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Cultural definitions of beauty devalue diversity

by Roselyn Heil, FSPA

The thesaurus describes beautiful as attractive, good looking, lovely, magnificent, with ugly and awful as antonyms. All these words describe a response according to the eye of the beholder. The diversity of the beholden and the beholder has a wide range.

We live in a culture that prides itself on neatness. But what is neatness? I think of the time I overheard a conversation between a young man and his father. The young man had recently bought his first house. He was speaking of his lawn. "It's not nice, there are all different kinds of grasses growing in it. After I mow it's all nice and even, but the grass grows back at different rates and it looks awful so fast. I have to dig it up and plant all one kind of grass." His father simply listened.

I am reminded of a 2½ mile walk to Cascade Lake that I led in the wilderness of Yellowstone through a series of different micro-ecosystems. We began in a forest that was 98 percent lodgepole pine. I invited the people on the walk to reflect on the advantages of an all-lodgepole forest. Mentioning our lawns at home always got the conversation going. I said, "How beautiful a lawn is when it is all the same kind of grass. We get rid of the dandelions and all the weeds. It looks like velvet. It looks cared for, beautiful." I came to expect the silence when inquiring about the disadvantage of the monocultural (98%) lodgepole pine forest. So, I primed the discussions with a synonym for "all the same kind"; ghetto. Disease spreads fast. Negative characteristics are intensified when a people of the same culture all live together in one place. This is true with all the living.

A few members created a new vegetable garden at Villa St. Joseph. The garden is shown here just after it ws first tilled. Photo by Rita Feeney, FSPA

We continued our hike into an intensely burned forest. It became an opportunity of emotions waiting to explode. Yellowstone had experienced historical fires throughout the park the previous summer. "Everything is dead," "ugly," "destroyed." The summer began with finding only one plant in a 12 inch diameter circle-if we were lucky. By the end of the summer, there were often three, including magenta-colored fireweed. Five years later it was easy to find 10-13 different kinds of plants including young pine trees.

Along the edges of the stream we would always find the most different kinds of plants. Through our discussions we became aware that the most varied kinds of animals choose to live along streams-including us. Many major cities begin and grow by rivers. These places along the rivers no longer have rich diversity of life like we find in Yellowstone. We people have a way of removing those plants and animals that we abandon as "ugly and worthless."

So what has this to do with our flower or vegetable garden or lawns? The Cascade Lake walk only spoke of diversity of plants. However, an integral part of any kind of garden is the creatures who walk or fly into the space and partake as food-including us. We people have a way of picking and choosing what animals and bugs are good and which ones are bad. We lump all insects together-bad. Well, except butterflies and maybe a few others. However, butterflies at one point in their life are "bugs." Considering that insects are the most abundant of animals, it's a good thing that spiders, birds, mammals and other insects eat insects. We often look to insecticides to simplify our gardening of rows of beans and tomatoes. Yet entomologists like Whitney Cranshaw say insecticides increase problems that can lead us to use other poisons. "Often the best strategy is simply to increase the biodiver-sity of your garden. Make an environment more complex and problems are less . . . ."

Certain types of plants provide shelter and breeding grounds for beneficial insects, thus increasing the naturally occurring populations. Allowing a corner of your garden to go a bit "weedy" invites the big-eyed bug. It is particularly fond of goldenrod, soybeans and pigweed. The big-eyed bug and its nymphs eat spider mites, aphids, leafhoppers, plant bugs, boll worms, tobacco budworms, whiteflies, soybean loopers and small caterpillars. They can eat up to 80 a day and a single nymph can eat as many as 1,600 spider mites before it becomes an adult.

Maintaining organic material in your garden soil by adding compost and leaf mulch creates a home for these friends of ours. Mulch also provides winter shelter and hiding places. Avoid excess soil tillage to protect any eggs laid in the soil.

I think Sister Sarah Hennessey is on to something much bigger when she speaks of one's personal journey of life; "Process is messy and long, sometimes ugly and heart-wrenching." Yet it is when we look into the heart of a life willing to go through all parts of the process of giving and receiving that we see beauty. Killing just one kind of bug is like unraveling one thread in the fabric of life. One thread that is woven in and out among all the other threads loosens the whole fabric. I propose that what is beautiful is that which we gaze upon with love and awe.

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