Feature Article July 24, 2003
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Beauty By cruelty
Each spring I faithfully buy hanging flower baskets, resurrect bulbs and perennials, and plant annual flowers. The yard looks great until about mid- summer, when all seem to lose their bright blooms and blend into the green vegetation roundabout. Those wiser about gardening than I suggest snapping the blossoms off as soon as flower heads are fertilized and wither. Throw the faded blooms on the compost heap and let the cycle begin again. The plant struggles to replace the flower since the basic purpose of reproduction has not been completely fulfilled. I know this is a fundamental truth for colourful gardening, but I can philosophically justify my laziness during the hot days of July.
Those flowers have given me great joy; snapping the heads off and tossing them to compost is hardly a fitting reward for the pleasure they have provided. Can you really enjoy the pleasure of fine company then discard it just because it fades a bit from its former glory? If this were the case, most marriages would not last beyond the honeymoon, after which reality begins maturing the bloom in front of formerly love-struck eyes.
We humans do love to interfere with Mother Nature and the procedures she has evolved over many years. We geld the horses to make them more docile for doing our work, unmindfully destroying their reproducing ability and introducing psychological trauma that must go hand in hand with such a deed. Just imagining it makes me shudder. Steers produce better beef than bulls that have other thoughts than eating, and a capon is far tastier to humans than a randy rooster strutting through a barnyard. Our comfort and taste are more important than natural selection by breeding. It becomes even scarier as we chemically alter life forms for our convenience. The final results from genetically modified plants and animals are still unknown, but interim reports are disturbing.
We are even penning the fish of the sea and stuffing them with hormones and antibiotics to make them grow larger faster. We scoop the few remaining wild ones in deep massive nets that devastate the ocean bottom, wantonly killing other creatures caught up in wholesale gathering. In procuring food we have evolved from individual pursuit and conquering - a procedure that limits the harvest to our immediate need - to indiscriminate harvesting. There are pursuers and pursued in life, but it seems to me that the pursued are getting the rotten end of the deal. We have let our brains and ingenuity become too powerful in the pursuit and are destroying life instead of improving it. We are the ultimate consumer and, in our opinion, the highest rung on the food ladder. Does that give us the right to sacrifice beauty and lives for our excessive comfort and pleasure?
We have to live so what is the alternate? I wish I knew. It is easy to criticize and to find fault but far more difficult to make constructive suggestions. At the rate this world's resources are being wastefully consumed we have to do something. Is it sufficient that we little guys start distinguishing between satisfying our needs and extravagantly fulfilling our 'wants'? The big guys we elect to govern us soon lose touch with reality and make little effort to set an example in their own spendthrift lives and efforts.
This musing has detoured from my laziness to snap off flower heads, but then perhaps a little less ambition by more people would naturally slow down life and we could all be better off while surrounded by less artificially-induced beauty.
