Margotlog: Round Up

Round-Up

During the last month, I’ve been sampling random chapters of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. My studio mate, photographer Linda Gammell, has the book here in our studio as she prepares for a show of native prairie photographs. My mother, who grew up in North Dakota, read the Little House books to my sister and me years ago. Now, I’m enjoying rereading this one, at how the story holds my attention, simply told, though it is.

In an earlier volume, Wilder described “The Little House in the Big Woods.” These woods which stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the flat lands of western Minnesota and the Dakotas. And where the woods stopped, a river of grass began. This green river has of grass has flowed through the middle of North America for millennia. As snow flattened the grasses over the centuries, and the grasses decayed, the soil of these prairies became the most profoundly fertile soil in North America.

We make do with what we have. And sometimes we make “big.” Minnesota’s corn and soybean enterprises stretch for miles over former prairies. My guess is that they stretch for hundreds of miles in all directions. And of course Minnesota soils are not alone. There’s Iowa and Nebraska to our south--flatter and warmer, prime soil for corn, alfalfa, and soybeans.

This would all be dandy if it weren’t for one thing: for years farmers have been using, a deadly herbicide called Round Up, made by Monsanto. Today, farmers plant genetically altered seeds that are protected from Round Up. Then they spray Round Up on their plants and soil. Round Up kills everything that isn’t corn or soybeans.

It’s as if an enormous genii stood over the Big Woods of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Houses and sprayed gigantic hoses full of a leaf killer. Within days, the oaks and maples, the ash and tupelo trees would all shed their leaves, denuding the canopy and depriving animals of food like acorns, and insects that depend on trees for food, and animals that need tree cover for protection from the bigger and fiercer. It’s as if in one fell swoop a gigantic silence and famine hit the land.

I’m no Rachel Carson, America’s finest environmental writer. Her book Silent Spring warned of such a silencing and deadening from another era’s wanton use of DDT. Now we’re wantonly applying a broad leaf herbicide that eradicates plants crucial for many insects.

Take bees. More and more evidence is accumulating that even if plants survive Round Up, they’re tainted. Bees that draw nectar from such tainted flowers lose their ability to reproduce or to navigate that life-saving “beeline” to their hives. It’s as if they have been hit on the head and can only stagger around.

Also Monarch butterflies. The Sierra Club, mounting a large campaign to outlaw Round Up, estimates that in the last 20 years, 90% of all Monarch butterflies have disappeared. I assume that this means they’ve died or never been born. Gone, Kaput, Fini! Not only is this a loss of one of nature’s most beautiful creatures—the fluttering gold of autumn passing gently among our flowers. But like the loss of the bees, the Monarchs’ decimation means doom to plants that monarchs have historically pollinated.

But we can’t blame only the farmers. Lawn-lovers too use Round Up. Since lawns are almost entirely built of thin-leafed grass, anyone desiring a lawn so uniform that it looks painted onto the soil can use Round Up. Such lawns grow not a single broad-leaf plant—think dandelions, clovers—whose flowers attract and feed bees and butterflies.

Round Up can also directly threaten human life. An old couple I used to know had maybe six or seven years together at the ends of their lives. They found each other over a bridge table, and happy to have love in their old age, bought a nice bungalow on the outskirts of a prairie city. Being nice, accommodating folks, they wanted their lawn to look as nice as everyone else’s. Like their neighbors, they used Round Up liberally, for one, then two, then three seasons.

In the fourth season, the old man began to sicken. He began to totter and slur his words. “Stroke,” whispered his daughter and son-in-law. His skin began to slough off. He stopped eating. Within three months he was dead.

His widow, mourning him, stayed on another couple of years, spreading Round Up on the lawn just as her husband had done. She’d been the younger of the two, full of laughter, a hearty, jolly sort. First her skin turned pale, then gray. Her hands began to shake. She became unsteady on her feet. “Make sure she’s eating well,” doctors advised her children. “Let’s have a look at her if she doesn’t improve.”

When they opened her up, her stomach was riddled with cancer. Quietly, without telling her, they sewed her together. “You’ll be right as rain soon enough,” the cheery doctors told her. It did rain, and the Round Up she and her husband had for seven years lavished on their lawn, once again seeped into the soil and into the water, which, once again, ran into the lake.

She did not last out the winter, and was buried beside her husband high on a hill overlooking a lovely river. “They didn’t have to die so soon,” whispered the chickadees that had nothing to do with lawns and gardens. “They did themselves in,” whispered the rabbits and squirrels, whose cousins near the lake had died, leaving these critters higher up on the bluff, where the soil was too rocky and steep for gardens, where scarcely anyone thought of lawns under spreading oaks and elms, but instead liked to pick wildflowers to honor the graves, some of which dated back to the Civil War.