A web campaign has scuttled a joint promotional deal launched last week by the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden and the Creation Museum, which promotes a strict interpretation of the biblical version of how life began.
South Korean artist Myoung Ho Lee encourages viewers to see trees in a new way by photographing each one against an enormous backdrop of canvas in the landscape.
“Trees are attractive objects in that they enable people to think philosophically and appreciate aesthetically. But too often, we don’t recognize the value of ordinary mundane objects around us. Seeing trees in a refreshing way or restoring the value of trees is to awaken all beings on earth in my work,” he told The Morning News.
It’s telling that while China’s first Great Wall was built to hold back warrior horsemen from Central Asia, its new Green Wall is designed to counteract human-caused climate change.
Fifty years of forest cutting have left few trees to the block ferocious sandstorms that have pushed the Gobi Desert southward, ever closer to Beijing. According to a new study, the Green Wall, a 70-year project to plant a 2,800-mile shelterbelt of trees, could lead to an increase in precipitation of up to 20 percent and decrease the temperature in the area. The project also will improve relative humidity and soil moisture, and reduce prevailing winds. It is expected to be an international model for dealing with the hotter and drier conditions expected due to climate change.
Ilka Halso’s Museum of Nature, where forests and rivers are preserved under glass.
Immacolata, my Italian grandmother, swore by marsala. When she’d work up a sweat digging in the garden, she’d come inside and take a swig of the wine, a traditional aperitif in southern Italy. When we’d get coughs, she’d boil down some red table wine with a dollup of honey and let us sip the resulting concoction. Don, my (non-Italian) husband, called the stuff “hocus pocus” until we convinced him to try it one night when he was hacking away with bronchitis. He slept like a baby.
These days science is providing some vindication for the Italian cure-all. First, researchers cracked the “French paradox” — why people who live on fois gras, cheese, and butter don’t die en masse from heart attacks. They drink red vin with all that fatty food, of course. Then came the news that red wine may lower prostate and lung cancer risk, and improve liver health. Now we learn that the polyphenols in red wine may also ward off Alzheimers by blocking the formation of proteins that build the toxic plaques believed to destroy brain cells.
Salut’, as Immacolata would say.
Polyphenols are found in high concentrations in tea, cocoa, nuts, berries, and other plant foods as well as wine.
A dissenting view. Crux of the argument:
“In the United States, a 2007 analysis found that transporting food from producers to retailers accounted for only 4 percent of greenhouse emissions related to food. According to a 2000 study, agriculture was responsible for 7.7 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In that study, food transport accounted for 14 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture, which means that food transport is responsible for about 1 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”
Calling all plant lovers this election week! Now that a desire for fundamental change seems to be sweeping the country, we should be pushing for a radical makeover of the White House landscape. Coddled with water, fertilizers, and pesticides and designed according to fussy, outdated, and ecologically destructive notions of beauty, this garden is a national disgrace. Enter the Great White House Garden Makeover Contest and make horticultural history!
Brooklyn Botanic Garden traces the history of the site: “When George Washington and Pierre Charles L’Enfant mapped out the ‘President’s Park,’ in 1791, Washington sketched reflecting pools and terraced gardens buttressing an executive residence to rival Versailles.” This hoity-toity approach to horticulture has continued to this day, with a brief interlude when Andrew Jackson actually got his hands dirty weeding the garden after naked morning dips in the Potomac.
So, what should be done with these 18.2 acres of hallowed ground today? The Rodale Institute exhorted the Clinton administration to ban synthetic pesticides in the Rose Garden and build a compost bin. Restaurateur Alice Waters offered to create an organic garden for the White House chefs. The White House Organic Farm Project has an online petition calling on the 44th President to oversee the planting of an organic farm on the grounds of the nation’s First Home.
What would you do if you had your druthers? Send me your ideas by December 1, 2008. I’ll post the best ones online. Here’s how to reach me.
This photo of a lily of the valley petal magnified 1,300 times won the 2008 Small World photomicrography competition. The other winners are pretty spectacular, too.
Java lovers take note: For better or worse, our passion for espresso, latte, or plain old cups of morning joe has had a dramatic effect on landscapes around the world — today, coffee is grown in at least 16 of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots — not to mention the people whose livelihoods depend on the stuff. In an effort to boost production, growers have increased their use of pesticides and are relying less on shade trees, which offer habitat for birds and other environmental benefits. Given increasing evidence of the health benefits of coffee consumption, this trend is likely to intensify, despite the fact that these practices make the crop more vulnerable to erratic weather.
No, this isn’t a plea for coffee hounds to switch to tea or hot chocolate (the same trends have been detected among producers of these crops). But it is a reminder that we can help protect the land and its people in coffee-growing regions by buying shade-grown products. According to the latest evidence, in an article published in the October issue of BioScience, sustainable farming that employs shade trees may improve coffee crops’ resistance to the temperature and precipitation extremes that climate change is expected to trigger. You can find a pdf to the full article here.
For years, we’ve been told to plan our daily diet by thinking food groups and calories. Now we’re told to choose by color. ”Orange and green, definitely, we should have something from these groups every day,” Lilan Cheung, director of health promotion and communication with the Harvard School of Public Health, told an AP reporter. “Purple or blue, dark green and orange. Reds don’t need to be part of the daily diet mix but they should be eaten frequently.” Turns out the disease-fighting phytochemicals and antioxidants we hear so much about are often natural plant pigments — the carotenoids that make carrots orange, for example, or the anthocyanins that give beets their lipstick hues.
