Sustainablog

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Call me crazy, call me crude, but I have to say that there is nothing quite like the smell of cow manure.

That scent is so rich, so savory, so earthy, so pungently sweet that just one whiff seems to bury you in an olfactory pleasure dome. And if you keep basking in the aroma, you may well feel driven to grab a pitchfork, plop a straw hat on your head, stick a blade of grass in your mouth, and head on out to the fields. This is especially true on those oh-so-humid mornings in the peak of summer, when the air is so moist and dense that you almost have to put on scuba gear. But any old day is a great day for cow poop.

I confess that I am no connoisseur of creaturely caca, but I would bet that none can compare with the quality of a cow’s. Horse manure comes close, but it pushes pungency at the expense of sweetness, plus it is not very good for fertilizer. The feces of fowls is not even in the same league; it is far too acrid, not to mention slimy and sticky and all around offensive. Elephant excrement is similarly versatile (for example, it makes a great alternative source for paper), yet so far it lacks the time-tested dependability and widespread availability of cow dung; pachyderm pooh is thus still an exotic delicacy rather than a common staple. (I cannot speak to its odoriferous character, alas.) And nobody would sing paeans to dog and cat poop. Look at how tenderly people carry those telltale plastic bags when walking their dogs–usually with one arm extended as the dog pulls the leash and the other arm, hand, and pinching fingers extended as far away as possible with the bag bobbing in the air. When it comes to the felines, we have managed to train them to go potty in specified places, cover it with “fresh scent” granules, and graciously shake off anything sticking to their paws. I suppose “domestication,” in part, means proper toilet training…or “house training,” as it is called. And as for “humanure”…I am not even going there.

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My editorial work keeps me hopping, so I’m a bit late getting started on reporting about my trip last week to Bentonville, Arkansas, for Wal-Mart’s annual Media Day and Shareholders’ Meeting. As always, it was a whirlwind of activity combining trips to company stores in the area, press meetings with company executives, and a little entertainment thrown in. I skipped the Carrie Underwood/Keith Urban concert Thursday night, but did see Joss Stone, Jennifer Hudson and David Cook perform early Friday morning… with Queen Latifah handling the MC duties.

Yes, Wal-Mart does a fantastic job entertaining the troops, but my real interest was in further news on company sustainability initiatives. Over the next week or so, I’ll be reporting on those. Today, I just wanted to provide some initial thoughts, and perhaps get the conversation going.

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy’s in a bit of slump… and that means more people are turning to discount retailers for their basic needs and luxuries. Sales figures are up for the company, and all of the executives that spoke at various portions of the media conference noted the company’s founding value of saving people money. At some points, I began to wonder just a bit if the much-heralded sustainability initiatives of the past few years were taking a back seat to it’s ability to provide goods (and services) at low prices.

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There are many ways in which entrepreneurs and ecopreneurs are similar. Both embrace failure and are idea driven, innovative, creative, risk tolerant, flexible, adaptable, freedom minded and independent. Perhaps you could add a few more defining characteristics as well.

However, ecopreneurs go beyond organic, beyond compliance to laws and regulations (or redefine them), beyond consumerism, beyond minimum wages and beyond the free market economy to conduct business. Entrepreneurs become ecopreneurs when their spirit, boldness, courage and determination not only transform the landscape but coalescence into a movement to transform global problems into opportunities for restoration and healing. After talking with thousands of ecopreneurs over the past decade, we’ve discovered quite a few distinguishing characteristics reflected in the chart to the right. Additionally, ecopreneurs seem to be more focused on cooperation and collaboration than competition as the means to get ahead in the world. That’s why so many form innovative partnerships or creative interdependencies with fellow ecopreneurs — just as in nature.

The most progressive ecopreneurial enterprises address more than one of the many challenges facing us. Their business might foster fair trade relationships (promoting economic justice and equity), generate more energy from renewable energy sources than it uses (severing our addiction to fossil fuels) and even serve local, seasonal, vegetarian, and organic meals to those who work in the business.

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“Love has no bounds” is an old cliché. Everyone loves “love”–from Valentine’s Day paraphernalia to sappy greeting cards. And environmentalists say they love nature, love the Earth, love a place or animal.

Obviously, nature is often “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson puts it.1 However, nature also has its soft-and-fuzzy side, which provides a wonderful lesson and model for how humans in general and environmentalists in particular can relate to nature. A particularly splendid example of this is animals “adopting” other animals.

I have been watching a pair of cardinals parenting a baby cowbird at my bird feeders recently. Cowbirds (like other birds, such as the cuckoo) will lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and let the foster parents do the dirty work–changing dirty diapers, wiping runny noses, feeding at all hours of the night and day. And so along with the little baby cardinals flapping flopping and squawking like mad, this little cowbird is right there with the rest getting dutifully fed by the cardinals. I am sure all pet owners can recount endless tales of cats adopting dogs, dogs adopting cats, and so on.

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Although I am a bird lover, and although I will bear the figurative feathers of the Virginia Tech hokie for life, I have no real affection for wild turkeys. So the graceless gobblers I have been crossing paths with lately did not stop my heart or steal my breath. They did not, like so many other birds and wildlife, send my spirit into spiraled flight or get me all inspired.

Or did they? After all, here I am writing about them. And, as I have discovered, there are some quite interesting tidbits about turkeys. Here are a few:

• Not only can turkeys fly, however awkwardly, but they actually roost up in trees at night.
• Benjamin Franklin, known for his wisdom and inventiveness and diplomacy, was an unabashed advocate for making the wild turkey America’s national bird. Indeed, he wrote some rather scathing criticisms of the bald eagle, though ultimately in vain. (In the long run, it may be best that Franklin and the wild turkey lost out, since patriotic sentimentality was crucial in saving the bald eagle from extinction. At the same time, though, perhaps America would have better luck with foreign policy if the wild turkey were its symbol. I personally would much rather have the U.S. criticized as “The Great Turkey” than the “The Great Satan”! And perhaps this bird might have given a different spirit to our approach to foreign policy in the first place….)
• Turkeys are extremely curious birds. When it rains, they will stare up into the sky as if pondering the mystery of water droplets hitting them in the face. This habit led to the old wives’ tale that, unlike their promoter Gentle Ben, they were extremely and tragically stupid–so stupid that they would drown themselves by staring up into the rain too long!

Now, almost everyone knows Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale “The Ugly Duckling.” Unfortunately, the metaphor just does not extend to turkeys. Turkeys are plain old ugly from the egg to the grave. What with that gangly neck, the funky wattle and snood flapping from their heads…and that face! Sorry, turkey fans, but I just am not going to put a poster featuring that mug up on my wall.

Still, me being me, I cannot help pondering these things a bit more as the turkeys run to and fro, gobbling like mad as I walk by. I mean, however “ugly” I think they are, there are still turkeys aplenty doing their little turkey trot day in and day out. There are still little ugly turkey chicks turning into big ugly turkey adults. There are still those strange turkey gobbles coming out of the woods.

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On my walk the other morning, I passed by a point in the woods where two pileated woodpeckers seemed to be in the throes of a frenzied debate. Listening to their contrapuntal cacophony, I could not help but think they had escaped from nature’s version of a psychiatric ward. And this is true for the whole lot of them. Perhaps, many eons ago, the first pileated slammed its face into a tree one too many times. (And you have to wonder what the other animals must have thought when that first winged oddity of black and white and red showed up on the scene.
“What on Earth is that thing?” one wooly mammoth asks another.
“Beats me.”
“And why does he keep head butting that tree?”
“I dunno. Must be a loon.”
“You got that right. That one sure won’t last long.”)

As I rambled on, pondering over the evolutionary conundrum that is the pileated woodpecker, I became more aware of the entire environmental aria that I had been missing while lost in my own little mental world. Ah, the tyranny of thinking….

It was really just grand (the aria, that is). Every note on the scale was being hit by some living instrument at some moment. The measures were not quite in sync, for sure, and yet the melodies came together in a strangely enthralling harmony that carried me with it as I tripped along.

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Stop Missing the Trees for the Forest!

In an earlier post, I discussed sacred places in our past and “sensory flashbacks”–how our physical senses can open up a wormhole in time and space to take us (mentally speaking) to the places in our past that we cherish. I would like to focus here on the sacred places in our present lives–that is, to discuss the dire need for recognizing the sanctity of our surroundings and why these sacred places (recognized or not) are so crucial.

Anyone who cares enough about nature to become a card-carrying, tree-hugging, thump-stumping “environmentalist”–or even to bother going green at all nowadays–surely recognizes that nature has special sacred places. Places that somehow touch the heart and stir the spirit. Places that somehow capture and convey just what it means to be alive on Earth. Yes so many people recognize that, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “There lives the deepest freshness deep down things.”1

When people think of “sacred places” in nature, though, I fear they most often think that these are also “wild places” exclusively. They believe that nature’s true majesty is found in the places where the human footprints are well buried beneath leaves or worn away by the winds of time. And, they believe, nature is found in the places where it is at its most “extreme,” most overwhelming, and most picturesque, where the sights and sounds and smells and schizophrenia of city life seem like a nightmare vision of some distant planet.

Mark Powell over at blogfish has written a characteristically thoughtful post on the need for getting and appreciating the “wilderness experience.” What he says is really great, especially since he emphasizes that we need “to save the wildness in people” in addition to the wildness in wilderness.

Like surely all environmentalists, I believe that we need to continue protecting the most inspiring, intimidating, and “wild” places in nature. Of course!

But we also need to focus just as much, if not more, on those sacred places whose “wildness” or “naturalness” is not prominent, pristine, or necessarily imperiled. We need to recognize and cherish, to sanctify, all those sacred places in our present lives where nature sneaks in and infuses in us the wild woolly wonder of Nature.

We need to sanctify not only the “extreme” wilderness experiences but also the “boring” nature experiences.” Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Americans remember the many men and women who have died as part of their service to our country in the military. With fireworks and barbecues, memorial services and quiet reflection, we pause from the normal weekly grind to honor those who helped give us all that we cherish today.

In this period of remembrance, I also think that environmentalists can and should pause to reflect upon why it is they love, fight for, and, yes, fear for nature in all its many manifestations. Why, that is, they even bother to get active for, to serve the Earth.

Let me begin by asking a question: Has anyone ever saved your life?

Yes or no, I am sure you can imagine how grateful you would feel towards the person, as well as how much you would want to repay that great deed by helping ensure his or her welfare.

Well, nature literally saved my life. It was during a time of very deep depression, when health problems (physical and mental/emotional) exacerbated serious discontent with my academic work and with life in general, that I was saved by nature. Sparing you details, I can at least say that “saved my life” is no exaggeration. For I often felt like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost: “And in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide, / To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.”1

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Pine needles, damp with morning dew, glistening at the edge of the road and farther off into the woods beyond.

That smell, that fantastically one-of-a-kind scent of wet pine needles.
That smell, sharp but sweet, overwhelming but easy to get used to and ignore.

That smell, wafting through town and country, rising from urban ditch and forest floor, tickling the nose’s nerves and the mind’s memories…

Wet pine needles….

And suddenly I am no longer standing on the side of a country road, warming myself in the just-out-of-the-oven rays of the morning sun like a lizard trying to turn its cold blood hot.

No, now I am back in my aunt and uncle’s house, that place where the smell of pine needles greets you in the morning and tucks you in at night.

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Has some sight, some sound, some smell, some taste, some feeling out in nature ever literally stopped time and sent you back in time? Has something purely sensual in the natural world opened up a wormhole and transported you through space to someplace else?

I am sure that many of you reading this have had some physical-mental “sensory flashback,” as I am calling it, through the time machine of your sensual body. And although there are many reasons why environmentalists go green, I think that these sorts of experiences play a crucial role in making us sensitive to the wonders–and the fragility–of the Earth.

French novelist Marcel Proust gives a superb account of this very phenomenon in the opening “overture” to his grand encyclopedia of sensuality A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-27). After eating a bit of a small cake, called a “petit madeleine,” dipped in lime-blossom tea, Proust’s narrator has a profound sensory flashback that launches the novel itself:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.

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