Feeling Local Affection for Plants

One finding of global development studies is that any effort to save the life of baby is overwhelmingly accepted. Other development efforts might meet with resistance, but not this one. And what might be considered strange is that this continues to be the case despite the drumbeat resistance to increasing the world's population. How does one reconcile these two apparently opposite stances?

This problem came to mind as I watered my newly planted dymondia margaretae this morning. Yesterday, during a minor heatwave we are having, my next door neighbor told me that I was losing my plants. They did look a little wilted, despite what I thought were my thorough waterings. I thought maybe I was watering them too much, and yet the soil always seemed so dry every morning. I was not watering thoroughly enough, just wetting the surface, a rookie gardener's mistake.

You can imagine how alarming I found the prospect of losing all of my dymondia, hundreds of seedlings that I had planted by hand in my front garden. The alarm did not arise over thoughts of all of that hard work and money going to waste, although those were certainly concerns, but rather over my concern for the the plants themselves, rooted in my affection for them.

So, I am watering in both the morning and evening now, a process I find wonderfully meditative, not only because the plants are there in front of me, but also because of the mesmerizing quality of running water. I suspect human beings, and probably other animals, evolved this positive if highly abstracted cognitive mode of engagement with water because it is such an essential component of life. I fortified these waterings with fish emulsion and B1 supplements to fertilize the plants and stimulate the growth of their roots.

And here of course is the local/global problem. Undoubtedly, this fish emulsion came from the demise of some fish, and yet they do not enter into my affective world. So too the water is precious in and of itself, but also as a component in other projects. California might be, after so many years, finally out of its drought, but I think everyone expects this to be just a temporary condition. And while nothing practical can be done to save this water or send it somewhere else in the world where it would do more good, as a general principle it seems ill-advised to pour it on my little plants.

And yet, these concerns did not matter. I was aware of them, rationally, but all of my emotional energy was focused exclusively on my little plants in front of me. Shifting from the local/present register to the global/future register requires a different kind of thinking. I think this insight is well established and has been discussed at length: humans are not evolved to be concerned about conditions that will or may exist far into the future or far off in some other place.

I think when Wendell Berry advises to 'think locally and act locally', that he is recognizing this key feature of human nature. His advice seems to be to have every locality act in a healthy, equitable and sustainable way so that the globe, as a whole, will maintain its integrity, in an accumulative or agglomerative way. Or, as my grandmother used to say: 'Watch your pennies and your dollars will take care of themselves'.