March/April 2002 Excerpt

Excerpt from America’s Second Green Revolution’ by Carole Ottesen

Three years ago, Mitch Baker, owner of a Maryland garden center, braced himself for the economic hit that would come with his decision “to take hard chemicals off the shelf and replace them with organics.” But when spring came, he was happy to find business went on as usual.

Baker’s experience is not unique. Across North America “green” gardening products are increasingly the choice of thoughtful home gardeners. We have become mindful of our environment and open to the discoveries that come almost daily, as plant and soil scientists delve deeper into earth’s mysteries.

IGNORING THE WEB OF LIFE

Current research is exploring a largely uncharted territory of our ecosystem—the soil. Teeming with the infinitesimal organisms that biologist E.O. Wilson called “the little things that run the world,” the soil, we are learning, is the foundation of plant life, but chemicals can destroy soil life and shut down the chain of interactions that affects all life.

As scientists add newer pieces to the environmental puzzle, the picture emerging is of an endlessly complex land organism with interdependent parts—from sub-microscopic fungi in the soil to the tallest, most majestic trees, all functioning in delicate, interconnected balance. It is the same picture painted over a half century ago, by conservationist Aldo Leopold, who wrote in A Sand County Almanac: “The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.” He foresaw that no part of the ecosystem was too small to matter, that all worked together in one grand, symbiotic relationship. He warned against destroying any part of it:

 “The last word in ignorance is the man who… would discard seemingly useless parts. To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent thinking.”

In 1949, when Leopold’s Almanac was published, the country wasn’t ready for it. World War II had ended in an Allied victory and the future stretched out ahead, golden with the promise of “better living through chemistry.” Resources seemed limitless, faith in American can-do was absolute; there could be no insect pest that chemistry would not conquer and no disease for which a silver bullet could not be found. In the callow postwar euphoria of the 1950s, Leopold’s message was out of sync and went largely unheeded.

A rude awakening at mid-century

Perhaps the first blow to the hubris of the ’50s was disenchantment with DDT, considered a panacea for insect pests. In 1962, Rachel Carson targeted DDT in Silent Spring for endangering the country’s symbol, the American bald eagle. Residues of the chemical stored in the body, she wrote, interfered with birds’ egg shell production, causing eggs to break during incubation. Banning DDT became a rallying cry for environmentalists. Outlawed in 1972, DDT took the rap while other pesticides proliferated. It is estimated that 75,000 toxic chemicals have been introduced into the environment in the last 50 years.

“Despite a tenfold increase in insecticide use in the United Sates since 1945,” wrote Howard-Yana Shapiro in Gardening for the Future of the Earth, “crop loss due to insects has doubled…it is estimated that less than 0.1 percent of insecticides applied actually reaches the target pests.” Not only were insecticides not doing the job, insecticides and herbicides poisoned birds and animals, polluted lakes and rivers, depleted the ozone layer, and turned up suspicious links to disease in humans.

The application of chlordane, a pesticide used against termites, precipitated auto-immume and other serious illnesses in adults and children. Chlordane was banned by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in March 1988, but not before it had been used to treat over 30 million homes . In 1992, scientists recognized methyl bromide, an agricultural pesticide, as an ozone-depleting substance. In the last few years, garden pesticides containing chlorpyrifos and diazinon became subject to EPA phaseout schedules. In the late 1960s, pesticide problems elicited a search for non-toxic solutions. IPM (integrated pest management), a new way of handling insect problems, became widespread. Its premise that some insect damage was tolerable was revolutionary for the time. “It’s been promulgated by the chemical industry that if you see something spray it—get rid of it immediately,” says Mike Shoup, owner of the Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, Texas. “We think plants have to be perfect all the time and it’s wrong.”
IPM dictated that chemicals only came into play if damage were truly unacceptable. Moreover, IPM required that pests be identified, and that the least possible amount of pesticide be applied at the moment in the insect’s life cycle when it would be most efficacious but, ideally, when it avoided killing beneficial insects. In short, IPM dictated that agricultural and horticultural professionals understand more and work smarter.

Today, many home gardeners practice IPM. “The line between organic gardening and IPM has begun to blur,” says Scott Aker, IPM Specialist at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., because “many of the newest pesticides coming on the market are, strictly speaking, organic.”

One of these is neem oil, derived from the seeds of the tropical evergreen neem tree (Azadirachta indica). It is non-toxic to mammals, birds, and beneficial insects.

GARDENING BECOMES CHIC

The development of new, environmentally safe gardening products coincided with a burgeoning of American interest and involvement in gardening in the 1980s. “In 1983, retail sales of garden products totaled $11.9 billion,” says Nancy Flinn, former director of public relations for the National Gardening Association. “In 1987, the number had grown to $17.5 billion.”
“By the late 1980s, gardening had become the nation’s number one outdoor leisure activity,” says Flinn, citing numbers tallied in a 1987 Gallup poll,“and was more popular than swimming, bicycling, or jogging.” In March, 1987, USA Today ran a five-day feature on gardening, calling it “The New Yuppie Sport.” “Urbanites are Finding Gardening Chic” read an April, 1988, front-page headline in The New York Times.

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