In Defense of Nature

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