At What Price, Perfection?

If you purchase today’s version of the “perfect” Christmas tree (seen here), you may find it is much too densely branched for ornaments to hang from. Instead, tinsel and decorations will lie upon the branches, which isn’t nearly as attractive as in days of yore when they hung freely.

 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

“Perfection” means free from flaws or defects, and it’s a state of existence many people relentlessly chase these days. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, $15 billion dollars was spent in America alone for beauty procedures in 2016. And the Japan Times reported that $10.7 billion was spent in 2017 on just the materials and chemicals practitioners used to perform these cosmetic procedures worldwide.

The price of physical “beauty” is not just in terms of money, but also in terms of real pain and risk for those who choose surgery, not to mention the price of wasting your life (time is something I consider more valuable than almost anything) on something that is ridiculously overvalued.

 

Presumably the point of beauty is to be admired and/or to find someone to love you, yet being beautiful is not in and of itself likely to bring you genuine happiness; it’s likely that even the most gorgeous woman and handsome man have been cheated on. That says a lot (or, at least, it should) about the value of great looks alone in terms of endearment to others.

 

People nowadays are even concerned with how their pets look. According to the New York Post, dogs are getting nose and/or ear jobs, face-lifts, and even testicular implants so male dogs “can regain their masculinity”! Although some procedures, as with people, are done for medical purposes, they are far fewer in number than those for simply aesthetic reasons. In 2011, pet owners—more often known these days as pet “parents”—forked over $62 million in plastic surgery for their pets.

 

Folks are free to decide how much money they want to spend and how much pain they are willing to endure for their own sense of flawlessness. But is it ethical to subject animals to aesthetic surgical procedures they get nothing out of except great discomfort?

 

This infatuation with “physical excellence” in human society borders upon madness. It not only places at risk and brings pain to pets going under the knife for invalid reasons, but it has also come at great cost to the quality of everyone’s everyday lives.

 

Decades ago, when I was in my twenties and had fallen in love with the man of my dreams, I received a dozen long-stemmed red roses from him for my birthday. Oh, the fragrance of those roses! It was divine. Less than a decade later, when I had to undergo serious surgery that I was terrified of having, a dear friend also chose to send me a dozen long-stemmed red roses. The cut flowers still held the marvelous rose essence that was able to carry my thoughts away from the hospital and the intense pain of my surgery.

 

But by the end of the 1990s, the scent was gone. I couldn’t believe that this emblematic feature of roses had so thoroughly disappeared, and I also couldn’t imagine how it could have been allowed to happen. It was perhaps my first brush with this new world in which physical “perfection” plays such a dominant role in so many aspects of everyday life.

 

The rose fragrance was sacrificed on the alter of “beauty”. Gardeners growing their own roses preferred new pastel colors that were not biologically linked to the heavenly scent of red roses. Florists who wanted access to roses from around the world needed hardier specimens that could withstand travel and last longer in the customer’s hands, and the plants bred to meet these standards lost their scent in the process.

 

There has been equal demand for looks over substance in the food industry, with equally regrettable results. Apples are especially noticeable victims of this trend, with most of the commercial varieties looking like the artificial wax fruits that adorned my mother’s dining-room fruit bowl when I was growing up. Their “perfect” looks belie their loss of great apple flavor, not to mention nutrition.

 

The lack of robust flavor and aroma in strawberries ranks right up there with the rose situation as a truly lamentable development. Time was when you would bite into a strawberry that was fully red inside and chock-full of sweet juice. Now these fruits tend to be mostly white inside—even if bought from a local farmer—and, not surprisingly, flavorless by comparison.

 

I used to make strawberry ice cream following a recipe that suggested you might want to add red food coloring, but the naturally red and tasty juice made such an addition totally unnecessary. I can’t even imagine making my own ice cream from the strawberries on today’s market.

 

Then there are the Christmas trees. I’ve always adored these decorative icons of the month of December, whether they be the fake tree we had during my youth, the Eastern Red-cedars cut for free from a farmer’s pasture during my college years, or a field-grown White Pine Christmas tree bought from a parking lot when I was a young adult.

 

The beauty of these trees came from their openness. Ornaments hung down in all their colorful glory in the spaces between branches, and free-hanging shiny tinsel augmented the glow of the lights, be they big or small. The trees looked as real (albeit decorated) as when they’d been growing in a forest or field (unless, of course, they were the pink, white, or blue aluminum trees some folks liked in the ‘60s), and even the fake ones mimicked the airiness of natural trees.

 

These Christmas trees gave you a sense of connectedness to the environment, a little bit of the outdoors brought inside for a special holiday. In contrast, today’s overly sheared trees evoke the hand of man, not nature.

 

The trees are pruned to make them grow in a “perfect pyramid” shape (Christmas tree-grower lingo for "much wider at the bottom than at the top"). If they aren’t “full enough”, the lateral branches are sheared to increase density. But the thickness of the branches doesn’t allow tinsel and ornaments to hang freely as they are supposed to do, making the trees far less attractive because the ornaments instead lie directly upon the greenery.

 

I’m guessing that someone decided that live Christmas trees should look as they are drawn in cartoons and on cards and other stationery. Indeed, they now do, which means they look as artificial as Christmas tree-shaped jewelry.

 

Perhaps artificiality is to be expected when such a large percentage of the populace spends a good deal of time living in a virtual world instead of a real one. But folks should be careful about “improving” Mother Nature. In many cases, they end up eradicating the very qualities that made things extraordinary, making the price of “perfection” way too high.

 

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

Before bringing your live Christmas tree into the house, be sure to check it over for mantid egg cases. Otherwise, immature mantids might hatch out (due to the heat) inside your home, where they will have nothing to eat and will die.

 

When you find an egg case, cut off the entire branch. Do your best to position it within the branches of a shrub, with the egg mass in its original orientation. Try not to leave the egg mass obviously exposed because birds feed upon mantid eggs.

 

You can visit the site below to read descriptions of the mantid egg cases of three commonly encountered species.

 

https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/mantids-mantises

Tallamy’s Talking Points Miss the Point

Tiny Hover Flies in the author’s yard in Virginia flock to Black Knapweed (Centaurea nigra) for food in November. This “invasive” flowering plant is one of the last to hold blooms that serve as a lifeline for insects out and about on warm, late-fall days.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

A friend sent me a link to a YouTube video of a presentation for the Santa Clara (California) Native Plant Society by Doug Tallamy.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esNIhiWWr84

His basic message continues to be that the best way to save birds is via caterpillars, which he expects you to accomplish by landscaping your property with native woody plants.

 

The problem with Professor Tallamy’s directive is that it’s simplistic at best and destructive at worst. He ignores a whole host of injurious human activities to focus on the one (gardening) that may be the most palatable to people to act upon (because they enjoy this hobby), but it's actually the least helpful for the perpetuation of wildlife. 

 

And although Dr. Tallamy avoided mentioning pesticides in his talk to Californians who are presumably more sensitive (and thus more enlightened) to the pernicious effects of putting these chemicals into the environment, he has previously made clear his support for employing them to get rid of so-called invasive plants that he mistakenly believes have “pushed out” native plants. [Please see “Invasion Biology: Perception Trumps Reality”, posted here on October 6, 2020.]

 

In other words, Doug Tallamy’s talking points miss the point; he’s not going after the real obstacles to maintaining insect and bird numbers, but rather is trying to get folks to apply a band-aid that will not make much difference. Even if everyone on the planet landscaped only with native plants, it still wouldn’t increase the populations of caterpillars and birds because a dearth of native plants is not the main reason for the dearth of caterpillars. The main reason there are so few caterpillars (the larvae of moths and butterflies) is due to the ubiquitous lights found in human environments.

 

Most of the caterpillars you’re likely to spot are immature moths, and what do many of them do nowadays as adults? Instead of mating to perpetuate the species, many spend the night flying around outdoor lighting along streets, in parking lots, and around homes and businesses where they are more easily caught and consumed by owls and bats. They also will remain on the outside surfaces of windows in which nothing blocks indoor lighting from escaping. When moths don’t get a chance to mate, caterpillars are not created.

 

When Dr. Tallamy penned his first book, he showed a nighttime composite photo of the United States that he employed to point out “the extent to which we have converted natural areas to developed landscapes”, rather than discuss the real danger illustrated in that picture: lights! Thirteen years later, he’s finally come to recognize the danger posed by lighting, but does he suggest that the Californians listening to his program shut off unnecessary lights and employ curtains or blinds to shield their glow from insects outside? Nope. His answer is to keep the lights burning! Just use yellow lights that are less attractive to insects.

 

Of course, keep unnecessary lights on and you are especially guilty of contributing to the warming of our climate. However, global climate change is somehow not high on Doug Tallamy’s list of environmental concerns, even though a real problem for many insects nowadays is that—thanks to warmer winter temperatures—they are active in months when they should be hibernating. With nary a bloom in sight, they can’t feed to replace the energy they are using. Run out of energy reserves and you die.

 

Then there’s the lawn. While showing a photo of a house with a humongous lawn, he blithely tells folks to just get rid of half of their lawn, as if wasting the remaining 50% of the sizable amount of land in the photo would be acceptable. Why doesn’t he tell folks that a manicured lawn—dosed at regular intervals with deadly chemicals and kept “weed-free” (i.e., no flowers, such as dandelions, for butterflies, bees, etc.) doesn’t help our wildlife? After all, aren’t the people listening to him supposed to be ones who care about doing what’s right by the environment? Or are native-plant folks flocking to his lectures only because he’s the spokesman for their raison d’être?

 

At the end of his presentation, the Santa Clarans were able to ask questions. One person wondered if it was okay to grow a close relative of a native plant instead of the actual plant native to California. Professor Tallamy’s answer? You should be more concerned with the function of a plant in the landscape rather than its origins—even though neither he nor nativists (people who prefer to see native plants being grown by gardeners) will ever make this statement when discussing purportedly invasive plants.

 

Doug Tallamy’s overall message perfectly meshes with the current push by native-plant societies to get rid of many alien-plant species. But, as exemplified above, this effort is contradictory. Everyone knows that when calling a plant “native”, it’s not supposed to have been imported from somewhere else. Yet plenty of nativists want to have it both ways, and Doug Tallamy isn’t going to incur their wrath by disagreeing with them.

 

Lastly, Tallamy has a bad habit of making comparative evaluations of both plants and animals. He has no problem denigrating the animal species he doesn’t believe are as “valuable” as caterpillars, and he implied that 85% of native plants are essentially useless because they “aren’t supporting that much in terms of food webs”. Of course, this suggestion is ludicrous.

 

First, as every creature exists for a reason (otherwise, evolutionarily speaking, it wouldn’t be here), it’s an improper concept to posit that some kinds are more valuable or important than others. Second, and perhaps more critically, people are already overly prejudiced against many lifeforms, which is hugely detrimental to the environment. It’s hard enough to get people to accept nature in its entirety without having an authority figure convincing them to favor some kinds of animals/plants over others.

 

If you listen to Doug Tallamy or read his books, I highly recommend you employ serious critical thinking. This scientist’s training is in entomology and it shows. He espouses a worldview that is far too narrowly focused, disqualifying him as a spokesman for the environment in its entirety.

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

With global climate change already occurring, consider growing nonnative plants that bloom as early as March and are still blooming in November (the Common Dandelion is a cheery flower that will bloom even in winter sometimes if it’s in a sunny spot and the temperature is warm enough). Many of these plants may be classified as “invasive weeds”, but they are crucial for assisting a variety of insects to survive the current conditions on Planet Earth.