“Nasty” “Chemicals” and the Path of Radical Inquiry
It’s all chemical reactions and such, “natural” or not, so what’s the best approach?
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One of the key tenets that Tim and I, and our circle of internet friends, espoused back in the “glory days of blogging,” was something we called “The Path of Radical Inquiry.” I’ve written about it from a “Gnostic” perspective on another site:
The act of inquiry is the single definitive act of conciousness. Every great thought, every great philosophy, spirituality, movement, etc. began with a question. Asking questions is also the most radical act one can perform, and the most essential skill needed to live within the confines of the world of forms. Many of the great teachers of enlightenment– Jesus, Socrates, Gautama Buddha and their adherents, for example– chose the dialectic form, question and answer, to impart information to their students. Information doesn’t “stick” if it doesn’t come in response to honest questions.
For me, the invironment project is a natural outgrowth of this idea. We’re continuing the radical act of asking questions, and so a lot of what we hope you’ll see on this site is a dialogue, much of which won’t have any good answer. We’ll probably disagree on a number of things, but that’s part of the point!
We also hope that publishing this on Medium will help encourage conversation, and that if we have any readers, they’ll also ask questions of their own. We’re inviting you to participate in our dialogue.
In the spirit of the Path of Radical Inquiry, Tim left a comment on my last piece that I think merits investigation:
Are all chemical fertilizers/pesticides “nasty?” How can we tell the difference?
I hate the word “chemicals” as it’s used by the “sustainable” crowd. Everything is a chemical. If you water your garden, you’re putting chemicals on your garden. If you use kitchen compost on your plants, you’re putting chemicals on your garden. If you apply a layer of mulch to your crops, you’re altering the chemical composition of the soil ecosystem. There’s almost nothing you can do to your plants that doesn’t somehow involve chemicals.
So, then, as Tim asks, what makes a chemical fertilizer/pesticide “nasty”? Or, to inquire even further, what makes a chemical “nasty”? Let’s take a closer look.
This is a picture of a Rhododendron tree outside of my house. See how wonky it looks?
Obviously it needs to be pruned, but if you’re familiar with Rhododendrons, you’ll probably notice it’s really lopsided, with most of the growth on the left side. This is especially weird given that the right side of the picture faces south, which would have the most sun exposure. What could have caused this?
What the picture doesn’t show is that I’d recently removed a young Black Walnut (Juglans negra) tree that had taken up residence next to the bush long before we moved in. It was probably planted by a squirrel; it was far too close to the house and I was worried about the roots getting into the walls, so I removed it (a good example of when NOT to let a neighbor into your garden — this walnut tree was a weed!).
Black walnuts are delicious, but walnut trees have a nasty feature you don’t often hear about. Walnut trees, and black walnuts in particular, pump a chemical called juglone into the surrounding soil to discourage competitors. As you can see on the page I just linked to, Rhododendron is on the list of plants that can be damaged by juglone.
So, as it turns out, my Rhody is basically screaming and leaning as far away as possible from the “nasty chemical” the walnut had been pumping into the ground.
Most annuals have the same bad reaction to juglone, so the point I guess I’m making is that it can be just as bad for your plants, “nasty chemical”-wise, to have a Black walnut growing nearby as it can to dump pesticides and such on them. The question now becomes, what about “nasty chemicals” and their effect on people?
In permaculture studies, we talk about something called “The Precautionary Principle”:
Instead of asking the basic risk-assessment question — ”How much harm is allowable?” — the precautionary approach asks, “How little harm is possible?”
In other words, if we can’t prove that something won’t cause harm to people or the “environment” (another bullshit word, but we can talk about that later), we shouldn’t use it. What “harm” means is up to you to decide, but I’m certainly not using Monsanto’s bullshit Roundup on my yard:
That said, it seems obvious to me that growing your own food, even using conventional methods and “nasty” chemical fertilizers and pesticides, is proveably less “harmful” than buying from a factory farm, if nothing else than in terms of carbon footprint. After all, your factory farmed broccoli often has to be shipped in, and its “harm load” has to be increased to include fossil fuel use, labor issues, immigrant rights, GMO concerns (again, a more nuanced question than either side tends to mention, but a discussion for later), etc.
In other words, it is less “nasty” to grow your own broccoli using chemical fertilizers/pesticides than it is to buy conventionally farmed, non-local broccoli from the grocery store. If you’re the kind of person who wants to garden food, but is put off by the extra steps it takes to go organic, it’s still better to grow your own than to buy mass-produced produce shipped in from another country (which I do *all the time!*).
So I guess we all have to decide what our personal ‘scale of harm’ might be for the garden we want to have. For me, it looks something like this (a very brief summary of course, which is subject to change):
SCALE OF HARM (writ Puma) from MOST to LEAST HARMFUL
- MOST HARMFUL: Wasting water and using industrial pesticides/fertilizers to maintain a grass lawn
- Wasting water to maintain an “organic” lawn where food could be planted
- Watering a lawn used for recreational purposes only
- Wasting water and using industrial pesticides/fertilizers to maintain a purely ornamental landscape
- Maintaining an organic purely ornamental landscape
- Wasting water and using industrial pesticides/fertilizers to maintain a conventional edible garden
- Maintaining an organic edible garden
- Wasting water and using industrial pesticides/fertilizers to maintain a conventional edible landscape
- Maintaining an organic edible landscape
- LEAST HARMFUL: Organic edible landscape designed with permaculture principles in mind
Yours will be different; your mileage may vary. Thing is, you’ll notice something about this “scale,” which is that the MOST HARMFUL practices are also the ones that, for most people, seem to take the least amount of work (whether or not this is true will be discussed later as well). So, it’s an effort to move up the scale, which is why people should be applauded for doing anything they can do.
If someone in a drought condition rips out their chemically treated lawn and puts in chemically treated drought-tolerant natives, that is awesome! If someone growing a conventionally treated garden digs out some boxwood and plants vegetables instead, that is terrific!
I think the point of this meandering article is, and to get back to Tim’s original question, is that the answer of how we can tell the difference between “nasty” and “non-nasty” “chemical” fertilizers and/or pesticides is, How important is this question to you?
And, can we use that question to start asking even more questions?
What do you want on your plants? Is it less harmful for you to use Roundup? Are you sure you know what it will do to your body and your environment? Do you have the time and inclination to grow things without using industrially produced pesticides? Could you do something differently, or more easily?
This is the Path of Radical Inquiry, and it’s an awesome way to help grow plants. I hope you’ll always ask questions!
About the author:
Jeremy Puma is a student of Permaculture. He writes things, cooks stuff, and can also be found at StrangeAnimal.net and Magirology.net.
