[pf] Fw. growing and buying organically-grown flowers; Donella Meadows

· There's some discussion of the magazine Resurgence, on GreenViews-NZ. You
should start at the entry page (see below, after "issue 199"), but on:
http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/ADMIN/articles.htm , the classified list
of articles, in the section: Ecology & Environment,
  Donella Meadows' name jumped out at me.

http://www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/issues/meadows199.htm has:

I LOVE ROSES 

by Donella Meadows 

         No excuse for poisoning flowers.

from
Resurgence, issue 199
http://www.resurgence.org/

THE MORE THE agribusiness folks mess about with transplanted genes and
toxic chemicals and irradiation, the better the market for local, fresh,
organic, unmessed-about-with foods. When it comes to things we’re going to
put into our mouths, things that are literally going to become us, we
consumers are cautious, and rightly so. 
But what about crops we don’t eat? What, for example, about flowers?
Whether we grow our own or buy them in a shop, need we care whether they
carry pesticide residues or genes from a fish? Does it make sense to buy or
grow organic flowers?

I’ve just come across two articles that remind me how much sense it makes.

ONE IS A REPORT on flower farms in Latin America, which export to our
florists year-round. I’ve seen some of those farms in Costa Rica. Imagine
acres and acres under plastic tents, not to keep out the balmy climate but
to allow fumigation against tropical pests and moulds. Inside the tents,
the soils are dosed with chemicals of sorts and at concentrations that
would never be allowed in the United States. Nor would our workers be
allowed to enter that toxic atmosphere.

The flowers, flown to us overnight, are beautiful. Smelling and admiring
them won’t hurt us. Those Costa Rican workers do at least have jobs. The
export money is important to their countries. Why should we care how they
grow flowers?

We should care because those poisons don’t stay inside the tents. They
drift out, they walk out on the clothes of the workers, they enter the
bodies of their children, filter into groundwater, work their way up the
tropical food chain, ... We are materially connected to those flower farms,
as we are connected to all the circulating flows of the planet. Not as
intimately as if we were eating the flowers, but strongly enough to care.

I care about the workers, too. I’ve looked them in the face. I can’t be
unconcerned about their health or jobs or children. If those flowers were
grown organically, there would probably be more jobs, and healthier ones.
It might not be possible to grow all types of flowers organically,
especially not types foreign to the tropics. ... This is one of those many
situations where something comes easy and cheap to rich folks because it
costs distant poor folks a lot, not just in lousy wages, but in health and
in the debasement of their local resources and environment.

THE OTHER ARTICLE that came my way was about growing our own flowers. It
was excerpted from the book Step by Step Organic Flower Gardening by Shep
Ogden.

Ogden once asked the rose gardener at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden whether
he uses chemical sprays to take care of one of the world’s most important
rose collections. (It’s commonly believed that roses are hard to grow,
requiring constant dusting and spraying.) The rose curator said no, he
didn’t use chemicals. “Why not?”, Ogden asked. “I love roses,” was the
answer. “I want to be here still enjoying them in twenty years.”

“Dusts and sprays have a nasty habit of not staying where we try to put
them,” writes Ogden. “I have known very few gardeners who actually follow
the complete, detailed directions on pesticide labels. To do so, you would
have to spend your days in a rubber suit or doublewashing clothes and
telling the children to stay off the lawn or away from the flower garden.
I’d rather spend my time in the garden hand-picking insects, as archaic as
that might seem.”

I can’t imagine why anyone would use pesticides on his or her own property.
They’re not only hazardous, they’re unnecessary. I grow all kinds of
flowers. In fact, I have knockout bouquets from early spring daffodils to
post-frost asters, and I don’t use sprays. But Ogden says the average
suburban gardener applies lawn and garden chemicals at per-acre dosages six
times those of farmers.

Talk about intimate connections! Who would want their dogs, cats, kids or
selves to live in that kind of toxic haze?

Most commercial flower growers ... I’m willing to push them less by paying
more for flowers grown without poisons. I do know farmers, in both tropical
and temperate zones, who produce flowers on a commercial scale that way. I
know it can be done, and so does Ogden, because he does it.
 ...

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P.S.
Diane; since you're on the Cobb Hill Co-housing list-serv, if they let you
know the poster's e-mail address ("eddress"), could you copy-and-paste this
to Donella, saying that we in New Zealand very much appreciate what she has
done (from the early 1970s until now), and is still doing? Thanks.

sent to Positive Futures by David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
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