Gardening and Global Warming

Smugness about prevailing conditions begets uncomfortable exceptions.

---Robert Michael Pyle, Evergreen: Listening to the Land’s Heart

Just when you think you've figured things out…. Just when you decide what and where and how…. Just when you finish planning for every contingency, every climactic conundrum, every jot, tittle, iota, and mote that has been recorded about gardening in your neck of the woods….

The world changes.

Not one of us has escaped unusual and aberrant episodes of weather, regardless of where we live. Strangely warm winter days and oddly cool summer ones have puzzled even the best gardeners. It has always been so, but these peculiar anomalies seem to be occurring with increasing regularity. Soon there will be no norm.

Global warming has been offered up as the culprit. “Greenhouse gases” and “fossil fuels” along with a bevy of other phrases of the moment, are joining our lexicon. Yesterday, 07.07.07, the world-wide musical event called, “Live Earth,” sought to raise awareness of the issue, even beyond what one of its movers-and-shakers, Al Gore, and his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” had done throughout its Oscar run. Trumpets blared, cymbals crashed, and voices soared...all to announce what anyone who's stepped outside could tell you...it's getting warm out there.

So what’s a gardener to do?

To be sure we should join the rest of the world in changing light bulbs, reducing our carbon footprint, and reducing our dependence on fuels. But…as Gary Rosen wrote in, ‘More Light Than Heat: Why fretting about the weather won’t help preserve the climate.’ (The New York Times Magazine, 07.07.07), “Every temperature spike is not a portent of the apocalypse.”

Rosen admits to suffering from “global-warming fatigue,” and suggests that less emotion and more calculation should go into the analysis of the problem—fearing that a single-minded approach to it narrows thinking. His nearly heretical suggestion: put resources into discovering new crops and techniques for dealing with a warmer planet.

On the very same triple-seven day, my copy of ‘The Garden’ arrived from the Royal Horticultural Society (July, 2007 issue). In a small article in its ‘News’ section, it cites data from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew concluding that the growing season is a month longer than it was 100 years ago (despite Rosen’s assertion that, “[a]ctual global warming over the past century amounts to just over 1 degree Fahrenheit.”). Furthermore, 80% of species are blooming between 9 and 15 days earlier than they did 20 years ago.

So what’s a gardener to do?

RBG Kew responded to its findings by instituting a Mediterranean Festival (no indication of what Portugal, Spain, Italy and the other truly Mediterranean nations are doing with their presumably warming climate) complete with a sandy Mediterranean beach smack in the middle of the UK.

There is, after all, a silver lining to the somber forecast, particularly for those in four-season, temperate climates who dream of growing banana-belt plants. If climate is truly warming, and this isn’t just part of a cyclical spiking in temperature, our palate of plants should expand accordingly. The range of plants we can grow because of warmer temperatures is much greater than the fringe we will lose because it no longer gets cold enough.

So, as I am wont to say in lectures on plant adaptations, “Adapt or die.” Just as plants evolved to survive the sundry conditions nature tosses their way, gardeners will need to change their ways to outlast the challenges presented by a shifting climate.

In Wisconsin, where the temperature in a given year can range from -35 F. to 105 F. and watching the changing weather is a sport even more popular than the revered Packers, we used to say, “If you don’t like the weather, just hang around for five minutes.” That advice is now being heard in many parts of the country and in other parts of the world. The changes being wrought by global warming are anticipated to be long lasting--and are moving in only one direction.

So…what’s a gardener to do?

Minimize your negative impact on the environment. Our position as gardeners puts us in the forefront of those who should act responsibly. Another old saying, “Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.” THINK.

Think about what you can do in your garden to take advantage of a longer season. Enjoy the increased plant palate that this alleged catastrophe allows you to enjoy.

Think about your greater responsibilities. Some have suggested that there isn’t a way to stop what’s happening…only slow the rate of increase in temperatures. No one wants to forego all the “progress” civilization has achieved since it discovered fossil fuels. Radical change is unlikely on a personal as well as national basis. I’d have a hard time giving up my car and the government isn't likely to close its office buildings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Don’t add to the problem. Do SOMETHING to make a difference.

Seventy-five years ago Aldo Leopold wrote a prescient and prophetic paragraph applicable to our present day issue:

“I realize that every time I turn on an electric light, or ride on a Pullman, or pocket the unearned increment on a stock, or a bond, or a piece of real estate, I am 'selling out' to the enemies of conservation. When I submit these thoughts to a printing press, I am helping cut down the woods. When I pour cream in my coffee, I am helping to drain a marsh for cows to graze, and to exterminate the birds of Brazil. When I go birding or hunting in my Ford, I am devastating an oil field, and re-electing an imperialist to get me rubber. Nay more: when I father more than two children I am creating an insatiable need for more printing presses, more cows, more coffee, more oil, and more rubber, to supply which more birds, more trees, and more flowers will either be killed, or what is just as destructive, evicted from their several environments. "What to do? I see only two courses open to the likes of us. One is to go live on locusts in the wilderness, if there is any wilderness left. The other is surreptitiously to set up within the economic juggernaut certain new cogs and wheels whereby the residual love of nature, inherent even in 'Rotarians', may be made to recreate at least a fraction of those values which their love of 'progress' is destroying. A briefer way to put it is: if we want Mr. Babbitt to rebuild America, we must let him use the same tools wherewith he destroyed it. He knows no others."

(Leopold, Aldo, ‘Game and Wild Life Conservation’, The Condor, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1932), pp. 103-106).

He could have been writing about global warming.

The world will not end tomorrow or the next day. We are, however, changing it--and some of those changes are irreversible. Think and act.

In the meantime...GROW. Make it part of your contribution to garden. Planting and growing--even one little clay pot--makes a difference. That difference, like the butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world, will have a ripple effect.

Garden responsibly and with some awareness of the potential consequences of each horticultural decision and method you employ (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). Your world will be better for it.

Bananas anyone?

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