Human Flower Project
Ecology
Santiago, MEXICO
Cairo, EGYPT
Austin, Texas USA
Sunday, August 22, 2010
When Did You Last Go Wild?
Roads and human egos have depleted the U.S. wilderness. The EarthScholars coax us back out of doors, to consider the plants, animals and perspective living there. Thank you, Jim and Renee.
Fireweed growing in Maroon Bells Wilderness Area, Colorado
Photo: snrephotos
By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group
The earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the Earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals.—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Wilderness areas provide plant enthusiasts – and anyone else with eyes to see and a mind to wonder— with occupations for a lifetime. In the wild, we may witness, explore, photograph, and write about the natural beauty of plants, their botanical diversity, visual complexity, fascinating life cycles, and valuable ecological roles—all within the thought-provoking and memorable settings of adventure and solitude. Encounters with nature and wilderness can reawaken our sense of awe and fascination. Such experiences help recalibrate our inflated estimates of 21st-century humans’ importance and degree of control over nature.
Culture & Society • Ecology • Travel • (2) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Trespassing for Power Fungus
In the disputed highlands along the border between China and India, a strange medicinal plant provides military cover.
Cordyceps sinensis, a fungus from the Himalayas,
inhabits and grows from the bodies of insects (here a
caterpillar)—and that’s just the beginning.
Photo: Heathen Healing
It’s referred to as the “Chinese love flower” but we don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say about the Chinese, or love—or flowers either. Just look at it.
This is a fungus, Cordyceps sinensis—an entomopathogenic fungus, meaning it grows on and, in time, into and out of insects. That’s hard on insects—lethal, as a matter of fact—as well as enormously weird and disgusting (just our opinion).
You might call its growth habit an “incursion.” But it’s human incursion into the fugus’s habitat, the very high territory along the China/India border, that prompted the Telegraph’s recent story about this plant.
Indian officials are claiming that small groups of Chinese troops, forces with the People’s Liberation Army, have been coming across “the disputed MacMahon Line” that separates the two countries. Dean Nelson writes that crossing the line “remains highly sensitive for both countries which fought a border war in 1962 in which China captured but later returned Tawang district, which it claims is part of Tibet” – also considered disputed territory. This moist, mountainous environment, between 10,000-12,000 feet in altitude, is where Cordyseps sinensis grows.
Thursday, July 08, 2010
A Florist with Prairie Aesthetics
Combining the grow-local ethic with a fondness for rangeland plants, Kimberly Hess will let Mother Nature handle inventory for her flower shop.
Kimberly Hess uses curly dock, a prairie wildflower, in arrangements. Her shop, soon to open in Fargo, ND, will feature the region’s wild plants, homegrown on her farm.
Photo: Sarah Kolberg, for the Grand Forks Herald
It’s a long way from the world’s renowned flower-growing regions—Lisse in the Netherlands or Medellin, Colombia—to Halstad, Minnesota. Nobody told Kimberly Hess that, though. She’s planning to open a flower shop in nearby Fargo, North Dakota, using the grasses and wildflowers that grow at her farm along the Red River.
Tu-Uyen Tran of the Grand Forks Herald wrote a fine feature story about Hess and her plans for Prairie Petals.
Halstad, pop. 622, is in far western Minnesota, a farming community settled by Norwegian immigrants. In fields of her own 150-acres and ditches through the surrounding countryside, Hess finds wild hemlock, sedge and lead plants, along with “purple prairie clovers and the violet flowers of the vervains, ignored or unseen by drivers roaring by on the asphalt.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Maps + OIL + Plants
Without detailed geological information about Block 252 in the Gulf and the chemistry of dispersants that have already been thrown into the water, how can we expect to clean up the coastal wetlands?
A dragonfly stuck with oil to marsh grass, Garden Island Bay, near Venice, Louisiana, May 18.
Photo: Associated Press
By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group
This past spring we had the chance to see the so-called Impossible Black Tulip of map collecting — the huge and detailed, 60-square-foot, 1602 Ricci Map of the World. It was on display at the Library of Congress before being moved to its new permanent home at the University of Minnesota. The James Ford Bell Trust bought the map for $1 million from Bernard J. Shapero, a noted dealer of rare books and maps in London, for the university’s James Ford Bell Library. The Ricci map had formerly been owned by a private Japanese collector.
Never before seen in the US, it is the first Chinese map to show the Americas, and was drawn and highly annotated by an Italian-born Jesuit priest named Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) when he was a missionary in China.
The Wanli Emperor had invited Ricci to become an advisor to the Imperial Court in 1601 because of his accurate scientific predictions of solar eclipses. Thus he was the first Westerner ever to be invited into China’s Forbidden City. Ricci placed China at the center of his map as a Jesuitical attempt to win converts to Roman Catholicism, while also exposing China to Europe and the Americas.
Father Ricci wrote, “This was the most useful work that could be done at that time to dispose China to give credence to the things of our holy Faith…. Their conception of the greatness of their country and of the insignificance of all other lands made them so proud that the whole world seemed to them savage and barbarous compared with themselves.”
Maps can indicate—and sometimes impose—great power. Today, we often assume that the maps we need are comprehensive, accessible to the public, objective, and unbiased. None of those assumptions is true. All maps actually distort reality in specific ways in order to depict some data better than others, according to their commissioned purposes.
Maps have also served as secret tools, intended to be used to gain a knowledge-advantage over one’s competitors. From ancient times onward, rulers have insisted that their countries be placed at a map’s center to convince others how important their kingdoms are. Only by being aware of the subjective omissions and distortions inherent in maps can we make sense of the information they contain.
Authors of Washington’s Blog wrote May 24, nearly a month ago: “We can’t understand the big picture behind the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill unless we know the underwater geology of the seabed and the underlying rocks…. We don’t know the geology under the [Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon rig] spill site. BP has never publicly released its cross-sections of the seabed and underlying rock. BP’s Initial Exploration Plan refers to ‘structure contour maps’ and ‘geological cross sections,’ but all the detailed geological information, maps and drawings have been designated ‘proprietary information’ by BP, and have been kept under wraps.”