That's the title of a novel I just read (a satire, very funny, by the way) and I thought of it when I heard about the following article:  "Maternal ethnobotanical knowledge is associated with multiple measures of child health in the Bolivian Amazon" by T. W. McDade et al.  Researchers found that,  among the Tsimane' of the Bolivian Amazon, mothers who had good knowledge of the uses of local plants had healthier children than mothers lacking such knowledge.

I don't know about you, but I have very little such knowledge.  Of course, I live in a different environment; I know a lot about finding healthcare resources on the internet, for example.  But still: if healthcare becomes much more expensive, many of us may indeed be forced to seek out those special plants again!  I know that in my grandparents' generation, many people still had this knowledge, and they used it because they were too poor to afford doctors.  But if the delicate web that is the global economy were somehow to collapse, I would become not only poor, but also "stupid" in the context of my new circumstances. 

In the aftermath of the horrendous 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, an astonishing story of modern v. traditional knowledge came to light: while fishermen in the Bay of Bengal ran onto the newly exposed sea floor to scoop up stranded fish, every member of the indigenous Jarawa tribe fled into the jungle and survived the tsunami's landfall.  What did they know that the fishermen didn't know?  Why didn't the fishermen know what they knew?
I'm not exactly sure what the moral of these stories is.  But it wouldn't be a bad idea to call up your grandpa or great aunt Hortense for a little chat.

You don't want to spray neurotoxins in your own house, do you?  Of course not.  And unless you're a Jain, you may feel the occasional need to trim the indoor insect population.  Finally, you don't want to have to spend any more money.  No problem!  Just put  a little dishwashing liquid (biodegradable, if possible) and a lot of water into a spray bottle left over from something else.  Dilute as much as you like without losing soapiness.  Your soapy water will kill any arthropod lifeform on contact, simply because of the way their respiratory systems work.

If you don't mind spending a little money, you can repel other little crawlies with clove oil, Orange Guard, even cinnamon, after you wipe up the bodies.

(If anyone has more tips on this topic, feel free to reply with them!)

Why Flor Garduño?

Flor Garduño was born in 1957, just a few years before me; is also a woman; is also not white.  But that’s not why I chose her.  It’s simply this: Her photograph of a woman lying on a mat next to a couple of  iguanas, neatly bound with twine, has haunted me for well over a decade.  When her collection, Witnesses of Time, came out and launched her career into the stratosphere, her work came to my attention.  I wanted to buy that particular photo as soon as I saw it, despite the $1000+ price tag at a gallery in San Francisco.  My boyfriend at the time discouraged me.

It's called "Mujer Que Sueña" (Woman Dreaming).  That's what got me first: it's not called Woman Sleeping, which is probably what I would have called it.  How does the photographer know the woman is dreaming?  And what could she be dreaming?  Did she dream the iguanas into being? 
Did she dream us into being?
Garduño's photos can do that to us: the subjects in the frame are so immediate, so primal, that they may very well be more real we, the mute observers.  Never mind the absence of color!  Garduño makes us forget color, or dismiss it as a cheap animator's trick.  Are the iguanas (the mask/ the bird's skull/ the lush, tropical vegetation) “exotic”?  Hardly!  Every element of her compositions feels essential and natural, immune to the choices that assail us at every turn.  Así es, so it is, so it must be.
Back to the dreaming woman: Where is she?  The light sources are hard to place in many of Garduño's photographs, making it hard to place them in what we think of as our world.  Where, we ask, is the sun?  This, I think, is on purpose.  The artist is offering us a glimpse of somewhere we cannot reach simply by getting on a plane.
I love the lack of voyeurism in Garduño's work.  Her respect for her subjects is clear and uncomplicated; they are not “weird”, they are not there for our entertainment, but only for us to marvel at.  If we shake our heads, it is only to wonder why we ourselves are not so astonishing.
……………………………………………………………
I think I'm going back to that gallery, with my checkbook.

OK, I really am great, big hypocrite, sitting here trying to tell you to get rid of your lawn.  Not that I have one myself, of course -- I'm not that much of a hypocrite!  But I do recall frolicking on the lawn in the back yard of my house when I was a little girl, playing kickball with neighborhood kids.  How could I ask anyone to deprive deprive their child of that?

Well, then, let me rephrase that first sentence: Keep the parts of your lawn that are actually enjoyed.  Turn the rest into a combination mini-meadow, woodland, cactus farm, sculpture garden, pond, meditation area, patio, outdoor dining room, whatever.  Yes, you love looking at that flat expanse of green, but how much more will you love looking at a real landscape of varying hues and heights, paths weaving in and out, birds twittering, critters crittering...? 

Lawns are a fashion long overdue to fall out of favor.  They began in England as an exercise in waste (of labor, of land) and so they largely remain.  In the drier parts of the U.S., lawns are particularly hard to justify, as they waste water as well.  When I was in the Southwest 2 years ago, I admired the many surreal displays of cactuses and succulents in the gardens of Santa Fe, but, alas, in Phoenix and LA lawn-worship continues in full-swing. 

Enough nagging!  Here are a couple of websites that will help you get started in strangling, er, shrinking your lawn:
    http://www.lesslawn.com/
    http://www.foodnotlawns.com/