On monoculture

Another in a series of posts dwelling on the negative.

Define 'weed'.

In the vegetable garden, grass and coneflowers are weeds. In the lawn, dandelions and thistle are weeds. In the hosta beds, volunteer tomatoes and wild strawberries are weeds. My boss Russell (ABAC, '82) at Family Nursery Chain in Atlanta, said that in horticulture "a weed is a plant that's out of place." So it depends on the gardener and what (s)he wants where. If I'm the gardener, I decide what's a weed and what deserves to live - godlike authority over my microcosmic domain. My garden, my intelligent design, my unnatural selection.

If you looked at my backyard (notice all the possessive pronouns, like anybody really owns any of it), you might notice the neatly laid-out little neighborhoods where different kinds of plants get to live. There's a friendly iris ghetto next to a new but growing salvia ghetto. Some ajuga groundcover have been allowed to creep in between the salvia. Yonder there's a solid, established hosta-ville, and nearby is a crowded patch where lemon balm and perennial geranium compete for space with another unnamed groundcover. In the far corner, three kinds of tomatoes each have their own corner of a triangular bed, and five kinds of peppers are segregated into corners of a circumscribed Pepper Pike. I'm a freaking Nazi of the plant kingdom! My obsession with order has created apartheid in the garden.

My friend Judy's garden is completely different. She has beautiful beds curving around her yard so full of varied color and texture and height that you would think it's out of control. Maybe it is, but it doesn't seem to concern her. Look more closely and you see clusters of echinacia, rudbeckia, columbine, those cool "blue spikey" things, and dozens of other varieties doing just fine rubbing up against each other. No straight rows, no cordoned-off sections, just abundantly buzzing and blooming profusion. Judy has been at it longer than I have, and her garden shows it. Maybe my garden and I will develop and mature into a more pluralistic culture, but I doubt it. Have you seen my paperclip drawer? My sock drawer?

Monoculture, as I understand it, is the tendency to reduce the number of species in a habitat to the bare minimum for a narrow purpose - nothing but tomatoes in the back corner, nothing but black-eyed susans next to the front porch, nothing but high-yield soybeans in the beanfield. It's the standard of efficiency in modern agriculture and perfectly consistent with monopolistic economic objectives in general. By eliminating competitors, not just competing with them, it's easier to dominate markets - or grow more tomatoes. There is nothing new in that practice, and companies like Walmart and Microsoft have come close to perfecting it, as Rockefeller showed them with Standard Oil, vertical integration and all that.

This brand of capitalism - or gardening - distorts the meaning of 'competition' (to strive together). What if Mr. Steinbrenner competed with the rest of the American League in this way, doing everything he could to drive the other teams out of business? Game over. Clearly there are more ways than zero-sum competition, where one side's winnings can only be measured by the other side's losses.

Governments, as we know, have also made bold and innovative attempts to eliminate problem populations, and the cleansing of weed-like ethnic groups from national boundaries has ample precedent. Genocide, insecticide, herbicide all serve the ends of monoculture. Your state and national legislators could very well be working toward similar ends in crafting laws that "protect" a certain kind of marriage, a certain standard of educational competence, a certain code of public morality. For the ambitious Frists and DeLays and Santorums among us, it isn't enough for the community of the faithful to honor and observe said standards, the aim is to exclude or expunge any who deviate from the dominant form, in short to weed out differences. Utopian communities have always attempted this kind of consensus voluntarily, but totalitarian states try to achieve monoculture by force. Instead of thinking globally and acting locally, they think locally and act globally.

This is what I think about as the blood rushes to my head while I bend over to pull another weed.