party platforms, both California and National, contain many portions I don't agree with, but mainly it is a question of gray areas. People who write platform planks tend to specialize in those issues, and push for what the rest of us may consider extremes. Just for instance, we have an anti-fluoride plank, which is like having an anti-vitamin plank as far as I am concerned. But Greens tend to love vitamin supplements and hate toxins, and see fluoride as a toxin, not a mineral supplement.

How do I tell the local organic farmers, who are in tune with nature, that a bunch of urban vegans want to shut down their milk, poultry, and meat operations? So far I have not. I'll just keep fighting over the party plank when I get a chance. What is really funny is watching the California Greens chow down at a state convention. They eat meat, and the vegans usually stage a guilt-trip protest. Your are right, we should be vegans, pass the ham, please.

So why am I still in the Green Party? I've thought a lot about changing my registration status to Decline-to-State (Californian for independent) lately. In general the Green Party is right about social justice and the environement. But the real thread holding me to the party is its opposition to war (on the other side, pushing me out, is its nonviolence plank, which I would like to amend to support people's right to self-defense). The Democratic Party wants peace, supposedly, but always delivers war. Voting Green sends a message that I want to dismantle the entire U.S. military apparatus. I really do.

I remind myself that the real, basic problem is human overpopulation. It is a global problem, it is certainly a California problem, and it is getting to be a Mendocino County problem.

We don't have enough water in Mendocino County for our current level of population and agricultural production. We take too much out of our streams, which has hurt the salmon. We really need to only grow foods that can survive mostly from the winter rains. We grow a lot of fine grapes here, but the vines are planted too close together. We need to tear out about 1/2 the grapes so that the vines will need very little supplemental watering beyond the winter rains.

And what we don't need is nuclear power. We don't need iPads. We don't need the Congressmen from Mississippi, Texas and New York telling us what to do. We don't even need the fools in Sacramento telling us what to do. Maybe San Francisco needs all that, maybe Lost Angeles needs all that, but we don't.

Green Party Ignored to Death on Stupor Tuesday

Just in case you missed the Green Party results for the California Presidential primary, here they are:

Ralph Nader 61.7 % with 15332 votes
Cynthia McKinney 25.3% with 6279 votes
Elaine Brown 4.5% with 1114 votes
Kat Swift 3.0% with 768 votes
Kent Mesplay 2.1% with 526 votes

Ralph Nader won, which I'll get back to in a second. The most obvious point is that only about 25,000 Green votes were cast in all of California, excepting I think there were a lot of write-ins for Barack Obama. This is a dismal turnout, and if you are not depressed enough by American politics already, I'm going to go into why.

For statewide offices in California Green Party candidates have polled far higher. For instance, in the 2002 race for Governor, Peter Camejo received 393,036 votes.

Before declaring an end to the Green Party, consider what people in Mendocino County were saying about how they wanted to vote in the primary. There were two common themes among greenish voters here: people could not vote in the Green Primary because they had switched to Democrat, usually back in 2004, to vote for Dennis Kucinich. And people who were mad they were registered Green because they wanted to vote for Barack Obama.

Let's take the Barack Obama greens first. A secondary comment was that the Green Party primary was not exciting because they had not heard of any of the candidates except Ralph Nader, who no longer excited them. Since there was close to zero press coverage of the Green Party candidates, of course they had not heard of them. If the corporate press that they say they hate and distrust had not whipped up Barack's campaign he'd be as obscure as any other black person in Congress.

The Kucinich greens are a sad lot. Consciously or not, Dennis Kucinich had a mission in 2004: to destroy the Green Party. He did great at that. He claimed he was going to move the Democrats to the left, but instead he made a joke of the left within the party. So he killed two birds with one stone. The dope-addled Kucinich Democrats of Mendocino County mostly fell into the we-love-Obama camp. After all, they had trained themselves for over a decade to hate the kind of Democratic Party that the Clintons represent. And Obama is not Clinton.

Anyone who thinks that because they are now what passes for the far left in the United States, people registered in the Green Party must be particularly astute or even news-aware don't know the Greens of Mendocino County, or of California. Green Party members, as a whole, hardly ever vote. They pay little attention to the news, and get most of their knowledge of the world from the corporate media. When focused they are as smart as anyone and may remember some of the lessons they have learned about corporate control of the media, the candidates, and the two party system, but they drift away from that pretty easily.

Cynthia McKinney is a far better choice to lead the Green Party ticket in 2008 than Ralph Nader, but she was smashed in the primary. Interestingly, there was only one city where the press covered the Green Party primary at all: San Francisco. There was a Green Party Presidential debate there, and while there was no TV coverage, the daily paper wrote a short article and enough people attended to create a buzz. Cynthia edged out Ralph there, 46% to 44%. If there had been statewide televised debates I think the statewide electoral results would have been similar.

Why? Because Greens, like other voters, mostly vote based solely on name recognition. Ralph Nader has way better name recognition than Ms. McKinney, an African-American who has served several terms in the House of Representatives for her Georgia district.

If there is anything that will make the Green Party rise from the ashes, aside from strong local candidates, it is a Democratic Party owning the White House and Congress at the same time. Then people will hear a parade of excuses about why nothing much can really be done about the economy, the environment, or the U.S. military budget.

Another Nader candidacy will be another disaster. It may throw the election to the Republicans not because Nader will get many votes, but because he'll make John McCain look like a young man.

Official California Election results

My Green Party main page