THE SHOW SO FAR

wild kale

Kale seems to be one of the most vigorous food plants in the world. It’s tremendously good for you and it kind of just grows itself. Once it’s planted it keeps seeding itself out. Here on the west coast, it provides people with fresh green vegetables all winter long. Kale tastes better in the winter because the leaves concentrate sugars which also serve as a natural antifreeze. Former students of mine have been scattering kale seed from Cortes Island, all over the Lower East Side of New York which is now growing into kale that people can eat. I found the wild specimen in the picture, growing beside a parking lot in Victoria BC. Kale is a wonderful vegetable symbiot. The kale varieties in my backyard are constantly cross-breeding and seem to self organize and *evolve* to deal with drought, pests and exposure to cold. Raoul Robinson in his radical book Return to Resistance, promotes this kind of anarchic botanical promiscuity as a way of inducing *horizontal resistance* in agricultural crops. Robinson’s breeding technique of *recurrent mass selection* creates a high degree of genetic variability from a large gene pool within the crop to allow it to adapt to continually changing conditions of pests and disease. This is the exact opposite of traditional plant breeding, which aims to create uniform genetics, and characteristics. There is a vigorous movement of plant hackers who are busy working against the *great homogenization* of our food supply being instigated by multi-national agro-business. One of the foremost of these is “open source” seedsman J.L Hudson (aka David Theodoropoulos). His catalog features amazing seeds but also his fascinating and insightful writings on biodiversity, for example his manifesto:

We recognize that the biological diversity of the Earth and the diversity of all cultivated species are the common heritage of all humanity and we REJECT the theft of the biological commons by individuals, corporations and governments through plant patenting, gene patenting, Plant Breeder’s Rights (PBR), Plant Variety Protection (PVP), or any other form of intellectual property applied to living things. We reject life patenting in any form . . .

The parallel to the Open Source software movement is striking here and it would seem reasonable that botanical otaku and computer hackers form alliances against the privatization of the genetic and intellectual commons. (More on this to come . . .) Hudson’s explicitly “uncopyrighted, all rights released” catalog reflects his attitude towards open source botanical germplasm. Maybe he should put a Creative Commons license on it. It’s worth sending away for his catalog just for the narrative! Here is a sample entry:

‘POMEGRANATE’ Spectacular brilliant deep orange-red flowers 1-2″ across, sometimes reaching 4″, from succulent scarlet buds. satiny crinkled petals surround gold-tipped stamens. The apple to grapefruit-sized red fruits are filled with seeds, each surrounded by red, juicy pulp resembling a mass of rubies when the fruit splits open. Tree or shrub 6 -25 feet, with attractive glossy narrow foliage, bronze when young. W. Asia. Grown for its delicious fruit since ancient times, it is mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus, and by Homer, Pliny and Theophrastus. Wine was made from the juice in Ancient Egypt, and used to make ‘Grenadine’ today. The Greeks believed it to have been brought by Aphrodite, and the fruit is to have kept Proserpina from returning to earth, hence the origin of winter. The Phoenicians and Syrians used the fruit and bark for tanning. It was grown in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and it is the national emblem of Spain. Black ink can be made from the rind, and red cloth dye from the flowers. The wood is hard. Can live several hundred years. The rind and bark are well known as vermifuges, and used against dysentery.

Perhaps most endearingly, Hudson (like me) hates telephones, warning potential callers that: “I HAVE NO BUSINESS OR PERSONAL TELEPHONE . . . If your ‘phone doesn’t ring, its me!”
While on the topic of the politics of food, Richard Manning has written an insightful article The Oil We Eat – Following the Food Chain back to Iraq in the February 2004 edition of Harper’s Magazine. In it, Manning does a damning energy audit of the effect of grain agriculture throughout the ages and describes how our reliance on petro-chemical based nitrogen fertilizers is pushing us toward the precipice of environmental and geopolitical catastrophe.

Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen -the wellspring of fertility relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban groundskeeper -that we should fear most

Tofu comes across as looking pretty bad in his analysis and Manning winds up making a good case for bagging the occasional venison.
Maybe it’s because of the New Year but I’m becoming more and more obsessed with how to *find my stuff* and then to see *how it’s all connected.* Surfing the net has yielded some interesting approaches:
Geisha asobi recently posted this interesting link to the home page of the Japanese design firm, Intentionallies. The page is a simple flash animation that scatters little picture cards of the firm’s many projects, at random on the screen. It gives the appearance of the way letters get scattered on a floor beside a mail slot in a door. Every time you log onto the page, the cards are scattered in a different way, revealing new ones and covering old ones -some completely, some partially-drawing one’s attention to different cards every time. Click the card and you’re learning about the project. It’s a simple trick, but extremely beguiling. The Intentionallies site is one of the closest approximations I have seen, to the way my own brain works. I only stay interested in things if I can keep shuffling the deck. Of course for the left-brain types, there are conventional sorting options available on the site also.
Geek artist, Beverly Tang uses Movable Type’s *categories* and *related entries* features in a very efficacious way. Check out her tree art section for some interesting links, particularly arborsculptor Richard Reames’s work, who grows his own furniture from grafted trees.
While on the topic of trees and the sustainable use thereof, BBC World’s ultra-cool design show, Dreamspaces, recently did a little item on gridshell buildings, made of sustainably harvested timber. The featured building -the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex England- is constructed of an intricate, computer designed grid (made of eco-harvested oak strips), that is assembled flat on top of a mass of scaffolds. Upon completion, the scaffolds are removed and the building just kind of magically *slumps* into shape. This deceptively simple technique can enclose large spaces with structures that are light, airy and *organic*. I’d *love* to live in a gridshell structure . . . Gridshells can even be made out of stiffened paper tubes. The presenter, architect Charlie Luxton, advocates the development of gridshell constructed shopping malls, as an ecologically sustainable alternative to the ultra-tedious big box units that now dominate the field. It might take a while before we start seeing gridshell structures in the wastelands of North American suburbia but Britain seems to be well on its way.