Akron Trees on Earth Day

Buckeye nut

One of the things I love about Akron Ohio is our trees.  The city has always maintained the trees in what we call the devil strip, that patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street.  When I was a child we had Buckeyes, the state tree. Ohio Buckeyes are related to the chestnut and horse chestnut.  The nut is encased in a spiny green fruit.  I remember them bouncing off my head on early fall afternoons, as I walked home from school (ow!).  One could have an artificial limb made of Buckeye, back in the day, or one's casket crafted from its wood.  Now it is used for pulp and feels to be fairly scarce along our city's streets.


Before the Buckeyes were the elm trees.  Majestic, with an expansive canopy, the American Elm tree lined streets throughout this country. Most American Elms died off from Dutch Elm disease.  The disease first appeared in 1930 in Ohio, most mature elm trees were gone by the 1970s.  The dutch elm fungus is spread by a beetle and along roots where trees are close together.  

American Elm

I have the opportunity to plant trees on my land on North Maple St.  I can plant anything I want but buckeyes and elms are part of my heritage (along with sour cherries but that may have more to do with pie...).  They feel like arboreal familiars alive with the essence of this place.   Nurturing an elm tree to maturity would require vigilance and fungicide.  This is the mystery of ecological change.  What was part of my environment at ten may not be viable almost fifty years later.  The Dutch elm fungus is now part of this ecosystem, along with other invasives such as japanese knotweed, purple loosestrife, the Asian long-horned beetle and a relative newcomer,  the blacklegged tick (deer tick). 


I plan to wage a vigorous campaign against knotweed but then I need to listen to this land as it is now.  Nothing remains the same.  Nostalgia will not fix our environments. But a girl does need to have a sour cherry tree or three.

####

Today's poem:

Excerpts of Eclogue 1 by Virgil, Paul Alpers, translator

Meliboeus

You, Tityrus, under the spreading, sheltering beech,

Tune woodland musings on a delicate reed:

We flee our country's borders, our sweet fields,

Abandon home; you, lazing in the shade,

Make woods resound with lovely Amaryllis.

Tityrus

O Melibee, a god grants us this peace --

A god to me forever, whose altar

A young lamb from our folds will often bleed.

He has allowed, you see, my herds to wander 

And me to play as I will on shepherd's pipes.

M. 

Not jealous, but amazed am I -- our fields

Are everywhere in turmoil: look at me,

Sick, driving my goats, scarcely leading this one.

Here in thick hazels, laboring on bare rock,

She left the flock's one hope, her twins just born:

A curse well augured, had our wits not been

Blind to the oaks struck down by heaven above ...

M.

Luck old man! your lands will then remain

Yours and enough for you, although bare rock

and slimy marsh reeds overspread the fields.

Strange forage won't invade your heavy ewes,

Nor foul diseases from a neighbor's flocks ...

Ah, but we others leave for thirsty lands --

...

T.

Still, you could take your rest with me tonight,

Couched on green leaves: there will be apples ripe,

soft roasted chestnuts, plenty of pressed cheese,

Already rooftops in the distance smoke,

And lofty hills let fall their lengthening shade.

Great Blue Heron Rookery -- National Poetry Month/Earth Day Installment 2

Bath Road Great Blue Heron Rookery

We have been making regular pilgrimage to the Great Blue Heron Rookery on Bath Road on the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I think of herons as primarily solitary but they seem to gather together for courtship, egg-laying and raising the young.  There are over 50 active nests in the three or four most populated trees. The males bring offerings of sticks to the woo the females and to demonstrate their homemaking (nestmaking?) abilities. They do a little tug of war over the stick and then she puts it in the nest (you can watch a nesting pair on the Cornell Ornithology Heron-cam).


Here is a fine Great Blue Heron poem by Carolyn Kizer:
The Great Blue Heron
BY CAROLYN KIZER

M.A.K. September, 1880-September, 1955

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing   

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.   

Shadow without a shadow,   

Hung on invisible wires   

From the top of a canvas day,   

What scissors cut him out?   

Superimposed on a poster   

Of summer by the strand   

Of a long-decayed resort,   

Poised in the dusty light   

Some fifteen summers ago;   

I wondered, an empty child,   

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.   

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting   

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,   

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,   

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?   

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned   

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow   

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:   

The old logs hauled away,   

The pines and driftwood cleared   

From that bare strip of shore   

Where dozens of children play;   

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,   

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently   

For fifteen summers and snows,   

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like grey smoke, a vapor   

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.

Carolyn Kizer, “The Great Blue Heron” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Poetry (April 1958).

The Lorax Sells Mazda's in DC

Thanks Bionic Mama for sharing this story about the Lorax selling what "everyone, everyone, everyone needs:"

Mister!  …he said with a sawdusty sneeze,

The Lorax Selling Mazdas

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.

 

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs

 

 He was very upset as he shouted and puffed--

"Whats that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?

 

Apparently, a Mazda.

New Blogs/Sites to Follow

I've found some interesting websites and blogs of late.  Here are just a few:

Ohio Environmental News

EcoWatch Ohio

Jack and Jill Politics

Colorlines

And my favorite,
Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl

Enjoy!

Affliction to Others, Affliction to Self

I am a full moon cycle behind on the study part of the Integrated Study Practice Program unit on Wisdom.  But that's ok.  I am in Mossville, LA this week, with 8 grad students from Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Health Advocacy Program, and right intention (for the full moon period that began  Feb. 28) seems particularly important.

We are here to assist Mossville Environmental Action Now (MEAN) assess the health care needs of a community made very ill by the toxins spewing from the stacks and "accidental" releases of the 40+ refineries and chemical processing plants within their parish (county).  Thirteen of these plants are within a 1/2 mile of Mossville.  CONOCO, the largest, is right in their backyard, the dangerous and irresponsible neighbor unresponsive to the demands of common decency not to mention justice.

I've written about MEAN before.  You can read about their situation in their own words as well.  But this morning as the sun is just coming up over the bayous and smoke stacks of southwest Louisiana I am conscious of the affliction everyone suffers down here, whether one is an environmentalist or not, whether one is black, white or brown, regardless of income, despite denial and evasion.  The air (and probably the water) and soil are killing people. 

Even though I live in a state and a region where I don't feel the air stinging my eyes, burning my throat, calling up all kinds of alarm in my immune system; even though I get to leave here at the end of the week, this affliction is my permanent affliction as well.  And yours.  Right intention for now is to know the affliction of others is affliction of self.  Engaging in wholesome actions that limit or relieve that affliction -- seeking environmental justice, working compassionately for change -- will yield results that benefit all of us.  If not in our lifetime then in the lives of our children.