Spring in the Meadow of Mud and Mad Dreams
I went to see Kurt Vonnegut when I was 12 or 13 years old.
Like my own kids I read ravenously, having made the jump quickly from boy’s wilderness adventure stories only a couple of years earlier, to adult books…Salinger, D.T. Suzuki, Ezra Pound, Flannery O’Conner, August Derleth, William Burroughs (staggering to discover in a gritty Minneapolis used bookstore at such an age!), and especially Vonnegut who wrote with clear-eyed, unpretentious intellect, and easy to access humanity and human decency.
When I discovered Vonnegut would be speaking at a local college, my mom, through some secret miracle, thought to save up precious money that should have gone to groceries and bought me a ticket to go see him. It turned out to be an event that shaped everything I would go on to do afterward, including how we run this business.
Ambling shyly into an auditorium of adults on the event night, the sole kid in the room, I found a seat and waited for this person who loomed so mythically large in my imagination, nervously anticipating some kind of secret admission into a world of adult thought and culture, something more than my backwater river town life of Velveeta dinners and Toughskin jeans, basement apartments and an absent dad. But I also feared the evening might somehow turn around into a public tribunal or inquiry into why a kid was in the room. It was exhilaration and terror in equal measures.
And then the most profound thing I’d ever witnessed up to that point in my life happened.
Vonnegut, made his way towards the stage after an extended and unmemorable introduction and stumbled going up the stairs.
He didn’t fall exactly. He caught himself -- sort of -- at the last second. But it was a solid and impossible not to notice stumble, one where you couldn’t help but worry about whether he twisted a joint, badly bruised a shin, or would be able to recalibrate his thoughts to monologue in front of an audience that just saw the stumble happen. A slight bit more forward lean, and he would have fallen on his face.
It was so singularly mesmerizing to witness, that I’ve long since forgotten whatever Vonnegut read or talked about that night, but the stumble has stayed with me. For some 90-minutes he held the podium, then upon finishing, navigated a precarious trip-hazard microphone cord, and walked to the edge of the stage where he pulled out a bouquet of flowers that had been tucked inside his sleeve the entire evening, and tossed it into the audience.
I will always love Vonnegut for his stumble.
He apparently was a clumsy man, prone to this sort of thing. In fact it’s what killed him – a tumble on the front stairs of his home decades later and a resulting head injury. And yet he braved the precarity of stairs his whole life until the end.
I’ve gone on to construct my own smaller, less and esteemed adult life of writing books (hardly as good as his) and speaking on stages, but I have no business doing either. I’m a sort of dilettante hick who by dumb-luck in a much younger age wandered into a private fascination with pollinator ecology, only to have it become a global issue a few years later on. By accident I knew things other people suddenly wanted to know, so it became a career. I got fired from most of my earlier custodial jobs for ineptitude, and became a bee ecologist instead.
What I learned from Vonnegut’s stumble however was the holy grace of being a natural, clumsy, faltering thing -- and being true to that nature in front of the whole goddamn judgmental world.
I stumble at everything. I use the wrong words in conversation leaving people bewildered. I take blurry and out of focus photos. I spill food on my shirt. I chip and scratch expensive things. I stumble in graphic and embarrassing ways – every kind.
And my meadows are full of weeds. But I both pull those weeds and take pride in them.
You should too.
We are under constant assault by false visions of utopian bliss: AI-enhanced dreams of perfect lives and perfect landscapes, perfect products, filtered photos of a higher status and higher pleasure – everything just out of reach.
It’s constant burden to carry around the lonely sense that your life has singularly run amok -- that it’s just you stumbling out of a messy house in the morning, stumbling late (again) towards work, past the wind-scattered garbage, past some broken soul, past the twisted chainlink fencing and dingy furniture abandoned alongside the road, all the while your phone continuously alerts you to some new personal dilemma. It’s a constant lonely burden to walk around daydreaming about that someday beyond your own current real-world hassles when you’ll get to be the one photographed in some magnificent spot -- maybe one of your own making -- with the rest of the chaotic world cropped out of the image.
It’s a grift. All of it.
And it’s a grift that will certainly, and immediately show up if you start poking around looking for information on natural landscaping. Social media and the broader internet is rife with doctored photos of perfect and harmonious outdoor ecologies, of people who present themselves as having unlimited time and health and money and no other commitments than gardening and meadow-making, with their monetized and sped-up pollinator habitat video success stories.
Much of the commercial “natural landscape products” sector is guilty of this: We've noticed another native seed business that obviously had a robot write all of their product descriptions – replete with digital fever dreams of imagined plant and pollinator “facts.” Meanwhile Facebook serves up photo-ads of “flowering lawn seed mixes” comprised entirely of non-existent, AI-imagined flower species.
If your own ecological endeavors don’t measure up to the mass hallucinations of attention-thieves and internet schemes, please know that ours don’t either; we track mud everywhere and sometimes accidentally kill plants and creatures we want to protect. Weeds take over and need constant fighting back. Rabbits eat everything. Once glorious lupines look brown and skeletal in the dormant season. Blackberries entangle the hedgerows. In the kitchen garden all the greens bolted and got aphids, while blight hit the potatoes and they rotted in the ground. Everything is a stumble.
But in the long intervals between those stumbles, your work of poking, prodding and pulling at things in the soil is the great authorship of your own existence. The seed you plant today in a modest and messy space will make a plant that makes ten thousand more seeds over its span of life, some of which will certainly escape into a far distant future, one beyond our own ability to envision. Some of the bugs and voles and songbirds that find momentary rest around your own skeletal dormant season lupine stems will produce great dynasties of their own kind, persisting through dramas we can’t conceive of, emerging in some cases centuries onward as wholly new species. I find this all infinitely more remarkable than the polished artificial ecologies attempting to steal your time, and money, and righteous sense of your own good work. Whatever you are doing to make a bit more nature – at any scale – messy or not, is an act of unfathomable glory.
Own your stumbles. You have flowers up your sleeve.
-Eric Lee-Mäder
In the Seedhouse
The current rhythm of our ramshackle 150-year old workshop space is frenetic as ever. There’s a million things to clean and pack and label and ship. Order processing can take up to a week sometimes (Thank you for your understanding!). That said, we try to add new things all the time. Here’s look at some things in stock now that are new, seasonally timely, or back in inventory:
Spring-Seeding Meadow Mix (mostly for the Pacific Northwest): It is still possible to plant a meadow for 2025. If you got waylaid by the fall/winter planting season, but have a site ready to plant right now, then check out this vivid, exuberant, and fast-establishing seed mix. It’s available in variable quantities based on how big your planting area is, so even if you only have a spare 10’ x10’ flower bed, you can still create an incredible little pollinator meadow right now.
California Native Wild Lawn: By request, we’ve recently developed a low-growing flowering lawn seed mix for California. In this case low growing is about 12-inches when blooming and un-mowed. The origins for this formulation come from Eric’s Xerces Society years where his team trialed seed mixes across the state for more than a decade, evaluating the performance of different native plants in combination with each other. It's not a mix with the durability to withstand football games or horse racing, but it’s pretty sturdy and can be walked on periodically. More importantly it doesn’t require precious irrigation water beyond initial establishment, and can be mowed down during the dry season to reduce flammable biomass. It’s a fire-wise, water-wise, bee and butterfly-producing meadow mix that you can plant in a residential setting. And it’s stunning to look at.
Owl’s Clover (Castilleja exserta): Not a true clover, yet this is quite the spectacular California and southern Oregon wildflower – a short statured annual paintbrush, and hemi-parasite of other plants (possibly Yarrow, Eriophyllum, and various grasses). Owl’s clover produces wildly magenta-colored blossoms and is probably hardy as far north as southern Vancouver Island as a native garden plant (although it’s unlikely to persist without periodic replanting in cool climates).
Canary Violet (Viola praemorsa): This charming, diminutive yellow wildflower has a nicely widespread distribution across much of western North America. It’s equally happy in damp meadows as it is in rocky outcroppings when there are some springs, seeps, or occasional meltwater. Possibly the most habitat-adaptable of our native violets, this is also a caterpillar host plant for many of our strikingly beautiful western Frittilary butterflies.
Creek Clover (Trifolium obtusiflorum): This is possibly one of our least common native west coast clovers, largely displaced by invasive species and poor land management. Despite this, it’s a quite adaptable species adored by bumble bees, various spring-flying Lycaenidae butterflies, and beautiful dun-colored Anthophra bees with their mesmerizing green-eyes. Check out the fascinating fringed foliage on this soft and lush plant.
Salish Blue (x Tritipyrum aaseae): After an extended absence, we have this splendid perennial grain crop developed by Washington State University back in stock. True to its name, Salish Blue produces gorgeous blueish kernels that are excellent for pancakes and other quick breads. Tolerant of soggy winters, slightly saline soils, and dry maritime summers, this genetically complex wheatgrass lives for multiple years, and can grow under semi-wild conditions. It’s something between a domestic grain crop and a wild grass.
Ramps (Allium tricocuum): Not a Northwest native, but one of the most esteemed North American wild food plants. We planted ramps in our forestland a few years ago and have been impressed by their adaptability. They are shy and slow growing plants, and they need deciduous tree cover to allow for spring sunlight and summer shade. These are fine traits for a forest garden, naturally preventing their spread beyond where we want them. And they are a plant that many more people could be growing for their kitchen or market garden. If you have a small alder thicket or a grove of big leaf maples, you can probably grow a few ramps beneath them.
Daggerleaf Rush (Juncus ensiflorus): This is a quite endearing graminoid with its large copper-colored seed heads perched atop electric-green stems -- certainly as showy as any colorful wildflower of similar stature – it’s even better when mixed in and among other plants with its wild shape and texture. At first glance the statuesque posture and form of this rush is obvious, but behold the diversity of small herbivores that live in and around this species – the tiny thrips and leafhoppers – the larger grasshoppers. Now behold the sleek and terrifically fast predatory wasps and stealthy spiders that make their life in pursuit of those herbivores. Now behold the thrushes and bluebirds that perch above the rushes, momentarily diving into the vegetation to catch a wasp or spider. Plants like this are foundational to everything. Prefers wet soil.
Asian Pioneer Vegetables: The great open secret of any vegetable is that the closer to home that it’s grown, the better it tastes. Because Asian vegetables are less common in U.S. grocery stores, even the basic staples like fresh edamame or daikon mostly come from a long way away, and have spent a lot of time in storage. If you’ve come to despise these vegetables, it’s no surprise. But grow these crops in your home garden, and they are something entirely different: they taste of pure life…vital, wholesome, and delightful in their fresh, clean-tasting nutrient-dense way. For us, after long days at the farm or seed shop, dinner is often centered around these things: a humble miso stew awash in green things with kimchi on the side, or a quickly tossed together okonomiyaki of garden vegetables and foraged things. All of which is to say, these are the kind of nourishing and cheerful basic kitchen staples that sustain us every day, and sustained people before us -- entire earlier generations of Pacific Northwest Asian and blended farmer families – people who brought their strawberries and tree fruit to market in the city, but who ate mizuna and lush pickled turnips at home. These crops are an untold and overlooked regional legacy and worthy of everyone having in their backyard garden, and if you do, it will change your outlook on these excellent foods. Sturdy and highly storable hakusai cabbage, traditional-type sweet Kuroda carrots, semi-wild garlic chives, 50-pound Sakurajima daikon radishes from Kyushu, and more. A common denominator in most of our Asian vegetable crops is long shelf life, exceptional dual-use fresh eating and pickling traits, and extended season cropping that produces fresh food into cool seasons, and sometimes over multiple years.
Large-Headed Clover (Trifolium macrocephalum): Every so often, an exquisite high-elevation wildflower turns out to be decently adapted to life in the lowlands, especially when some of its basic habitat features (such as rocky screes, and a bit of meltwater) can be replicated to a reasonable degree. Large-headed clover, with it’s bold 1+ inch wide “pom-pom” flowers is one of the plants. Eschewing rich garden soils and tender care, this spectacular flower is happiest when planted in rocks and protected from rabbits. Nipping animals and aggressive grass neighbors are its nemesis – we’re planting this as a green roof species on our bee house.
Prairie Shooting Star (Dodecatheon pulchellum): Of our western shooting stars – this is possibly the most widespread species – occurring nearly everywhere left of the Rocky Mountain crest. Comically beautiful flowers, and a caterpillar food plant for some of our exceptionally beautiful small blue Lycaenid butterflies.
Slimleaf Onion (Allium amplectens): There’s much to love about our native onions – their multi-decade longevity. Their herbivore resistance. Their edibility, drought tolerance, and cheerful existence under harsh circumstances. All of this is certainly true for slimleaf onion. Plant it in neglected gravel beds that are soggy all winter and sun-baked all summer, it prefers such locations! Surround it with grasses and in time it will rise up and through them declaring itself with luminous spherical flowers that resemble miniature comets.
Seaside Plantain (Plantago maritima): Sometimes called “goose tongue” for the long, slender leaves, this saline tolerant native plantain naturally appears along the coast at the highwater mark (although it can grow in many other conditions). Like sea samphire (Salicornia) -- which it commonly co-occurs with – this is a sublime wild perennial vegetable. Eat it fresh, or flash sauteed. It’s a bit like a salty green bean, ridiculously packed with nutrients. It can be periodically trimmed for harvest, and allowed to continuously regrow. And it also freezes very well. This is one of those potentially great specialty market plants that nobody grows.
Watercress (Nasturtium officinale): Watercress isn’t a native plant, but it basically retains its wildness, even under cultivation where it quickly adapts to random muddy and poorly drained sites – while it enjoys flowing chalk streams, it’s also happy with much more modest surroundings. Esteemed as a status food, watercress is also nutrient dense, and a lot easier to grow for home use than most people realize -- even adapting to containers and indoor windowsills.
Elkhorn Clarkia (Clarkia pulchella): Displaying flamboyant antler-shaped flower petals, elkhorn clarkia is plant at home in dry open slopes, and in the sun-dappled understory of western pine forests. Easy to grow, and adaptable – if you live anywhere in the west outside of extreme dryland deserts – you can probably grow this showy annual. Very good as a cut flower, and the plants are caterpillar hosts for several of our almost impossibly large and showy moth species. Splendid in every way.
Bog Birdsfoot Trefoil (Hosackia pinnata): This is not the common invasive birdsfoot trefoil, but rather it is a very different thing altogether – a plant of ornate pinwheel flowers, of numerous butterfly associates, and a preference for wet places such as rain gardens and stream embankments. Return it to damp meadows and similar locations where it has been pushed out over the decades by invasive species and over-abundant deer; establish it in bioswales, wetlands, and water gardens between rushes and sedges to add more color and pollinator life.
Short Season Vegetables: Going forward, most of our expanding vegetable seed stock is going to focus on reliable short season, cool climate crops. To that end, we’re happy to have in stock now for spring planting (in addition to our Asian standards): Fort Vancouver Yellow Pear Tomatoes – a super prolific giant of a plant that is a tough, tenacious, and generous producer, Golden Bantam 8-Row Sweet Corn – an 1890s heirloom producing sturdy, compact plants and reliable dinner-plant sized ears, Käferbohnen Scarlet Runner Beans – a quick climber that likes growing along warm, sunny walls where it forms some of the most beautiful flowers and seeds of any bean (an Austrian-type selection of a Mesoamerican plant), Mary Washington Asparagus – a zone 3 perennial more than a century old with excellent disease resistance, Purple Vienna Kohlrabi – a 150+ year old heirloom that features purple skin with white flesh that is prime for both fresh eating and for roasting like a potato (German-style), Minnesota Mini Melon – a darling softball-sized cantaloupe from the 1940s that grows quickly on short 3- to 5-foot long vines in less than 2-months(!), Wild Arugula – a ridiculously easy to grow spicy perennial that is tolerant of the harshest growing locations, Toma Verde Tomatillo – beautifully tough and tolerant of drought and poor soil with crop maturity in only about 60-days, Sugar Baby Watermelon – this compact little melon is one to try if you think your growing season is too short for growing melons. These and other rugged, reliable, short-season crops can be found here!
Natural Reeds for Mason and Leafcutter Bees: Flight season is kicking off now for the spring bees. Among them the Osmia, Hoplitis, and Chelostoma are early emerging genera that nest in narrow wooden cavities and hollow stems. A few months from now tiny Ceratina carpenter bees, and scores of Megachile leafcutter bees in all kinds of shapes and sizes will emerge in search of homes -- along with graceful and interesting grass-carrying wasps. Natural, renewable, and durable reed tubes are a great home for all of these creatures – providing moisture-, mold-, and parasite-resistance, durability. We offer them in variable sizes to support the widest potential diversity of inhabitants.
Scythes for Natural Landcare: Currently in stock, our Brush & Forestry Scythe thins and removes woody brush – extracting blackberry canes from hedgerows and decapitating Scotch broom. The Meadow & Light Brush Scythe provides exceptional cutting of tall meadow/prairie vegetation, for both standard late-season maintenance as well as selective control of weeds like thistle within otherwise high-quality stands of native vegetation. The easy-to-use Grass & Lawn Scythe is possibly the best beginner scythe available and is a no noise, no fuss, alternative to mowers for grassy areas. The Farm & Homestead Scythe is a serious tool for managing cover crops, cutting grain plots, and managing diverse vegetation around the farm or garden. And the low maintenance hardened steel Nordic Land Management Scythe requires no-peening (blade hammering) making it an easy grab and go tool for wild vegetation in remote locations.
Back in Stock: It’s been a while, but we finally cleaned and packed our most recent harvest of Field Mint seed. (Even the seed itself smells wonderful). Nodding Bur Marigold, Pacific Snakeroot, and Oregon Iris are also back in packets, ready to ship.
Seed to Sea
Much of what we do begins in muck. Our farm, a tidal marsh now severed from the sea by a county road, retains its wetland heritage. The soil is a deep, hydric gleysol, a marine-deposited clay. Dig a few feet down and it becomes hard like concrete, but streaked with red and grey. Such holes almost immediately fill with frigid water, emanating cold even on hot summer days like an air conditioner set to freezing. They also stink of anerobic life. It’s an alien planet inverted beneath us, the literal sea. Upon this uncanny shelf of mud, salt crust forms beneath every fallen object and abandoned pile of junk. Juvenile salmon swim up the roadside ditch at high tide, perhaps expecting ferns and forests but finding culverts and thistle instead.
Mere feet away we collect aster and field mint seeds.
Those seeds, threshed in one homemade machine and cleaned in another will end up weighed and bundled into paper made by a century-old U.S. mill. That paper is chopped and folded into envelopes on hulking, ancient, greasy machines in a gritty Seattle-Duwamish neighborhood of derelict superfund sites, hidden factories, and invasive weeds.
All of this is something from another era. Roughshod outdoor elements and real people in torn pants and worn-out rubber boots crafting things by hand. Seed is slow and not very glamorous. It’s dusty and repetitive. It leaves no time for concierge service, same day delivery, or app-based tech support.
When we send our humble little colorful packets of seed to you, know that they are infused with this journey, and with the hope that they bring you wonder, happiness, and some wild mystery from a low muddy field, half-land, and half-sea.
Spring Meadowcraft
Spring is the least active working time in the meadow, even so, we seem to rack up long lists of tasks. Here’s some of our own farm projects that might be applicable to you:
Fencing: We mostly hate fences, but where we lack them on our farm, the locally expansive deer population and the numerous feral eastern cottontail rabbits make fast work of many plants. Unfenced camas flowers are cleanly bitten off just as the buds begin to open. Native clovers are browsed to the ground. Wild strawberries will bear no fruit.
It’s fascinating to observe the rabbits in particular remake meadow plant communities even in heavily urbanized spaces, living and browsing mere feet from busy traffic and many square miles of trash-strewn concrete. Beyond the bunnies, people trample starter meadows in places like parking strips, as do visiting dogs. Practically everyone with even a few square feet of meadow space deals with some version of these visitors.
We have some experience with every type of fencing to enclose meadow spaces: single strand wire, hardware cloth, as well as the ugly by sometimes useful plastic deer netting. But it’s a more time-consuming and slow to manifest system that currently lights our imagination, which is dead-hedging.
A dead-hedge is a linear semi-organized tangle of interwoven dead limbs. These long horizontal tangles are sandwiched between vertical fence posts spaced a few feet apart. The limbs can be stacked as high or low as necessary. It's like basket-making on a grand scale. We largely use long limbs of Scouler’s willow (Salix scouleriana) in our own dead hedging, as we are constantly “gifted” fallen limbs of these tall trees, but lots of species offer up long, straight, semi-flexible branches that work for dead-hedging: all manner of willows, dogwoods, birch, poplar, hazel. Almost anything can be woven into a dead-hedge, even odd bits and pieces like rose trimmings, driftwood, tree stumps, and retired Christmas trees. Aside from enclosing protected meadow spaces, dead-hedges create supreme habitat for many small creatures: bird and bumble bee nests, homes for toads and small snakes. In Northwestern Washington, we find our only native lizard, the northern alligator lizard, in these kinds of dead-wood piles.
For a stellar example of small scale dead-hedging, check out these beautiful willow and dogwood “baskets” at the Burke Museum in Seattle, developed to reduce rabbit browsing on camas flowers. Lots of people could be creating this kind of gorgeous handcrafted fencing in many more places.
Grass Management: Before the spring wildflowers emerge there’s a brief, convenient window of time to scout the meadow for invasive grasses. Depending on where you might be, tall fescue (Lolium arundinaceum), ripgut brome (Bromus diandrus), Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis), cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), rattail fescue (Vulpia myuros), smooth brome (Bromus inermis), crested wheatgrass (Agropyron cristatum), velvet grass (Holcus lanatus), and reed canary (Phalaris arundinacea) are some of the varied and obnoxious species that invade and take over swaths of land, shading out wildflowers and creating biologically impoverished spaces.
Invasive grass intrusion is the most challenging part of meadow management anywhere in North America. As they establish a foothold in your meadow, they grow with more vigor than any native species, shading out interesting species, then collapsing under their own weight to create a dense layer of thatch, which further shades out the soil surface, leaving a decomposing organic layer that cycles nutrients back into their own hungry root systems, further accelerating their own vigor. It’s a zombie takeover of spaces that could be wildflower rich. Some, of these zombies like tall fescue, live in symbiotic association with toxic fungal microorganisms that inhibit nutrient absorption by herbivores. Everything from deer to insects that feed upon the plant edge closer to malnutrition and sickness.
Hand pulling in small spaces can keep invasive grasses at bay. Velvet grass, before populations explode, is conveniently clump-forming and can be wrenched out of wet soil to create new bare spots for overseeding. Harder but sometimes viable options for other grasses are fire and flooding. (Even handheld flame weeders can be a useful when and where wildfire conditions are not a threat). Spot-treating with some of the newer chelated iron organic herbicides will burn these grasses to the ground, and can kill off some of the invasive annual grasses like rattail fescue and cheatgrass during their early growth, but they won’t make a dent in the more persistent perennial species.
Brutalist grass-specific conventional herbicides are sometimes used in large-scale restoration; sethoxydim is one that can kill almost every grass (native and non-native alike), fluazifop is a more selective grass option that kills most grasses except fescues which can allow for native fescues to survive spraying, but also invasive ones. The impacts of herbicides aren’t benign, and deserve scrutiny. Invasive grass takeover isn’t benign either. For some reason we’ve become a society that calls some aggressive foreign plants invasive, while happily planting other aggressive foreign plants everywhere. Make no mistake: every hardware store bag of turf grass seed is a bag of invasive species. They’ve escaped and taken over the continent. We don’t need to passively accept all of this.
Grafting: Not a meadow-activity, but in and around our meadows for years we’ve planted odd little native trees and grafted things on them. Much of this work has been with the beautiful native Pacific crab apple (Malus fusca), onto which we’ve grafted various hundreds of cider apple and pear scions – mysterious Spanish and French and Irish varieties as well as strange roadside wild apples growing from ditches and between old buildings. Douglas hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii) is a compatible grafting rootstock for pears, as is serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia). Our various wild Prunus species (bitter cherry, choke cherry, wild plum, etc) are mostly unexplored as grafting rootstocks, but they appear to be less compatible with many standard cultivated stone fruits. Pacific wild grape (Vitus californica) on the other hand readily grafts onto all manner of table and wine grape varieties.
So why on earth would anyone bother with all of this?
For us, these native rootstocks allow for fruit growing in new ways. The wetland-tolerant Pacific crab rootstock allows us to produce cider apples in our saltwater marsh. Occasional fruiting limbs can be interspersed into our wildlife hedgerows among the native vegetation. The native rootstocks provide exceptional cold and drought tolerance, and disease-resistance. They sustain a fully native soil microbiome in and around their root systems. It’s a wholly different approach to “farming.” It’s wild and untidy, like us.
Sound and Vision
There are a handful of semi-recent recorded media and event appearances featuring Eric that might be interesting to someone:
How to Eat for Bees (Keynote talk to the 2024 Colorado Pollinator Summit): Before retiring from the Xerces Society last year, Eric spent a decade and a half engaging the food industry in pollinator conservation initiatives. Satisfying and frustrating at the same time, much of the discourse around the impacts of agriculture on bees ignores the central issue of our own personal diets. This talk tackles that issue.
Buzzkill Episode One: Save Which Bees? (Podcast by the Food & Environment Reporting Network): In a similar vein to the How to Eat for Bees talk above, Eric makes an appearance in this serialized environmental podcast at a large-scale Bee Better Certified blueberry farm in Oregon to share the work of creating on-farm habitat for wild bees and honey bees alike. It’s an episode on bee diversity, and how our food system shapes the landscape for those small creatures.
Making Meadows: Alchemy & Science for Designing, Installing & Managing Open Spaces (Washington Native Bee Society guest lecture): This recorded presentation serves as a bit of a primer for folks new to planting and maintaining meadows, and possibly has a few emerging ideas for more experienced meadow people.
And Finally…
If it seems to you like posers and con-artists are ascendent on the public stage right now you are not alone in that sentiment. A toxic attention-economy has gripped our politics, social interactions, commodity-entertainments, and commerce. Greed has eclipsed principles to a degree that feels new, exponential, and unexpected. It feels like we are inhabiting a new era, and settling in for an extended stay.
Such dark timespans sometimes take root. Long centuries can occur when cleptocratic instincts run amok, enforced by smiles and lies, or casual violence. It would be great if this were hyperbole, but we all know that it’s true.
And yet, within the contours of such times, perhaps there are a few things to keep in mind:
First, as a wise person said: to struggle is a gift. Hope and gratifying work are born of challenge. Life is our great challenge.
Second, history settles scores. Lots of ruthlessly self-important people have always wanted to be remembered as celebrity prophets. Most end up remembered as something like a disease of the past – their name appended with “-ism” -- if they are remembered at all.
Meanwhile, the countless good but largely anonymous people who surround you all the time are quietly carrying forward the grand and generous project of being human: cooks and cleaners, carpenters and CPAs, nurses and street dwellers and rideshare drivers, HVAC installers and keyboard salarymen…mostly kind-hearted, bumbling, well-intentioned intrepid explorers of deep-time. The lady in traffic next to you eating soup while driving and the man shaving in the airport bathroom are part-time saints and bodhisatttvas. They are children of someone who loved them, questioners of the uncanny origins of our universe, artists of lives mundane and tragic and comic and spectacular.
To be in their presence... to be in each other's presence... is a stellar gift.
