Culling Plants, and Culling in Nature



Greenhouse with seedlings, 2009

    Not to pick up where another post left off--about first days landscaping--but every time I hear pounding rain on the stretched plastic of a greenhouse roof, I'm carried back to a January day in Petaluma, California where I logged my first day as a nursery worker.  My boss shepherded my into the little 48' x 24' hoop house, after we'd dashed from the barn.  Stepping inside the greenhouse, it sounded like being in a subway tunnel or on the tarmac of an airport next to an idling plane.  Greenhouse plastic amplifies the sound of rain, and the roar was alarming.  My assignment was to go through about 5,000 small seedling tubes of marsh plants and cull.  I had never heard that word.  So I watched as he did the first few.  Culling is a word I've since learned from this and other contexts, but I didn't know there was a real word for thinning the herd, so to speak.  It comes from Latin, where the root "coll-" meant 'to collect'.

  In nursery vernacular, 'culling' usually refers to the removal of dead plants from a large group, and the re-arrangment of that block of plants with only the remaining good, healthy ones.   Most good nurseries remove the worst living plants with the dead, as a way of upgrading the stock.  I culled pickleweed--Salicornia--for about 3 hours as water rose up through the grenhouse's gravel floor, as if the marsh plants were demanding their nursery environment seedling tubes were all sticking together and sticking to their holding trays, with roots tangled together.  It become a marsh right then and there.  It was hard on that first day to judge which live plants were weak or unhealthy enough to toss.  Something all nursery workers learn over time based on a few factors, boiled down to the idea of a standard for that nursery.  One easy guage you can try is: "Would you want to buy this one?", but that doesn't always work if someone isn't the type who buys plants at nurseries.



Deer in Ithaca suburb, 2011

    'Culling' has recently been used in relation to localized deer problems, basically meaning to reduce the total numbers by killing a significant percent of the deer herd in a given area.  I won't get into the right or wrong of that here, except to say that the nuances of the word are different from how it's use for plants in a nursery environment.  In a nursery, you wouldn't really refer to that as culling.  You might call that 'tossing plants' or 'pitching' them as a dear old friend from North Dakota used to say.  Pitching or tossing plants is something a nursery person hates to do, and only does when he has to admit he's grown too many of something to sell, and while it's a waste of money to throw plants away or compost them, it will cost more to care for them all.  But as you can see, the words are all a little different, even though they all refer in some way to reducing a quantity of a living organism for some reason.

   Nature culls its own, we know that.  Weak organisms are often easier prey; some are spared their eventual fate by the cruel pragmatism of the group: they may be eaten, killed, or abandoned to ensure they don't survive.  Evolutionary theorists argue about how animals of many kinds know to do this, or if in fact we are reading into their actions to see forethought or intent that's not really there.  But somehow they know.  It is perhaps biology's most fundamental idea--that organsisms struggle to pass along their genes to the next generation.  Barely hidden in this idea is another one: that organisms can recognize defective genes in their relatives. 

  In plants, we see a much more decorous society.  There is really no eating their own.  It's all left up to nature and her elements.  Yes, there is prey--lots of things eat plants.  But even the strongest most fit plants are stuck in place, there to be eaten by any animal willing to try.  Again the theorists: plants develop protection to defend against their sitting-duck problem.  Spines, thorns, toxic chemical compounds, rapid rejuvenation after being browsed--all these are ways plants have adapted to their fundamental flaw of being stationary.  Culling, then, comes at the hands of a more external cruelty.  As a plant you have to worry about a lot, but one thing you don't need to watch out for is being eaten by your parent, or being abandoned by one. 


Tsuga candensis, hemlock seedlings

    There's one more intriguing consideration with culling in the nursery environment.  With native plants we're growing them for their genetic diversity or their genetic specificity.  That means we either want a broad mix of genetics from within a given region to maximize appropriate options, or we want the genetics from a given habitat or location because we've decided that's what maximizes chance of survival in this particular case.  So we raise as many plants as we can, from our seed crop that meets those goals.  So should we cull the weak ones within such a subset of plants?  Once we've raised 1,000 spicebush for a project for example, should we cull out the 50 or so that are weakest and slowest to grow?  What if those end up being the most productive for seed output at maturity?  What if those happen to have a higher concentration of a compound that renders them more deer resistant?  What if the slower growers happen to be longer lived?  As a grower of native plants, we wrestle with these questions as they hide just below the surface of the more obvious decisions we make.  Some growers even argue you should save all the seed that doesn't germinate, because that reluctance--or recalcitrance as it's called in seed jargon--is precisely what these plants need in their gene pool to survive a changing climate.  After all, what better survival mechanism than not playing all your cards at once?  When you see a block of 200 columbine plants in 4" pots in the nursery, for example, not all 200 of those 200 germinated in the same tray.  We consolidate those out of the entire seed flat we sowed, based on the 200 that grew to a certain size with a certain vigor--a herd mentality, if you will.  You might call it culling, if you are feeling sorry for the ones we didn't pot up.  Or, you might call it reverse culling, or artificial selection, if you look at it from the perspective of the 200 we saved...it gets complicated.  In nature, it's Natural Selection--Darwin's key mechanism that acts on nature's raw, wild genetic stew.  But natural culling, or natural selection, plays out over time and space, massive amounts of both, which allows for the most possible factors to influence the culling.  When we do it in the nursery, it's kind of a sudden blow.  To keep the analogy warm, also consider the suddenness that comes with the 'culling' of deer.  In nature culling may happen suddenly on occasion but it is usually more of a process.

  Culling is one of those ideas that seem more and more nuanced the more you think of the concept.  Next time you buy plants, or read about 'culling' the deer population in a suburban neighborhood, think about what people really mean when they use the word...

Don't Sing to Your Plants--Sing With Them

   In the nursery one often engages in conversation about plants--with customers, with each other as staff members, and sometimes in my own head, solo.  Why does this one never grow well in pots, but it's so vigorous in the ground?  Why does this one die in the winter even though it's absolutely cold hardy in our region?  Where did I get this lone plant that's hiding out in an odd-size pot in the corner of a hoop house?  Didn't we just pot those 4 weeks ago--look at all those roots already coming out from the drain holes in the pots...whoa.  Some plants prove themselves as the nursery equivalent of excellent house guests--not necessarily doing dishes but being pleasant companions in an ephemeral sort of way.  Other plants are like the other kind of house guest--they are happy to stay as long as we let them.  All plants behave uniquely in our care and under our wings. 

   Thinking about them as unique beings is the conversation I have most often with plants.  I may sing among them, but I don't sing to them.  I feel they sing to me, and I'm grateful.  The music isn't literal--it's more like seeing music with no sound.  Conversation with these evocative creatures--truly out other half, in a cosmic sense going back to earliest evolution, but also in terms of metabolism.  They live on what would otherwise be one of our most toxic waste products, and in return they make the very air that swaddles us breathable.  It's truly hard to fathom.  So it should be no surprise that conversation with plants is an ancient, articulate, intimate affair grounded in observation and silence.  It's quiet time.

  The most beautiful thing about being a grower is just that--being a grower.  Growing plants is the beautiful part.  Creating any satisfying landscape is perhaps analogous to a chef's presentation on the plate--important, but it's an effect noticed way down at the end of the process, when the final product is in view.  Growing plants is more akin to the chef's creative act--cooking.  As growers, our conversations with plants often begin in the field, with their parents.  Some idle small talk, admiration, maybe some light flirting: "You look pretty in the early light" or "The frost brings out your natural color".  Later, we try to figure out how to allow them to germinate in our care.  There are a few basic tricks with most native plants, ways to treat the seed.  It's like anything else in life.  You find out what you need to add to the equation to make it work.  Once seedlings sprout, we as growers need to pay close attention--if you've raised kids, this stage is entirely analogous to the infant stage of human life.  Very unforgiving.  You try to control all exposure to the elements, and to anything else--too dry, too wet, too cold, too hot, one stray predator, one lapse of judgment--all have consequences.  But with seedlings, everything is sped up compared to human life, so within a few days or weeks, seedlings 'harden off'--this is a nice old-timey nursery term for toughening up, which takes a lot more than a few days or weeks for people...

   At every step, we have conversations with plants.  Most growers have these chats in our heads.  Talking about plants with other people is fun, but communing with the plants themselves is the richer language.  Raising them in this accelerated way to adolescence--when they are ready to go out on their own, into the world, into someone's garden--is sweet and wistful.  Some growers I've known don't really want to sell any of their plants.  In a comical way, they will decline sales as they walk around with a nursery customer: "Oh, no, those aren't for sale, sorry..." as they grab the flat of 4" pots and whisk them off to some fake "SOLD" area or some faux infirmary.  Of the 400+ species we raise or tend to each year, there are always a few we really don't want to part with.  It's probably how a dog breeder feels, and why some dog breeders accrue dogs over the years.  Our Nursery Manager (Kathy) grew a world-class crop of bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) two years ago, and we all really resented when people bought them.  We even priced them prohibitively, or so we thought--out the door they went.  Our latest example of this is a crop of native wild ginger (Asarum canadense) Kathy also grew from seed I collected seed in early June, near Clinton, NY.  I was lucky to stumble on a sprawling patch at its single-best seed-bearing day of the year--ripe fruit but not open yet.  Seeds of wild ginger are borne in soft, plump thumbnail-sized fruits on spindly stalks that either hide under the leaves and blend into the colors of the forest duff, or they actually slink under the duff.  Either way, very hard to see, very hard to find.  Adding complexity to shyness, the fruits open quickly, and the seeds are ferried off by ants who relish the little appendage clinging to the seed--the eliasome.  Ants probably hasten the fruits' opening as well. 

  I like to think of all our native plants in the nursery as passing through.  These particular plants, our first crop of wild ginger seedlings, grew quickly, proving to be a truly rhizomatous plant, becoming themselves in a matter of months, filling the little seedling cells with crisp white roots, then filling the next size after we transplanted them.  I also like to think of their time with us as an interlude.  We interrupt their natural cycle in the wild, but out of care, love and consummation.  Then once the seed sprouts and the seedlings are ready for life out in the world--adolescence, time to leave the nest--we send them back out to the wild.  Sometimes the wild is just that--a real woods where they can smell the leaf litter and remember the sound of the wind.  Sometimes it's a garden someone's made to mimic, or honor, the wild--a natural garden, a native landscape.  As long as there's some love there, I like to think the plants are happy to be back 'out' in the world. 

   We want that for them also.  For any native plant, life in the wild is the ideal.  Life in a garden isn't bad either if you like conversation...

Just the Fracks? Environmentalism is Patriotic, Not Political

     The question whether or not to use 'fracking' to tap underground natural gas resources in Central New York is easily one of the prime dramas playing out in our historical frame.  It's like so many other things that manifest as politics but really are just questions, aims to find out the truth, or the best way to do something.  The term 'politically correct' is overused, often when people really mean 'socially correct', or simply 'disingenuous' or 'un-genuine'.  It really means 'You may say that, but aren't your real thoughts a bit more cynical or ruthless?'.  Use of this phrase seemed to gain prominence also in our lifetimes, and seemed to really take off when open discussion of who's soft and who's tough became the defining political argument. 

     Attempts to make everything political, and the tendency for people to see more and more things as falling along political party lines, can be construed as the honest evolution of party lines in a country, America, that is still nascent and still sorting itself out.  We're still less than 250 years old as an organized sovereign entity.  But is political party line truly the keenest way to divvy ourselves up?  Especially when we really only have 2 major camps?  You want Coke or Pepsi?  Maybe we're headed for a refining of thoughts within broader parties, the early rumblings of an evolutionary set of sub-menus within the two-party model.   But the politicization of everything can also be seen as a chronic afflication, and can't be the goal of a two-party system, unless the next goal of that system is constant bickering that leads to grudges, feuds, and fighting about money, taxes, resources, power and status within the system...isn't that what the young America was trying to reject in the first place?  Can Environmentalism ever hope to exist above Politics?

     Attaching the the weight or standard of a political party to every decision is not only a grave hinderance of free thought--shouldn't we be able to hold opposing ideas in our hearts simultaneously?  Isn't that a natural condition of humanity?  Isn't that part of what makes us human?  Didn't Einstein say that?  Maybe he was wrong.  But making every dispute political also diminishes the ideas and questions at hand to a sort of sport.  Yankees or Mets?  Jets or Giants?  Flyers or Bruins?  Red or Blue?   Would it were that simple.  Yes, many decisions can be cast as political--affairs of the state, or the public, the commons, whatever you want to call it.  But too often the party itself becomes the badge that stands for a long grocery list of packaged ideas.  Instead of thinking about the ideas, we just use the brand name as a placeholder for the ideas, until we're talking in code instead of thinking.  Someone wears certain clothing, they're with this party; someone has a certain job, or drives a certain car brand, they're with that party.  Environment?  Liberals want to take food out of my kids' mouths.  Can we come back from that idea, that wanting to protect the environment means not that we love our country but that from some ivory tower we want to govern the salt of the earth?  These caricatures are taking the place of reality.

     I  have no problem saying I don't want hydrofracking to be here.  I don't.  The idea that our state DEC--Department of Environmental Conservation--seems to be functioning more as a Department of Economic Consideration is of grave concern but no surprise.  Have you ever once heard of a wetland being protected at the expense of development in our region?  To be fair, I assume that has happened--but I've never seen or heard of it happening.  There are complicated issues of public vs. private land, but if on one hand you argue that owners of private property should be able to do what they want with their land, how can you also have compulsory intergration, which says the exact opposite--that a drilling company can take things from my land even if I don't want them to?

   I also have no problem saying I think increased flooding in recent years, locally and all over, is directly related to the loss of wetlands to development.  You just can't continue to develop in wetlands, then try to acheive the same hydrologic function with man-made detention and retention ponds and culverts, and expect nature not to react.  Nature isn't reacting with a vengeance, I don't think...it's just an unfathomably complex system that has taken millions of years to reach equilibrium in so many ways, in millions of places.  If we undo that, and then try to 'fix' it again, there is no way we should expect to succeed, or at least not quickly.  You don't have to be a wetland scientist to start wondering what the effect might be of losing much of our wetlands in America.  But again, it's been made into a political issue, bundling ideas along party lines: anti-development, pro-wetland?  We know all about you, Mister.  It's my land, I can do what I want with it.  Keep government out of my life.  Except when I want it there...But what happens when each of those seemingly individual decisions starts to have collective consequences?  When individual 1/2 acre decisions are multiplied by a huge number of replicates?  It adds up.

     According to the Center for Earth and Environmental Science at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, the US as a whole has lost over half its wetland acreage, and continues to lose more than 100,000 acres of wetlands a year.  The lower midwest (and California) has lost over 80% of its wetland acreage; only 3 states have lost 20% or fewer of their wetland acreage--Alaska, Maine and New Hampshire.  The stats are alarming but breaking them down further just numbs our sense of meaning.  Check countless other sources for similar data if you are a skeptic.  You can't continue to lose wetlands and hope to keep the functions wetlands perform.  The main ones?  Absorbing water, or slowing its flow and thereby allowing the loads of sediment, nutrients and other pollutants to settle out into the vegetation and the mud.  This is nature's erosion control--the wetland, and vegetation in general.  Wetlands are sponges.  Wring them out or throw them out, and you don't have as many sponges at work.  It's that simple.  Faster-moving water does more damage in the form of erosion, and it can't be absorbed into faux, man-made 'wetlands' or scraped-out straight-line roadside ditches when it's moving fast.  Note how, in nature, water settles out and slows down in large, generous allotments of space (again, the wetlands) that for the most part we don't create.  Our roles with wetlands are generally to learn to appreciate and love them--leaving them intact or protecting them--or to destroy them and suffer the consequences.  So flooding--is this political?  Wetlands--are they political?  Is it political to learn and understand how wetlands work, what they do?   Does it make you a weenie within your 'party' to say 'Hey, that kind of makes sense, could it be true?'...does it make you a traitor within your party to suggest that development in one place might be ok, better than development in another place (again, wetland...)?

   Loving wetlands is patriotic--they are our natural heritage, our tableau.  Those idyllic nature scenes we think of as heartland--geese and ducks landing or resting in a farm pond with vast vistas of hedgerows sharing space with fields, sunset in peach and lavender and gray--this is what we had.  Wanting to protect that has somehow become unpatriotic.  It's an aspersion to be pro-environment. 

   This is what we need to reclaim.  We need to remember to be proud of environmentalism because its core effort is to protect America from careless waste and thoughtless squandering.  For years, going back to grade school, we've been taught that nations and cultures are defined by their resources.  Does it make sense to risk one to extract another?  How about risking a few to extract one?  If we squander our fresh water, but money can be made in the act, does that make squandering better?

First Landscaping Jobs and Seed Collecting for Life

     I was 21 years old and living in a rented house that backed up against a fir-pine woods at about 6000' elevation in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  If you walked uphill slowly, swinging back and forth between widely spaced trunks, it might have looked like a slalom skier in rewind, going uphill, instead of downhill, in alternating arcs around trees.  Just keep going up and up and up until you'd hit a wet meadow with monkshood and lilies and sedges and Indian paintbrush and all the seemingly delicate but mountain-tough plant species that make a colorful wet meadow in the Sierras.  I was new in town, so they were all new to me, and it was love at first sight--but as with all love at first sight, I didn't know much about any of them.  One might say I was being shallow, falling for a meadow of pretty faces.  But there was more to it.

     I found work one night while eating a slice of pizza.  I was next to a guy named Roy at the counter.  Roy asked me what I was doing, if I was new in town.  In small towns that's a fair and logical question, so I took it as a friendly ice breaker.  I told him yes, and he asked what kind of work I did.  I told him I was looking for something immediate just to get myself working quickly.  He advised me to come to his jobsite tomorrow and his boss would definitely hire me.  They were talking earlier today about how they needed more guys.  It was a large lake-side estate being built, and landscaped, from scratch.  I told him I'd never done landscape work, but he said it didn't matter, they needed help.   I thanked him and he said, "What was your name again, Squirrel?"  I said "Segal."  He said ok, great, see you tomorrow.

Cornus racemosa, gray dogwood

     So I showed up at the jobsite and his boss immediately asked me who I was and why I was here.  "Did Roy mention I was coming by for a job?  I met him last night and he said you needed help."  He said something about how Roy was always saying things that weren't true and that he didn't even know if Roy was still working for him, but if I was ready to work we could start for a day and see how it went.  I moved gravel all day to lay a generously wide apron around a beachside firepit.  I tried to catch a large rolling boulder coming downhill at me by putting my shovel head under it, the way you'd pick up a lacrosse ball with a lacrosse stick if the ball were slowly rolling towards you.  The shovel handle abruptly shot up from about my chest height to over my head, missing my chin on its way by about 1/2".  My jaw would have been broken in an instant.  My new boss was right there and imparted the bossly wisdom "Never do that again, dude".  He said everything in the vernacular and tone of ski culture in the mountain west, I would come to learn.  He was old enough to be my father.  I had never heard adults talk like freshman year of college.  It was eye-opening in many ways. 

     After about 3 weeks of site prep, including days raking vast expanses of soil to remove every pebble larger than about 1", we began installing plants.  Unfortunately, much of the approach to the lake was sodded, which at the time I didn't understand or think about, but now realize was part of the eternal compromise between landscaping and ecology.  While sod or lawn provides some quick green cover, and it's useful to humans in some ways, its shallow roots are unsuited to stabilizing slopes or slowing down any real water volume over a surface of land.  But we also planted thousands of plants--ball and burlap evergreens, understory trees, large container shrubs and countless perennials.  On planting days, a Landscape Architect with the actual last name 'Plant' showed up on site wearing a bowler and holding what seemed like an ivory walking stick.  He would pace the site, impetuously tap his cane on the ground while we followed with a few species in our arms, and he'd either say nothing if we guessed correctly which plant he'd intended for his latest cane divot, or he'd say caustically "No..." until we tried another and another and finally got it right.  Sometimes he'd say "No, I'm just resting here."  Somehow we found him fun to work with.  He wasn't really a snob, he just seemed to enjoy playing the part. 

     There was a woman who worked for my boss, and on this jobsite she was in charge of plants and horticulture decisions.  At some point during this endless project which seemed to be funded with money from an offshore fortune, she started showing me some of the plants, probably because I asked her the names of a few.  I don't remember how we started talking plants, but she was nice to me, and most of us remember our first love--in my case it was columbine.  The seeds in an elongated sort of honeycomb, or fan-shaped capsule, would rattle seductively, the plant kingdom's sound of fertility (there are technical terms for many different kinds of seed-bearing structures in plants, and trust me that I learned them and know them, but I find certain generalized terms like 'head' or 'capsule' to be much more useful and also instinctive for people to grasp...moreso than the confusing 'follicle', for example).  Also the super-small but super-shiny black units, the seeds, seemed so clean, so pure, so powerful and so nearly lost and invisible to the average person.  And their sheer numbers were kind of shocking.  So many, so efficiently made and packed in this cute, durable and cosmically beautiful remnant of a flower.  I really knew absolutely nothing about plants.  And I was hooked right away. 

     She showed me coral bells and other North American native perennials commonly used in landscapes and especially in the mountain west.  I learned that some didn't make seed.  I'd do all the things the plant asked of me: be patient first, waiting till the capsule was a nice dryish tan, than I'd touch it gently, seeing if seed rattled out, or listening for the rattle.  Then I'd pinch a head and bring it up to head height and inspect more closely--where are the seeds?  Some plants, I would learn later, don't make seed because we've made sure they can't.  Or we've inadvertantly made them eunuchs.  But since most plants have both male and female parts in the same flower (and in botany this is called 'perfect'!), eunuch may not be quite right, but rather the sterile word 'sterile'.  Sterility as an accidental fate, or sterility as a virtue in plants...those are topics for another day.

     About this same time, during my seed awakening with plants, I noticed other plants magically doing the same thing--synchronized seeding.  It felt like a conspiracy.  All around me, plants that wowed everyone with their shows of color in flower followed their opening act with a subtle encore even more fascinating, and equally essential: they made seed.  Outside my local bank and grocery store, there were casual plantings of Cosmos and other flowering annuals and perennials, and I stopped to visit them regularly, scouting to see if any seed was ready to sneak into a little brown bag.  I collected cosmos seed, California poppy seed, lupine, and about 15 or 20 other kinds.  I stored them in those paper bags on my fireplace mantle.  As they began to pop open and explode in various ways (dehisce is the verb), I felt they were introducing themselves to me in more depth.  We were getting to know eachother, the plants and me.

   Ten years later I was more hooked than ever, and started a small mail order seed business called Californica: Seeds of the Golden State.  Californica is the botanical second name (species name) attached to many different kinds of plants native to California.  I collected all seed myself and spent zillions of follow-up hours cleaning, bagging, and mailing seed out to the modest horde of other plant crazies who found this strange, meager currency valuable.  In fact, some found it more valuable than money.  Letters came from Holland requesting seed of western US native plants for their research; I got a letter from a student in Scandinavia who just loved native perennials of the western US mountains for their hardiness.  The most touching letter of all was from an old timer in San Diego who lamented bitterly the loss of habitat and species he remembered from his childhood spent roaming the scrub behind his home.  Now all he wanted was some Viola pedunculata seed to grow as a token memory of his youth.    

Asarum canadense, wild ginger, from seed


  Here in 2011, in the Finger Lakes of Central New York, seed collecting is still the essence of my time out in the field, but the window is narrow here.  Also, fewer people here seem to value the currency of locally hand-collected native plant seed.  But I still do it, and it's still the basis of our plant inventory at the nursery.  Not so much by volume, but in meaning.  The plants we grow this way, from local seed we raise from scratch, has so much more inherent meaning to me.  We can't always work with those plants, but when we get to use our own-grown plants, the plantings have a certain secret, underlying glow that probably no one else sees.

Baseball, Weather Records and A Rest in the Woods

     Last weekend, just before Thanksgiving, in the woods of the Finger Lakes of Central New York, it could have been colder.  It's hard to say 'should have been' colder, because in truth, we don't know what it's supposed to be like on any given day or weekend.  Yes, if you like to see minute snippets of weather--single day high temps, for example--as passing bytes of proof that climate is changing, then you would say it should have been colder, more raw.  If, on the other hand, you believe that climate is changing, but you also see any given day's weather as an expression too ephemeral to represent the whole, then you just take a warm day in stride.  Or a warm weekend.  How about a warm month?  I think you can still take those in stride.  But the larger the data set, the harder it is to dismiss.  And larger data sets are, of course, collections of small bits of data--just as the streambed is a moving collection of cobbles and gravel, and while any one cobble isn't the streambank, well, in a cosmic way, it is.  Our aim should be to understand things at multiple scales and on several levels before we take a strong stance.  Scientists know this, which is why biologists study cells and organelles, but also organisms and systems, and why astronomers need to understand fundamental laws of physics and chemistry: the infinitessimal, and the infinite.

     Records in sports and weather are of two kinds: the meaningless and the meaningful.   The three things I follow most closely in life (aside from family) are weather, our emotional relationships with nature, and sports--not in any order.  In sports, we see humanity's main themes expressed somehow, so as an ex-jock but also as an observer of life, I think there's fundamental meaning in sports.  Meaningless sports records are ones that are either broken regularly, or that are statistically insignificant.  Often those two criteria are met in the same records.  For example, say a baseball player had more walks than anyone else since 2009.  Trumpeted as a real feat by announcers or statisticians, this means that such record has been broken twice in 3 years.  So is it a record, in the sense of a real accomplishment, or is it really just a statistic that reflects some artificial change in the way the game is played, managed, or officiated?  Or a team hitting its highest number of triples since 2007.  Compare that calibre of feat with something like most shutouts by a pitcher in one season since 1974 or most stolen bases by a player since 1981.  Of course, the idea is that rarity matters, scope matters, margins matter.  That's what makes records meaningful.  We understand the governing influences of baseball pretty clearly--and other sports--so most people tend to agree on the meaningful vs. meaningless distinction in sports records.  I am using baseball because of its deep history of stats. 

     With weather, it's not exactly equivalent, but we do have our share of meaningless records, and some that seem more meaningful.  Breaking the record high temperature for a given day in a given place, by a couple of degrees, may be analogous to someone breaking a sports record by a very small margin--250 innings pitched vs. 248 innings--or to breaking a very singular, isolated record that by definition is subject to the occasional low-probability outcome--maybe most throwing errors in a night game following a day game, for example.  The enhanced ability to track all types of data now allows for more data, more qualification of data, and therefore, more records.  However, this doesn't make weather data inherently meaningless, just because there's more of it.  In the above example, a record would be much more meaningful if it were broken by a wide margin.  There's nothing inherently interesting about Syracuse breaking a July high temperature record by 1 degree.  But breaking it by many degrees, or breaking single-day records many times in a given year, or breaking monthly averages several times over several years--that's when the gravels and cobbles start to become a streambed, and it's hard not to see them that way. 

     So that's the long way around to saying you can't extrapolate from little bits if information, but you can't ignore them either.  Isn't this just re-stating the law of averages?  Maybe.  I think of it more visually, as a fractal view.  Each scale of reality stands alone, but is also embedded in ever-larger scales.  In ecology this is called an 'organismal' approach--where we see cellular structure and organization as small-scale expressions of the same principle we see organizing larger systems in nature.  As if all scales are not only related, but together make up a larger organism, a cohesive whole.  For some, the organismal approach is just symbolic--a model or an idea--while others take it literally.  I take it literally.

     Thanks for the Ecology segue--overdue.  Ecology is really the study of all nature, and where we observe all rules of nature playing out.  Some rules play out in deep space, but then again, everything is deep space, even right here.  Darwin was an ecologist, just showing us a mechanism by which we might understand most rules of nature.  He was also tormented by his own awareness that his insight into ecology would more or less permanently weaken a religious explanation for everything.  By most accounts, Charles Darwin was a religious man who called nature as he saw it (this would make him a true scientist, practicing observation rather than projecting ideas first), and tried neither to stage, or avoid, a battle between opposing views of life.  To him, his observations were compatible with his belief in God, but he knew others would have trouble seeing it that way.

     So last weekend, just before Thanksgiving, in the woods of the Finger Lakes of Central New York, it could have been colder.  Maybe it should have been colder.  But either way, on this given day, trying to enjoy the moment and trying not to read context into the momentary weather, it was a sweet chance to spend a mild day in the woods with my 11-year old son.  We visited a local nature center and spent a few hours walking trails.  We wandered paths through some brutally disturbed struggling woods, with an understory of pure multiflora rose, privet and invasive honeysuckle.  He said he didn't really like those trails and I hoped it was because he was picking up on the absence of native vegetation, so we talked about that a little as we walked.  I suggested that people sense that even if they don't always pinpoint it.  He showed me where he found crawdads in the creek along this same trail earlier in the year.  Then we headed upslope between two small gorges, on a gentle jutting ridge of bedrock, and wandered into a much more promising oak woods with a supporting mix of ironwood, hickory and maple.  We found a semi-open gap in the forest, with the ground strewn with a perfect pad of soft crinkly oak and maple leaves mostly.  My son spontaneously sat down and then laid down to look up at the sky.  I asked him redundantly if he wanted to stop and take a rest here.  He said yes, it seems like a good spot.  Between us and the gray sky a hawk raked the canopy and prowled the woods.  We watched treetops move in a light breeze but the air was mostly still.  For a few minutes it was nice to just recline and rest in silence, taking in the subdued, rich tones of fall with a boy who will someday, with his peers, inherit the earth.