Subject: Re: generalizations
From: "Todd M. Bolton" <tmbolton@erols.com>
Organization: Todd Bolton Associates, Inc.
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 19:46:54 -0400
Message-ID: <MOD$970925.16636@rec.gardens.ecosystems>
References: <MOD$970922.22377@rec.gardens.ecosystems> <MOD$970922.26760@rec.gardens.ecosystems>


William D Hulet wrote:
>
> What I'm interested in is learning new viewpoints and finding new
> questions to ask when I look at a problems. I think that it is pointless
> to discuss the relative toxicity of a specific poison when it seems
> obvious to me that the need to use poison on our garden is already a
> statement to alienation from nature. I also think that it should be
> obvious to anyone with insight that this alienation from nature is one of
> the key problems that confronts our present society.
>
> If I wanted to discuss the relative toxicity of one poison versus
> another I think that I'd go to another conference. Here I want to learn
> how people have found out to sidestep the whole problem. I am not a
> scientist and I don't think that science will have very much to do with
> any solutions to either problems in my garden or problems in my world.
>

My viewpoint is that there is a time and a place where science and or
chemicals can produce the best results. Not because I am alienated from
nature, my enjoyment of "nature" and the feeling of connectedness I get
are the reason I garden, and walk in the woods, and fish, and take
pictures of wildflowers, but because I set out with a degree of damage
that I will allow to the beauty of my garden, or because I want to try
and replicate a natural ecosystem.

Ailanthus altissima was not part of the American plant community until
delivered by the Europeans. I don't have the ten years required to
eradicate it from my 14 acres of woods so that the, native, White Oaks
will follow the VA pines and grow back where they belong. Using a
herbicide does not seperate me from nature, it comes from the scientific
understanding of plant physiology, the working of nature.

IPM or TPHC are ways of working WITH nature to produce aesthetic or
eatable results wiht the least use of "cides" possible. An interesting
idea.gr