One of the great joys of preparing soil where vegetables will flourish is pissing on it together as a family聽to add a healthy, free-flowing, and free-of-cost nitrogen dose, which otherwise would be flushed down the toilet. My seven-year-old daughter, Josie, and I have been urinating away in the bright air of spring鈥檚 lengthening days in the Catskill Mountains, where I live, and where Josie, who spends most of the year with her mother in New York City, 140 miles to the south, often comes to visit. We sing songs as we piss. 鈥淪pringtime for Hitler鈥� is a favorite, followed by 鈥淲e Will Rock You.鈥�

Last year, with Josie and my girlfriend, Viva, who was born and raised in the Catskills, we built and tended the first productive vegetable garden of our lives. I was 45 years old, a latecomer to the soil. The garden eventually fed us with such bounty that we were freed, if only fleetingly, from the agricultural-industrial complex.聽

A year later, in the spring of 2020, a sizable number of my fellow Americans, prodded by the COVID-19 pandemic, appear to have joined in the tilling of soil. Used to constant, unquestioned plenty, and shocked at seeing empty supermarket shelves, the good citizens got the message that a backup plan, a kind of prepper-lite initiative, might be in order. Fearful of going hungry, they have apparently started trying to grow their own vegetables since the collective Victory Garden movements of the First and Second World Wars. The rise of the modern coronavirus garden may be one of the unintended positive consequences of the pandemic.聽

It鈥檚 strange now to think that when Viva broached the idea of a food garden in the spring of 2019, I didn鈥檛 want any part of it. I was putting the finishing touches on a new book, and I told her a garden would be a pain in the ass, a lot of work鈥攁nd it was.

We had no idea what we were doing, and the first season was a process of muddling through. Our nine acres sit at 2,400 feet, on a ridge in , which means an average last-frost date of mid-May, but it can be later than that. It鈥檚 a place of long winters, windstorms, lake-effect snow from the west, and early-autumn cold鈥攖he classic elements of a short growing season. The soil is rocky and thin, and our house is surrounded by forests of maple, beech, birch, and hemlock that shade out the light. We would either have to chop them down in numbers unacceptable to me or make do with what patches of sun we could find.

Last spring, a month before the final frosts of May, we sowed kale, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, pole beans, and tomatoes in little starter pots that festooned the rooms of the house. It was done in haphazard fashion and in a race against time, because we were late with the planting. The sprouts huddled pitifully against windows facing east, their tiny tender leaves leaning together, bent as if in prayer toward what little sun they could get. We watered and fertilized and watched and waited.

In a humble 20-by-20-foot plot beside the house, we prepared the soil, which was full of weeds and rocks. The old saying about the Catskills goes that God made the earth in seven days聽and on the eighth day smashed boulders and threw the fragments at our mountains. So we picked and hauled rock and dug out tough, sinewy roots, working under gnat attack on the few warm, clear days we got聽but more often laboring in cold fog or drizzling rain. We tilled and turned the soil, added outrageously expensive compost bought at the feed store in town, and urinated, and then tilled and turned some more. We ground eggshells into fragments and sprinkled them in the dirt bed聽to add calcium, and we threw in聽our coffee grinds, though not too much, because that would acidify the soil.

We started to think about the future, the next season. If compost was so expensive, why not produce it ourselves? We began the process聽in a pile near the house, using organic nitrogen-rich matter like vegetable scraps, tea leaves, more coffee grinds, and even the gum Josie chewed. Mixed with the nitrogen, we added the organic carbon of cardboard, newsprint, paper towels, beard trimmings, lint from our dryer, leaves, twigs, and cut grasses. When I described our nascent pile to a friend who had years of experience in composting, she said it was 鈥渞edneck,鈥� which I figured was OK. It would take six months to produce soil from our jettisoned crap, but better to have soil than put it in a landfill.聽

For a city boy like me, born and raised in Brooklyn, where I had spent most of my adult life, this was all very new. Once you get your hands in soil鈥攔eally get dirty with it, feel it under your fingernails鈥攖here鈥檚 a change in perspective, and you鈥檙e someone different. You鈥檝e opened the tiniest of windows onto the ecological reality of the forces that sustain human existence, the biogeophysical relationships of water, sunlight, air, earth. Quite suddenly, what seemed mysterious quotients鈥攕ay, the balance of phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon, and potassium鈥攂ecome commonalities of understanding and, eventually, of wisdom. The plants that depend on all those factors in harmony rise up, or they don鈥檛.聽

It鈥檚 hard to express the pride and lovingness and delight in seeing a plant germinate, and grow tall and hardy, and then flower and put fruit out. When the crop came fresh and healthy last summer鈥攖here wasn鈥檛 a hint of blight, and no insects attacked it鈥擨 felt a bit like Viva and I had brought green babies into adulthood. We will never not do it again.

Go to any number of online seed purveyors nowadays, like ,听,听and , and you鈥檒l find them stripped of supplies, often cutting off orders. Home Depot鈥檚 website says that virtually all the seeds it sells online are out of stock.

This kind of panic buying has聽been happening across the country. Forbes recently聽聽on a 鈥渞ush of people buying gardening supplies鈥� in California鈥檚 Sonoma County. Oregon State University鈥檚 offered an , made free through the end of April, and the about it was shared 26,000 times. The executive chairman of Burpee, the nation鈥檚 largest seed retailer, that he had never seen a spike in seed purchases this large and widespread.

Do these things signal a turn toward something lasting and meaningful, a new era of localized food production led by a new generation of gardeners? Or is the seed rush a mindless herd dynamic driven by fear? Will people put in the time and labor to garden once the pandemic is over?

At the height of the Victory Garden movement during World War II, Americans took to tilling soil in such large numbers鈥攃ultivating food in pots on fire escapes and rooftops, in backyard plots, in empty city lots, and in rural and urban spaces alike鈥攖hat as many as 20 million new gardens produced an estimated of the nation鈥檚 fresh vegetables.

With collective determination, we could probably replicate (and perhaps eclipse) that productivity today聽and do it on a human scale聽in a manner that鈥檚 decentralized, locally controlled, and outside the ag monopoly, thereby making ourselves, as individual citizens, hyper-resilient to systemic supply shocks. In an ideal world, this type of social and economic resilience is exactly what the pandemic will teach us we need.聽

This spring, with Josie out of the closed New York City school system, she and Viva and I again planted seeds together. 鈥淒addy, Daddy, wake up! Alert!鈥� she shouted one dawn in March, and Viva and I woke up startled, thinking something was wrong.聽

No, it was just that the peppers had sprouted.

We had been talking the night before about the difficulty of growing peppers, how they needed just the right measure of heat and light, how in the stingy sun and enduring cold of zone 5A they might not do well.

But now they鈥檇 come up, and Josie was mad with joy, exactly as a child should be at the sight of food emerging from soil she鈥檚 seeded. As it happens, Josie would never have gotten to see those first germinations of spring if it weren鈥檛 for the fact that she was homeschooling with me, holed up in the mountains far from the viral epicenter鈥攕he would have been in New York, in a room with聽four walls, at her school. In a聽silver lining to the pandemic, horticulture, hands-on, was now a daily part of her curriculum.

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With President Obama鈥檚 signature on the聽 this week,听the iconic species聽Bison bison, better known as the buffalo, has been declared a 鈥渘ational mammal,鈥� joining the bald eagle, the rose, and the oak as quintessential American symbols.聽

The groups that pushed the legislation鈥搉otably the National Bison Association and the Wildlife Conservation Society鈥� 鈥渢he resurgence of bison as an important part of the American environment, diet, and an emerging part of the agricultural economy.鈥澛燱e are told by Wildlife Conservation Society聽bison program coordinator Keith Aune that passage of the bill 鈥渟ignals the beginning of a grand American adventure to carry out ecological, economic and cultural restoration of American bison into the future.鈥�

Really?聽 If we like our bison domesticated, held behind fences, and commodified for the dinner plate, then there is much to celebrate: Of the approximately 500,000 buffalo聽in this country, the majority are privately owned, have been interbred with cattle, and are raised for meat production. These would be more accurately classified as 鈥渂eefalo.鈥� Fewer than 10,000 remain genetically pure, and almost all of these exist within fenced areas聽that prevent them from doing what bison do best, which is roam. Buffalo ranching is unquestionably聽doing well in this country, with commercial buffalo grown in all 50 states. But that's hardly a conservation success story.

What you don't hear amid all the noise surrounding the Bison Legacy Act is anything about the continued mismanagement of the last truly wild bison. These herds have existed on the American landscape since prehistoric times but are now found only聽in in Yellowstone聽National Park, where they defined by round-up, quarantine, and slaughter conducted in the interest of a far more powerful icon of the American West: the livestock rancher. Ranchers fear the invasion of bison into grazing areas where cows are considered the only deserving users of the public domain. (Ranchers also believe, ,听that bison pose a disease threat to cattle.)

Yellowstone National Park superintendent Dan Wenk says the bison need to be culled because they have overpopulated the park, and over the past decade the Park Service has captured and killed thousands of bison. Despite the cull being conducted on public land by public officials against animals owned collectively by the public, journalists are barred from viewing the round-up, a policy Wenk says is due to a concern 鈥渇or the safety and welfare of the public, staff, and bison.鈥� I think the real concern is that if journalists reported the brutality of the Park Service鈥檚 assaults on the bison, there would be outrage.

Fortunately, despite the media ban, we have accounts of what takes place. A nonprofit called Buffalo Field Campaign sends volunteers to document the annual round up. From a high point on the landscape in the Gardiner Basin, near the north entrance of Yellowstone, BFC watchdogs peer with their binoculars from a mile away to see the animals 鈥渉azed鈥� by Park Service wranglers into a dingy corral on park land called the Stephens Creek Capture Facility. There the animals are forced through a maze of chutes and passages, and goaded by men on catwalks brandishing whips and prods, before they are put onto trucks that carry them to slaughterhouses in Montana.聽

The fine print of the National Bison Legacy Act ensures the operations in Yellowstone will continue: 鈥淣othing in this Act or the adoption of the North American bison as the national mammal of the United States shall be construed or used as a reason to alter, change, modify, or otherwise affect any plan, policy, management decision, regulation, or other action by the Federal Government.鈥� This should come as no surprise given the pro-ranching groups celebrating its passage. The National Bison Association describes itself as a 鈥渘on-profit association of producers, processors, marketers and bison enthusiasts.鈥� Another prominent supporter of the legislation, the Inter Tribal Buffalo Council, is a federally-chartered native American bison ranching corporation.

Critics point out that classifying the bison as our national mammal is an act of greenwashing. 鈥淭his status is already giving people a false sense of security, thinking that it鈥檚 an end to hazing, slaughter, and all the other nefarious forms of abuse,鈥� Stephany Seay, media coordinator for the Buffalo Field Campaign, wrote to me in an email this week. 鈥淵ellowstone would never slaughter our national mammal, right? At the same time, we鈥檙e supposed to believe buffalo ranching is the conservation success story.鈥�

Earlier this year, represented by lawyers at the University of Denver Law School and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Seay and I filed a lawsuit against the Park Service, citing the First Amendment, to gain press access to view the bison round-up in Yellowstone. Our lawsuit is pending. Meanwhile, this week鈥檚 legislation simply puts a happy face on the tragedy unfolding for America鈥檚 national mammal.

聽is a freelance writer for 贬补谤辫别谤鈥檚, National Geographic, VICE, and many other publications.聽 He is working on a book about wilderness, ranching, and the American West.

The post Op-Ed: Calling the Bison Our National Mammal Is the Worst Kind of Greenwashing appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.