Lights Out!

 

Lights illuminating a hotel burned day and night, needlessly wasting energy while increasing power-plant emissions that contribute to global climate change. The 24-hour lighting of nearby plants was probably not beneficial for them.

Lights Out!

 

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

This year my first fireflies of the season appeared in my yard on May 20. There were only two to be seen very briefly, but I’m hoping there will be many more. Unfortunately, however, the numbers of these insects have dwindled in many places around the world, in large part to human activities.

 

Habitat loss and pesticide usage take a toll, but one factor people tend to overlook is the effect of artificial lighting on these particularly vulnerable creatures. Their courtship revolves around the flashes of light sent by both the male and female to communicate their interest in mating. But, in the glow of light pollution, it can be nearly impossible for them to detect the bioluminescence they emit to find each other.

 

Look around and you’ll notice how many people leave lights on outside houses, barns, and commercial buildings all night long, sometimes 24/7. These lights not only negatively impact fireflies, but also moths and numerous other kinds of insects that depend upon darkness to procreate. Is it any wonder, then, that insects are disappearing?

 

I imagine most folks simply don’t give these lights much thought, but they should. According to the International Dark Sky Association, about 35% of light is wasted, which equates to about 3 billion dollars spent per year on exceedingly harmful sky glow. Additionally, about 15 million tons of carbon dioxide—a driver of climate change—are emitted each year in order to power outdoor lighting, which is often nonessential.

 

Because of city lighting, birds migrating at night are killed in huge numbers every fall and spring. Lit windows invite birds to crash into them. These avian creatures don't have any conception of the glass blocking their way through the lighted rooms they believe they can fly through.

Studies show that birds cluster around brightly lit structures, just as nighttime insects do when they continuously fly around a carport or porch light. This travel delay necessitates finding food when daylight arrives, but that can be difficult in an area of concrete and asphalt. Is it any wonder many migratory bird populations have severely declined over the past five decades?

 

The World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness is written by scientists and measures what is called artificial sky glow—the reflected light scattered in the atmosphere from electric lighting around the world. Illustrative of the amount of sky glow is the estimation that the Milky Way is no longer visible to one-third of the people on Earth, especially in the most heavily industrialized regions. Sixty percent of Europeans and eighty percent of North Americans are no longer able to enjoy this natural wonder.

 

This light pollution affects human health as well. According to Richard G. Stevens, an epidemiologist at the School of Medicine (University of Connecticut), “[L]ight at night, in all its forms, can most disrupt our normal circadian rhythms...This circadian physiology has developed over billions of years. Humans have been living with electricity only since the late 19th century, and with widespread access in industrialized countries only since the 20th century. While that sounds like a long time, it’s a tiny drop in the evolutionary bucket. We are only beginning to understand the health consequences artificial light has on our circadian physiology.”

 

He goes on to write that, “Humans, like most other life forms on the planet, have...a built-in cycle for sleep and wake patterns, hunger, activity, hormone production, body temperature and a vast array of other physiological processes. The cycle lasts roughly 24 hours, and light, especially sunlight, and darkness are important signals to keep it on track.”

 

Scientists suspect that some serious health problems could be the result of circadian disruption, for which “the most potent environmental exposure that can cause [it] is ill-timed electric lighting, particularly at night.”

 

https://theconversation.com/new-atlas-shows-extent-of-light-pollution-what-does-it-mean-for-our-health-60836

 

It’s vitally important for people to recognize how harmful night lighting is to the many forms of life, including humans, on Earth. It’s high time for lights out!

 

NATURE ADVICE:

 

You can do humans and their fellow creatures a great service by letting people know they should minimize the amount of light being wasted.

 

When you notice unwarranted lighting (for example, light not being utilized by anyone in the wee hours of the morning) in parks and at businesses, let the government entities and business owners know about the harmful effects of leaving lights burning unnecessarily.

 

If you or your neighbors feel the need for nighttime outdoor lighting, consider motion detectors instead of continuously lit floodlights.

 

Finally, always use the dimmest lighting you can, but better yet, consider whether lighting is essential or whether you could do without it.

 

The Plant Police Are Coming for You

These two male Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are feeding on sunflower seeds that originated in North America, but we often feed wild birds seeds from other lands, such as niger (also spelled nyger) that is grown in Africa, India, and other places in Southeast Asia. Why is it okay to provide foreign foods in a feeder to native animals, but frowned upon to feed them by way of nonnative plants that have the additional benefit of also providing shelter and nesting sites?

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

In 2010, overpopulated deer herds denuded virtually every native plant in my yard. Consequently, the plants were unable to flower and produce fruits. If I hadn’t grown nonnative plants unpalatable to deer, such as Japanese Barberry shrubs (Berberis thunbergii) that did make fruits, a flock of bluebirds that visited the following extremely cold and snowy winter would not have found nourishment. 

When I excitedly reported to the state Internet bird-reporting site my discovery that bluebirds ate Japanese Barberry fruits, I was taken to task for growing “such an invasive alien plant in [my] yard!” Although my comment went out to serious birders who presumably care about these avian creatures, no-one expressed happiness that the bluebirds at least found something to eat.

 

In the ensuing eleven years, a huge invasive-plant mythology has been written to support waging an unjustified war against specific alien plants, and government at all levels has been brought on board to deny you the right to grow plants that can survive deer overpopulations, climate change, and vast alteration of our physical environment.

 

The City of Cape May, New Jersey, almost passed Ordinance 404-2020 in December of 2020 “relating to the control and elimination of invasive plants”. It was much supported by the Cape May Environmental Commission, a member of which wrote a letter to the editor which contained the usual misinformation that, nevertheless, often convinces unknowledgeable government officials to act in a manner that harms, instead of helps, nature.

 

The letter writer spoke of kudzu to say that “It outcompetes all native vegetation and creates a monoculture made up of itself. This is true of all invasive plants [emphasis mine].” This last pronouncement is simply not true.

 

So-called invasive plants grow where conditions are especially suitable for them, but not for native plants, which means aliens aren’t “outcompeting” natives. Rather, native plants are not growing there in the first place. Additionally, “all invasive plants” do not necessarily create a monoculture. Autumn Olive (Elaeagnus umbellatus) shrubs often share fields with Eastern Redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) and other species.

 

The next sentence of the letter reads that “You may control an invasive on your property, but if it has seeds, both the birds and the wind spread the tree, bush, or plant.” What does this statement tell you? It declares that the so-called invasive plant provides food for birds, and if it’s a tree or a bush, it goes without saying that it also supplies cover and perhaps a nesting site for them.

 

Yet the sentence following the declaration above tells us that “Monocultures do not feed our bees, butterflies, or birds.” This kind of conflicting information is extremely common in letters to the editor and in articles in which the author wants to convince us of the evils of supposedly invasive plants.

 

Continuing, the writer says that, “Planting native trees attracts insects that are needed to feed the birds [but] [a]lien tree species do not attract these specific insects, so they may be pretty, but as far as the environment is concerned, they might as well be stone statues.” Wrong.

 

Native trees may support more caterpillars and sawfly larvae (an animal commonly considered a “pest” when feeding in people’s yards) than alien plants, but that doesn’t mean the pretty nonnative plants “might as well be stone statues”. Flowers are typically what make a plant pretty, and many so-called invasive plants make flowers that attract a huge number of pollinator species. These insects are dwindling in number, undoubtedly due, at least in part, to the vast amount of lawn area in this country that is devoid of "weeds" (interpretation: flowering herbaceous plants) that could feed them.

 

The conclusion of the letter writer is that, “We need this ordinance as a way of supporting the need to educate and control invasive species.” Amazingly, the local government tabled the ordinance, but you can bet the Cape May Environmental Commission will be back pushing for some version of it yet again, even though the “facts” provided by this member of the commission are inaccurate.

 

Unfortunately, some states have fallen under the spell of the mythological “invasive-plant” narrative. In the state of Washington, “plant police” are authorized to charge you with a crime (harboring an illegal alien!!!) and assess fines should your yard contain a plant on the “Noxious Weed List”.

 

https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/washingtons-noxious-weed-laws

 

The Environmental Protection Agency is working to bring this reality to backyards everywhere across the land of the free. Susan Gitlin, Office of Sustainable Communities at the EPA, writes of “refining lists of plants that are regulated at the state and federal level”, positing that such plants “have moved from their native regions into new areas where they crowd out native vegetation.”

 

https://www.astm.org/standardization-news/?q=update/invasive-plant-listing-ja13.html

 

This now entrenched, but false, belief of nonnative plants crowding out native plants has been made “factual” only by perpetual repetition by native-plant societies and other special-interest groups, including invasion-biology scientists, but it contains serious errors of omission. For example, people ignore the factuality that growing conditions in many locations are no longer hospitable to most native plants.

 

Alien plants, such as Autumn Olive that these folks are determined to eradicate, are especially noticeable along highway edges created by construction of roadways or in fields abandoned by farmers. Like native colonizers, such as Virginia Redcedar, they can grow just fine in soil compacted for centuries by cows weighing a half-ton each or road-building crews that bulldozed the land, removing topsoil.

 

If you weren’t paying attention for the past forty-five years and now notice the abundance of nonnative plants in such areas, you could easily believe that nonnative plants pushed out native plants. This misperception forms the basis for the entire field of invasion biology.

 

But the actuality is that abandoned fields, roadsides, hiking trails, and clearcut forest not replanted filled eventually—I’m talking many years—with colonizers, whether native, nonnative, or a mix of both. I’ve been watching it happen since I was a college student in the 1970s, and you don’t even need a scientist to explain why this scenario makes sense.

 

Any avid gardener knows the saying, “right plant, right place”, meaning that every plant has specific growing requirements that must be met for it to thrive. Most native plants cannot grow in the corrupted soil profile of disturbed areas, which includes homeowner yards that have been cleared and graded. When I moved into my house 35 years ago, the gray-clay subsoil had been exposed and the yard looked like the surface of the Moon.

 

Alien plants quickly provided wildlife habitat, and my moonscape became a nature-friendly garden supporting a larger diversity and abundance of wildlife than had existed when the land was deeply shaded by forest. Over the decades, these plants rehabilitated the soil and numerous species of native plants have moved naturally into my yard, but I refuse to remove the alien plants that have been—and remain—so helpful.

 

I’ve seen far more wildlife—in species and numbers—in my yard over the past 35 years than most folks will ever see in a lifetime of visiting wildlife refuges and national parks. I know for a fact that nonnative plants are beneficial to wildlife by providing them with food and shelter and to native plants by rehabbing the soil for them to return.

 

If you want to truly aid our wildlife and the environment in its entirety, you must ignore the mythmakers of plant-invasion biology. But don’t ignore your lawmakers! Please let your congressional representatives know you don’t want laws restricting alien plants on your property—and tell them the excellent reasons why not.

 

 NATURE ADVICE: 

Before taking advice from those folks who may have their own agendas for pushing you to remove alien plants, make notes on which animals are making use of them, as I have done for many years. It may well change your mind as to what’s in the best interest of our wildlife.

 

 

Lawn Mowing: An Injustice to Nature

If people would leave grass on slopes instead of cutting it (and any wildflowers growing there), they would allow the vegetation to prevent erosion and preserve water within the soil.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

Spring has sprung

The mowing’s begun.

 

Swards of green

No blooms to be seen.

 

No food to find

By bees and their kind

 

Because humans are blind.

 

I’ve always loved springtime with its obvious awakening of so many life forms. But over the past few years, I’ve come to dread it.

 

Whereas I used to mostly hear the songs of birds and, in season, insects and frogs, I now hear the incessant sound of lawn mowers from 8 AM to almost 8 PM from Monday to Friday, and sometimes even on the weekend. People seem to be obsessed with short grass that is cut close to soil level, which isn’t good for its own health nor the health of our pollinators.

 

When grass is cut, all the blooming wildflowers growing with it are also cut, leaving our bees, butterflies, flies, and other pollinators with no nourishment to sustain them. Is it any wonder, then, that these insects are in trouble and disappearing? Sadly, humans tend to live in their own bubble and are blind to the numerous life forms around them that require these flowering plants in order to survive. And it’s vital for humans that they do survive.

 

If you grow your own fruits and veggies, you’re indebted to pollinators for helping your plants to be productive. If you purchase this kind of food from farm vendors and/or grocery stores, or if you eat a meal at a restaurant, you can be grateful to pollinators for providing the produce you bring home or eat on the spot.

 

Most folks have lawns, but they don’t understand the connection between the wildflowers that show up there and how helpful they are to wildlife. Many people might even get rid of these plants altogether by way of pesticides, another action highly detrimental to our insects and other kind of critters.

 

These situations are commonplace in suburbia, where everyone follows the lead of others, as in the expression: Monkey see, monkey do. It would be nice if someone within the community could explain to others the importance of keeping wildflowers instead of viewing them as “weeds” (I very much dislike this word) to be gotten rid of. It just takes one person to open the eyes of at least some of the neighbors.

 

Strangely, mowing is commonplace in the rural area where I live, and there’s not even much lawn to be seen on many properties! What can be seen not far from my property, however, is a huge vineyard and several horse farms, places where I wouldn’t expect people to need to mow grass or pesticide it much. Horse farms have pastures to feed horses, and vineyards maintain row upon row of grape vines. But they are totally in sync with suburbia! Nowadays farms are every bit as manicured as any yard in developed areas.

 

Years ago, however, farms were wonderful places to find wildlife. As a young girl and even as a teenager, I spent many a day at local farms located within the small town where I grew up. I did the same in college, having attended a university also located within a small town in a rural area. Farms back then had places that were not maintained, creating habitat for all kinds of animals.

 

With a booming human population, I’m not sure where people expect wildlife to live and thrive. But in the case of pollinators, we can certainly make room for them on our properties. We just need to stop mowing so darned often (taller grass results in healthier grass anyway) so wildflowers can survive long enough to feed insects. Better yet would be to get rid of most of the lawn to grow only flowers, or to allow a section of the yard to “grow wild”. If people recognized the value of wildflowers and wildlife, I feel certain most of them would do things differently.

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

You can help to change people’s attitudes regarding lawn care by writing letters to the editor in newspapers and other publications, and by writing to government officials at every level. Explain the value of “weeds” and request that these plants not be pesticided in lawns (private or public) and that mowing occur less often (preferably no more than once every two weeks). Folks need a leader to remind them that we share the Earth with other creatures and to inform them how to support those other life forms. You can be that leader. 

 

Let “Invasive” Plants Do Their Job

A Common Buckeye is one of many late-summer species of butterflies that finds nourishment at Black Knapweed in the author’s garden. One of the last plants to cease blooming in fall, it feeds tiny bees and hover flies active late in the season due to climate-change-induced warmth. And American Goldfinches benefit by feeding on its seeds.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

An edited version of this article was published April 9, 2021 in the Bay Journal.

 

https://www.bayjournal.com/opinion/forum/let-invasive-plants-do-their-job-so-the-natives-can-take-over/article_7387fc70-93c6-11eb-a929-03fb0e9b107b.html

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend”—French philosopher Henri Bergson

 

The January-February issue of the Bay Journal reports that nonnative Hydrilla (Hydrilla verticillata) “has become important in the Bay as a ‘pioneer’ species, colonizing unvegetated areas and making them suitable for native grasses.” People working for the federal government long ago realized that alien plants performed better than native plant species to repair degraded environments, which is why many plants now referred to as “invasive”—such as Autumn Olive (Eleagnus umbellata)—were brought here. This species helped with mine reclamation in the 1830s.

 

Was it a mistake to bring such plants to this country to help fix man’s destructive impact upon the environment? No. With an increasing human population accompanied by development of the land, and increasingly warmer and droughty conditions in places like Virginia due to manmade global climate change, so-called invasive species would be the unintended savior for our wildlife—if only folks would take the time to educate themselves about soil science and how the natural world works.

 

For example, it's common to see abandoned fields and roadsides in Virginia filled with Autumn Olive as you drive throughout the Commonwealth. You could easily believe the dogmatic precepts that these Asian plants “pushed out” native plants and took their place, but such erroneous information combined with your deceptive perception would fool you. Without an assessment of prior use of the land and knowledge of soils, you can’t possibly come to a reality-based conclusion about why certain plant species grow in these areas.

 

Unused fields formerly accommodated either half-ton cows that trod over them day after day, or crops that required heavy machinery to prepare the soil, to sow seeds, and to care for and harvest the plants every year. Roadsides are leftover disturbed areas following road construction. Both fields and roadsides typically contain nutrient-poor, compacted soil. Little organic matter was returned to the soil to enrich cow or crop fields, and topsoil removal by roadway construction uncovered dense subsoil containing few organisms or nutrients.

 

Therefore, the plants you view as you drive along highways bordered by neglected farm fields are the plants capable of growing well in almost inhospitable conditions resulting from human activity. They rehabilitate the soil for the benefit of native plants that require good (i.e., crumbly, nutritive) soil in which to grow well. Only after the “pioneers” (as with Hydrilla) have done their work can such plants move into these impaired locations.

 

Native-pioneer plant species are few in Piedmont Virginia (where I live), consisting mainly of Eastern Redcedar (Juniperus virginiana), Virginia Pine (Pinus virginiana), Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus, in mountainous and foothill areas), Broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus), and, though not actually native to this part of the state, Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacicia). You will often see these plants joined by Autumn Olive, a hint that supposedly invasive plants are simply nonnative-pioneer plants, increasing the diversity of plant life and thus animal life in these areas.

 

Autumn Olive shrubs and Black Locust trees in fields and roadsides share an extremely useful attribute: the ability to fix nitrogen and thus enrich poor soil (a desirable trait often employed by gardeners growing peas and beans). Such plants serve as Mother Nature’s nitrogen cooperative, working with soil bacteria that enrich the soil by adding this vital nutrient to it so people don’t need to squander oil reserves manufacturing synthetic fertilizer.

 

Unfortunately, the predominant narrative nowadays is that everyone must remove supposedly invasive plants that are mistakenly believed to have displaced native plants while not offering their ecological benefits to the environment. It’s a false narrative, but not surprising, given that people are prepared to understand only what their own biases and limited experiences allow. Yet, anyone can find out for himself the truth about these plants. It’s not rocket science; you simply need to observe the natural world without preconceived notions and grow these plants on your property.

 

I’ve observed in my own yard how Black Knapweed (Centaurea nigra), Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), Autumn Olive, and Paulownia (Paulownia tomentosa) feed our pollinators with blooms, birds and mammals with fruits/seeds/or buds, and even furnish nesting material and/or sites. In years when deer overpopulated the area, they denuded my yard of most native plants, which would have destroyed all habitat if I hadn’t included commonly disparaged invasives in my yard that deer didn’t eat. These ungulates are often unrecognized for their role in making many alien plants appear invasive.

 

In the severe drought years of 2002 and 2003, I witnessed how native species withered alongside the roads as I drove to Shenandoah National Park to give monthly slide presentations. Meanwhile, alien species continued to flourish despite drought and drying winds.

 

If you care about wildlife, ignore the siren call of voices who frame the invasive-plant movement in terms of morality (i.e., your “duty” to destroy these plants). They couldn’t be more wrong.

NATURE ADVICE: 

It may not be long before localities begin to ban the growing of so-called invasive plants on your private property. People must speak out against such laws that will only bring harm to our wildlife. Government officials are not experts on this issue; they respond to the people who make a ruckus. Enlighted citizens must raise their voices so the truth can be heard and given due consideration.

 

Missing the Forest for the Trees

A male Eastern Towhee perches on a radio tower enveloped by an Autumn Olive shrub—perhaps the best wildlife plant there is as it feeds numerous species of pollinators, birds, and mammals.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

There’s much publicity nowadays that misinforms people about the need to create a wildlife habitat in which 70% of the plants are native. A major focus is often on getting folks to grow trees—in particular, oak trees. Why? According to Nancy Hazard, a member of a group called “Greening Greenfield [Massachusetts]”, “Oak is king. Oaks host over 400 different species of moths and butterflies.”

 

https://www.recorder.com/Ecological-difference-39423618

 

This deceptive “fact” (which comes from entomologist Doug Tallamy, whose tally for caterpillar species that feed on oaks was 557 in 2017, according to the National Audubon Society) is repeated often in gardening columns, making people think that any oak they grow in their yards is going to feed hundreds of species of moth and butterfly caterpillars.

 

https://www.audubon.org/news/new-research-further-proves-native-plants-offer-more-bugs-birds

 

The reality, however, is that this number represents the sum of Lepidopteran species that feed upon the entire genus of oaks across the country, of which there are at least 90 species. In other words, if you plant a White Oak (Quercus alba) in your yard, it’s not going to feed nearly as many caterpillar species as you might think.

 

Why the focus on tree-caterpillar species anyway? The study that supposedly proved that at least 70% of the plants in a yard should be native for the benefit of songbirds was based upon the foraging habit of Carolina Chickadee parents getting food for their chicks. These small birds mainly feed their young tiny caterpillars that they find on forest trees (their ecological niche) which, by definition, consists of native species.

 

Although Doug Tallamy and his coauthors, student Desiree Narango and ornithologist Peter Marra, concluded in their original paper that the Carolina Chickadee requires native trees (which should have been obvious even without a study) to reproduce successfully, their observations are now employed by virtually every garden columnist and TV gardening personality to mean all bird species require 70% of the plants in people’s yards to be native. But this contention was not proven by the study everyone references, and therefore Narango, Tallamy, and Marra should have set the record straight by now.

 

https://indefenseofnature.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-carolina-chickadeegrasps-tulip-poplar.html

 

However, these scientists do not seem to comprehend or value the larger picture because they are so focused on only a fraction of it. They’ve been missing the forest (the rest of the environment) for the trees (especially those oaks).

 

Dr. Narango “believes that her results provide convincing evidence that planting native is in a bird lover’s best interests. ‘The trees [our color-banded chickadees] were going to were covered in warblers, tanagers, and orioles,’ she says. ‘They’re basically telling us what these other birds want.’”

 

https://www.audubon.org/news/new-research-further-proves-native-plants-offer-more-bugs-birds

 

Yes, the chickadees were telling her what warblers, tanagers, and orioles want because these species are birds of the forest, as is the chickadee. To assist such birds requires that your yard and every yard around you must become forest, something highly unlikely to occur in urban/suburban areas.

 

Additionally, this newly minted scientist fails to recognize that the forest habitat of these species is not what all other birds want. If everyone made their yards forestland, we’d lose our common backyard species—Eastern Towhee, Northern Cardinal, Brown Thrasher, and Song Sparrow, to name a few—that require shrubby habitat, not forest. Sunny shrubland with herbaceous plants and woody shrubs supports far more diversity of insect life than forest, including an abundance of mammal, reptile, salamander, and bird species. And truth be told, numerous nonnative shrubs and herbaceous plants support these organisms very well.

 

https://www.marlenecondon.com/

 

For the greatest diversity of life forms, our landscape cannot consist solely of forestland, which is what Tallamy, Narango, Marra and their followers are pushing for, even though they don’t seem to know it.

 

NATURE ADVICE:

If most of your plantings are already native species, that’s great—if they provide the proper structure necessary to create good wildlife habitat. Problems arise when people feel they are obliged to get rid of fully mature nonnative plants, especially by way of pesticides, even though the resulting bare ground or young (immature) newly planted native plants will not be useful for a long time to come.

Alien plants can provide habitat for shrubland bird species, whether it be by providing nesting sites, food (fruits/seeds), or cover. It’s a huge mistake to destroy habitat that functions perfectly for shrubland birds. Please don’t be swayed by the harmful information perpetuated not only by the media, but also scientists who dare not speak against a popular thought, even though it is wrong.

 

 

Making Scents of Nature

Plant fragrances came into being for the utilitarian purpose of attracting insects (such as this Hummingbird Moth) to pollinate flowers (such as the Mimosa [Albizia julibrissin] seen here). Their function has nothing to do with making people smell “nice”.

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS © Marlene A. Condon

 

For thousands of years, at least, humans have applied substances to their bodies to smell better. Of course, for most of those years, people did not have easy access to bathing facilities as we do now. As a result, when hard-working men and women sweated, they were not always able to effectively wash off the bacteria that fed on their sweat (a mix of water and a tiny amount of salt and waste products). People therefore tried to mask the resulting body odor with fragrances.

 

Sweat itself does not smell bad. The body odor we find so offensive is the result of droppings that bacteria feeding on the waste products of our sweat create. All living things leave behind droppings, substances that an organism is unable to break down and make use of to keep itself alive.

 

This odor is not instantaneously noticeable. It only becomes apparent over time, with the build-up of bacteria and thus the build-up of droppings. These microorganisms are constantly multiplying, so if a person delays washing himself for too long, more and more bacteria are producing waste and the odor assaults our senses. Workout clothes left sitting around for many days, especially if they are not hung to dry, will become smelly for the same reason.

 

Over the past several years, my husband and I have found it ever more difficult to enjoy a good meal at a restaurant, but not because of people’s body odor. Rather, the problem is instead that so many people nowadays wear perfume (if a woman) or cologne (if a man).

 

It is extremely unappetizing to try to eat when various non-food scents, pleasant as they might possibly be in a different setting, are filling the air around you. If I were writing a book of etiquette, the first rule would be to never wear perfume/cologne to a restaurant or anywhere food is going to be served (parties, office meetings, etc.).

 

I would also suggest that restaurants should never be using anything but fragrance-free hand soaps. Have you ever washed your hands at a restaurant and then tried to eat a sandwich with hands reeking of fragrance that masked the appetizing aromas of the food?

 

Lamentably, restaurants are not the only venue where the odors of fragrances abound. Hotel rooms and lobbies, and even some doctors’ offices, can be strong-smelling, thanks to devices that shoot aerosols into the air “to make it smell nice”. There should be absolutely no need of these products in such places because they are supposed to be clean.

 

Even many retail establishments make a point to fill the air with strong fragrances, undoubtedly because they know many people have been deluded into thinking that perfumed air equates to “fresh” air. But it isn’t.

 

Surprisingly, when my husband and I are trying to enjoy the actual fresh air of the outdoors, we are often subjected to the perfume/cologne of joggers passing by. As someone who jogged for more than 35 years, I can state with confidence that the wearing of fragrances to exercise was not something I ever encountered on the road or at the track.

 

There are good reasons not to wear these substances. Fragrances attract insects that feed at flowers and fruits, and you probably would prefer not to have insects hanging around you. I once wore a dress to a picnic and a yellow jacket persistently followed me around. I couldn’t understand it, and I was concerned about it going up my dress. (Yikes!!!) It finally dawned on me that I had made the mistake of putting on a mildly rose-scented body cream (I love the smell of roses).

 

Another reason not to wear scented cosmetics is that cheaper perfumes and colognes can contain toxic ingredients. Think petrochemicals. Petrochemicals are chemicals derived from petroleum or other fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas. The huge multitude of products made with these chemicals is astounding. Paints, electronics, tires, bedding, housewares, clothing, and toys are just the tip of the iceberg.

 

While these products can entail problems for the Earth because they are difficult to dispose of, perfumes pose a different dilemma for people. These substances can be carcinogenic. Substances applied to your skin or inhaled through your nose can be absorbed into your body, entering your blood stream and getting carried to your organs.

 

In antiquity, perfume makers used plant-based oils as the “carrier” for natural fragrances. For example, olive oil and almond oil were readily available in ancient Greece and Rome and thus were employed as the method of delivery for the delightful scents of flowers and other plant-derived products.

However, the use of natural substances in perfume does not always guarantee a product is safe for humans, and only the most expensive perfumes nowadays are made using natural fragrances. Less expensive ones use mostly synthetic fragrances, some of which are derived from petroleum, and others of which have such hazardous properties as the ability to accumulate in human tissues.

 

Although research is ongoing about the effects of both natural and synthetic fragrances upon human health, my thought is that you can never go wrong following Mother Nature’s lead. “She” doesn’t bombard us with fragrances. Fresh air (when unpolluted) is enjoyable of its own accord. Of course, we love the scents of many kinds of flowers, and thus stop to enjoy a quick whiff as we move on by. But that’s it—a short inhalation of fragrance that is unlikely to be problematic for our bodies.

 

The wearing of manmade perfumes and colognes, on the other hand, means breathing in these volatile substances for quite some time. And for bystanders, it can be just as unpleasant and unappreciated to be exposed to someone’s perfume/cologne for a long time as it is to be exposed to the smoke of a smoker. It could possibly be just as dangerous for them as well.

 

In days of yore, it made sense for people to take the scents of nature to make perfumes in which to envelop themselves. Today, it’s not necessary, and we know it could pose a risk to our health. One thing I know for sure: Perfumes and colognes can certainly ruin date night!

 

NATURE ADVICE: 

People think of yellow jackets as “pests” when these insects show up to share food, such as fruits, that folks are eating outside. Therefore, if you don’t want these insects flying around you even when you aren’t eating, avoid wearing fragrances that mimic the sweet scents of flowers and fruits.