From the Pollyanna Professor
This is the fourth installment of a series that I’ve been writing with my dad about food and gardening.
You can read the others about growing sprouts, edible landscaping and mushrooms.
Growing up with a history professor as a dad has meant that everything from breakfast to the local bus stop had an opportunity for a lesson. As a child, making pancakes included lectures on Napoleon’s armies and the food they ate, and the walk to take the bus served as a platform for an analysis of urban planning. While I may have found this extremely embarrassing as a second-grader, as an adult it has been an absolute joy and makes my world infinitely more vibrant.
Lately, I have found myself in a dreary mindset about the future of our planet and the decisions of our political leadership. Despite a new year on the calendar, the trends of our world continue to make me wonder where we can possibly find gleams of optimism in all of this chaos and turmoil?
Like many others around us, we both have found that optimism in the most basic of things—love, community, connection, growth. Every year, my pessimism is uprooted by the optimism I see in the resilient plants that continue to thrive despite the turmoil we see all around us. While climate change challenges many species to adapt faster than they are able, the greenery, from the sidewalks to the forests, continues to grow. Seeing this optimism can feel foolish at times (I want to warn the plants of the devastation to come!), but perhaps it’s the most graceful and productive thing I can do. To work together with what nature gives us and to keep on growing. I’m lucky to still live near my father, and whenever we’re together we find ourselves diving into deep conversations melding our shared interests of gardening, history, and food. Often, my dad’s reminders of the patterns of the past help with my feelings of the future, so today I share Professor Fuller’s optimism for the future with you all, because I have a feeling that we could all use it.
The Book of Ecclesiates from the Hebrew Bible, written in fourth century BCE, contains the oldest lyrics ever to make the Top 40 in the US pop-charts. The song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds hit number one in December 1965. The text has a long history in literature, but in the mid-Sixties, the lyrics expressed both the hopes and the frustrations of a young generation, not unlike the one today. “A time for every purpose under heaven…a time to plant and a time to pluck up what has been planted.” The cycles of the season, even as the environment radically changes, still gives hope for the future.
Yet, the hippies and the New Left of the 60s naively underestimated the power and greed of the fossil fuel industry and its related branches of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in agriculture. The failure of these mid-century moderns to make changes in the basic structures of society and production, degenerated into both dogmatic Evangelical Christianity and, at the same time, into a narcissistic liberal anarchism with little sense for building community beyond yoga studios.
Planting the mound of bulbs during the pandemic.
When my daughter was seven years old (and I younger too!), we started a tradition of planting 100 tulips every year in our parking strip. At first, we started with the idea of planting with as many varieties as possible—like a Dutch-bed from the 17th century! The next year, we would dump ten bags of composted steer manure on the top and plant 100 again. We have repeated this ritual as a moment of eternal recurrence every fall for the last sixteen years. The newly planted bulbs reliably flower in the first spring. Remarkably, the bed would also get return visits from “old friends” — the hundreds of bulbs that we had planted a decade before. ”Remember that was the year we planted all red for my high school colors!” Over the years, the bed of soil went from being at ground-level to a mound over eighteen inches high. To make a series of bad puns, this ritual has grounded Hannah and I, and reinforced our roots in the community—it is our annual gift to the neighborhood. Dozens and dozens of people have remarked, “Oh, I wait for this every year!” A stray compliment about a particular tulip variety led to introductions, conversations, and even friendships. Hell, my kids knew everybody in a two-mile radius! In the almost two decades since we first began our annual tradition, people have taken lots of photos, but we have never had any problems with people taking flowers.
Nature and its hybrid of farming and gardening have always represented hope. ”Always” here means just for the last ten-thousand years. Agriculture was a leap of fate that the land and people could settle in one place, form communities and stay alive in times of famine — like every winter! Even during some years not too distant, that agricultural wager fell short. In 1816, volcanic dust from a volcano eruption in Indonesia so clouded the skies of the Northern Hemisphere that there was hard-frost in June and snow in August: known historically as “The Year Without a Summer.” Crop failures and food insecurity also fueled the revolutionary movements of the late 1840s. Today, hunger continues to be a weapon, the promise of the harvest withheld for political and economic gain. Even with climate change, that anyone should die of hunger today is purely a political choice that only the most coldly rational can stomach.
So why do we carry on believing in the potential of the future? Some might argue that that optimism is born of white, male, heterosexual and euro-centric privilege in our inequitable world…well yeah! But neither class, gender, race nor ethnic-background excludes one from finding the joy and goodness in one’s community. A contrarian can push back against the status quo while being simultaneously Pollyanna — like the ancient goddess of the triple-faced Hekate, who could look three ways at once.
The bulbs beginning to bloom in the early spring.
Seeing potential in the future is certainly not in fashion these days of ruling doom and gloom. The land is on fire or underwater, seasons have all but disappeared — “to every season, turn, turn, turn” rings hollow. When does spring start anymore? Hurricane season. Wildfire season. Drought season. The rainy season. Nature will not go down without a fight, and has declared open warfare. Tornados! The Earth is doing a good job of reacting to abuses. One can only hope that the planet kills us, before we kill it. Like yeast dying in its own feces, as grammar school science in 1965 taught. A time to reap what greed and hubris have sown.
But that kind of pessimism is defeatist, fatalistic, and absolves the individual’s responsibility to the community and to the planet. There are all too many smug ‘friends of the environment’ who sermonize on the death of the planet with self-righteous smirks on their faces — while simultaneously looking for a condo in France should the government go fascist. Both sides preach the End of Times with glee.
And yet, while we all theorize, seasons do still happen. Despite it all, spring, fall, winter, summer create a larger pattern of potential. Nature’s cycles are not too large in scale for the mind to grasp. We plant tulips every fall with faith, and the next spring they burst forth as promised. Potential and promise also lie in the much-maligned generation between twenty and thirty years old. Young people today are much more savvy and political than the generation of 1965. The solutions are clearer to them, undoubtedly because the stakes are higher and the problems so much more complex. There is an urgency in the youth today. Young people realize that not only LSD and an expansion of consciousness will succeed. While my generation made some cosmetic changes to the cultural landscape, we did not make the fundamental changes in the economic inequalities of society and production. The New Left failed to implement a community of equality, fairness, and compassion — and instead, succeeded in provoking its opposite. But let’s take that leap of faith that the seeds planted will bear fruit. “A time for every purpose under Heaven.” Our young people are now our last and best hope.
This piece is part of a series of articles that Hannah and her dad are writing together to stay connected through quarantine and beyond. Interested in reading more from them? Read about about growing sprouts, edible landscaping and mushrooms in their other articles on Grounded Grub.
