Article Contributed on: 6/16/2009 10:52:50 AM
It's been raining for a long time now, and staying cooler this spring than in the past 10 years or so, and if you're a gardener, you've seen the results....weeds that can be measured by the foot.
It's funny the way things work. The vegetables are sort of in stasis. They're coming up, and they are growing and blooming, but very slowly. They want that sunshine that we're barely seeing except in the morning. The thistles and nettles and bindweed are going gangbusters, growing at least an inch a day, making sure they have a good foothold by the time the summer sets in.
Sort of nature's idea of "sprawl." As far as the earth is concerned, I'm pretty sure it's good to have all those taproots breaking up the soil, and earthworms absolutely love dandilions and thistles, and can be found whenever you pull up the roots. Keeping the ground covered is good when there's drought. But we want those weeds out. We want the flowers that give us pretty blooms in a vase, and we want the vegetables, some of which absolutely cannot compete with weeds anywhere near them, so we dig and dig, and hoe and get them out of there, leaving the soil empty except for the pretty (flowers) and the useful (vegetables).
Then the hail comes, and the pretty and the useful are all ding'd up, and the landscape is pretty ugly. Those weeds that the gardener never got to, however, are just fine. Very hardy, very tough, and definitely survivors.
As we start dealing with issues closer to survival (the Treasury report for May indicated we borrowed the same amount of money to deal with May 2009 than we did for the entire year of 2007 - if this trend continues we are in for some serious difficulties in the months and years to come trying to pay all that off), nature may have some advice to offer.
Let the things that can be hardy and robust grow, even if they are uglier than what you're used to. Yes, urban sprawl can be ugly, but it is also an economic engine, one that allows some of the more exotic flowers (art museums, dance companies, theaters, etc.) the resources they need to survive, because they take a lot more attention and TLC. Sprawl came to be precisely because it was cheap, and it was possible for businesses to make more by resettling in places that weren't quite so manicured, where the land was affordable, and the rules and regulations less strident. The surge of economic benefits that came out of WWII came from several sources, not the least of which was having a workforce used to the rigors and self-discipline of the military, but the major factor was the interstate highway system and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that sprung up along those highways near major cities. Those businesses thrived and helped to pay off the significant costs of WWII.
We owe a lot to sprawl, but now it's considered too ugly to live. We've become a lot more like the hothouse flowers, unable to live in the presence of those ugly weeds. It requires too much effort to constantly fight for our place in the garden against invaders of the weed persuasion. We rely on others to make the weeds go away. Without a gardener, we are helpless.
We are the hothouse plants. We are no longer the adaptable, tough weeds that could immediately answer the call to arms when Pearl Harbor was bombed, that could turn the economy on a dime to create planes and tanks, and all the materials needed to bring a dictatorship to a halt. Our success in WWII came from moving together, volunteering to serve to protect the country, sacrificing for the cause, (those of us old enough to have parents who went through it know some things were just not available, and you had to live with that, and whining was not an option) and putting out our own hard earned dollars to buy war bonds.
Now, not only are we happy to have others volunteer to protect the country (regardless of the dangers of having a significant number of folks not working at their chosen profession unless there's a war), we don't want to buy bonds, we'd rather borrow money from foreign countries and take our chances with the dependencies that creates. We encourage one another to spend freely, thinking that helps the economy, when in fact, all it's doing is increasing our debt. Self-sacrifice is viewed as naive, even stupid, and even the thought that a draft might come back is horrifying. Of course, a lot of that is fueled by our developing understanding that the military is not being used for defense, but for manipulating our place in the world order, and few of us willingly will sacrifice our lives for that. Few of us are willing to actually work to keep our place in the garden by dint of our own efforts (adapting and toughening up so we can grow in spite of the weeds), we rely on the gardener to get it right.
But the gardener has to have enough time to be able to get to all the weeds that might come into our general area, to force them out by whatever means necessary, without, of course, marring our perfect blooms and spotless fruit. We are dependents of the gardener. If he goes on vacation, if he has a fight with his wife and pouts for a week, even if he gets the flu and can't get out there to fix things for us, we are hard put to do anything to defend ourselves against those tough, robust competitors that keep pushing at us, trying to grow when we're in their way.
The goal is to cover the soil so that the sun doesn't bake away the organisms that live there and that provide much of the growth impetus. The goal is to have greenery that will keep producing oxygen. When times get tough, the hothouse plants can't help much with that goal. When it's cool, they hold back, waiting for better weather; when there is drought, they wilt and die without constant attention.
I maintain we need to be more like the weeds. More able to defend ourselves economically without debt (even if it means being a bit uglier and less trendy than we'd like), more self-disciplined in how we spend our money (or if tax dollars, other people's money), less in need of perfect conditions in order to grow.
It's tough times in the garden, and this time, it's the economic equivalent to a drought. The gardener does not have control over all of the elements; he may be good, but he can't make it rain, and when he can't do it all, the weeds are always the survivors. The bindweed and the crabgrass stay green when the grass is baked dry. The oxygen is still being produced, and the ground is still being protected. When it's drough times in the garden, ugly is not too great a price to pay to keep the soil safe. When it's tough times in the economy, ugly is not too great a price to pay to get the economy back on its feet, and our children out of debt.
Small businesses are the weeds of the economic garden. They should be allowed to grow and flourish without the interference of government, micro-managers, or whining neighbors. Is having a sign in the window of a neighbor's home business too much to pay to have more income coming to the City? Is having a few more cars in your neighborhood when clients come to call on a small business too much to pay for an insurance policy that our City will be one of the survivors as our economy grinds under the wheels of excessive debt? Is allowing a retiree to rent a room to keep her home something that can't be tolerated?
Where is the harm? If a business is fraudulent, or cheating its clients, or not paying its taxes, then it's time for the government to take action, and it should have a good way for folks to report such problems. But just to stop our growth because something is ugly is self-destructive, as having a gardener who keeps all the weeds out when the sun is baking the soil dry is destructive, and in the end, the garden can't be sustained. A word to the County Commissioners, in the context of BuildSmart:" a gardener who won't plant anything that doesn't look like their absolute ideal of the perfect flower, in spite of the fact that it will take every waking moment to maintain, at the expense of the rest of the garden, is a poor gardener indeed.
While we talk about fostering a positive business environment in Boulder County, we are constantly dinging businesses with ever more strident rules, extending requirements, and pushing for more tax dollars, all of which keep them from succeeding. We encourage only the pretty flowers, the businesses who need money from our tax dollars to stay here, the ones who can't really make it on their own because they have a lot that they need from us in order to be productive. We only want the buildings that are "sustainable" by a dictionary definition steeped in the religion of environmental perfection -- not in the context of sustainable, as able to survive hale and hearty over many years. We discourage the little businesses, like someone fixing people's cars in their yard, people making clothing or weaving rugs at a home shop, music teachers, tutors, and a host of other folks that would have clients come to their homes, who could be contributing to our economy because some neighbor might whine. In some communities we don't allow people to rent rooms to boarders, unless they are in very strictly defined zoning areas, something that might just make it possible to keep their homes in times when forclosures are rampant, because some neighbor might feel uncomfortable, or there's a hardwired rule that can't be bent.
The drought is here. The gardener can't do everything. Let's just let the gardener do the basic stuff (in the garden, getting the water and keeping the weeds at bay that are right near the roses and leaving the weeds elsewhere to protect the soil; in the government, protecting us from fraud and danger, and ensuring our rights, and leaving the rest alone), and see if we can keep the soil from baking away out from under us. Our future is in danger if we continue along the path of the hothouse plant. It's time to adapt, stop whining, toughen up, and grow, or those debts will never be paid.