Sunday, April 30, 2006

Sunday Afternoon Conversation With My Husband

Dear Blogging Community,

I need your advice. It's true I'm into inheriting friends' and strangers' discarded items and thereby:
  1. saving a buck
  2. adding to our home's retrofabulous "design plan"
  3. preserving the planet's rapidly dwindling resources
  4. freeing up space in the landfills (which, I know, my Hummer-driving, consumer-crazy neighbors in the burbs will thank me for)
However. I am not a zealot. But I'm not sure GreenDaddy realizes it. Because about fifty seconds ago, he called me up from our friends' Rube and Angel's.

And this is what he said: Hi MaGreen. We're done. We've loaded all of our friends' stuff into the moving van.

I said, Good!

He said: Do you want a rug?

Me (thinking, how thoughtful it is that GreenDaddy remembers I was just saying how it would be easier on my knees if I could play with BabyG on a rug instead of the hardwood floors): Ooooh, a rug?!

GreenDaddy: Yeah. It has a sort of oriental pattern.

Me: Oooooh...

GreenDaddy: But it has diarrhea on it. (Being funny) Not Rube or Angel's. It's the puppy's.

Me: (Confused) Do YOU want the rug?

GreenDaddy: It's fresh diarrhea from last night.

Me: But you want it?

GreenDaddy: (Pauses) Well, it has dog hair all over it. It's covered in it.

Me (thinking that we're lucky he didn't become a salesman, but that he surely wouldn't call about a rug unless it was easily transformable and/or he really wanted it...): Ummm...Well, I guess I could rent a RugDoctor. We could clean it.

GreenDaddy: But it's wool. And it's not a really nice rug.

Me: But do you want it?

GreenDaddy: Well, it really stinks.

Me: Okay. Well, then. No, *I* don't want the rug.

GreenDaddy: Yeah. It's not a very nice rug. And it's got sort of an ugly pattern.

So my questions are: Just who does your partner think you are when he calls you up to ask if you want an ugly, stinky, puppy-diarrhea-stained wool rug? Is he the one who is addled? Is it a sign he needs a vacation? Or could it be that he thinks you'd be angry if you discovered a perfectly wretched rug had passed from out of your mutal grasp, on his watch? Or is there some other explanation I'm not thinking of?

Signed, MaGreen
Doubled over in laughter,
yet bemused

Saturday, April 29, 2006

A Recent Interview with My Four-Month-Old Daughter

Me: Do you like having green parents?

My Baby: Green parenting is not a static, achievable state of being. I question the stability of the very term "green parents." What I appreciate about this blog is that you conceive of raising me as a process. Green parenting is always coming into being, always undermining and rebuilding itself. You and mommy are constantly striving for and playing with a notion of greenness. You are not yet, and never will be, green parents.

Me: Well, do you like green parenting as process? You like it don't you?

My Baby: I inhabit a state of theory, perception, joy, discomfort, and discovery. I need. I learn. I enjoy or don't enjoy. I formulate worldviews. However, I cannot pick among possibilities. I have figured out how to put my foot in my mouth, but other than that you and mommy interpret my expressions and define my experiences. In short, I'm not yet accustomed to thinking in terms of choice, of like or not like.

Me: Choochee moochee poo! A choochee moochee poo…see I knew I could make you smile.

My Baby: You're funny daddy. I'll always smile for you.

Me: I'm really anxious about being your daddy. Sometimes I smile at you to cover up how worried I am about failing you.

My Baby: Daddy, I can see your smile, I can see the anxiety behind it, and I can see the oceans of dreams in which your fears are specks of sand. You should always remember that my well-being does not depend solely on you and mommy. There is also the world. The winds. Social norms. The laws of the nation. Parenting is the convergence of basic human concerns like love, resentment, food, and sleep; pre-capitalist constructs like religion; and modern developments like nation-states, global warming, and time becoming a series of opportunity cost calculations. This context is beyoond your control and you should not assume responsibility for what you cannot control.

Me: But isn't it my responsibility to understand as much as possible so that I can help us as a family to negotiate the world? Like you said, besides putting your foot in your mouth, you're not used to thinking like an agent, somebody who has to make choices that have long-term consequences.

My Baby: Get mommy. I'm hungry. Now.

Friday, April 28, 2006

A Blackspot Birth

My wife gave me new shoes on the day our baby girl was born. It was also my twenty-eighth birthday.

"Open your presents," she said between contractions. She's a show off, my wife.

In short, my daughter was born the same day I was, the same day I opened my Blackspot shoes.



Adbusters, the organization that makes the shoes, claims that they are "one of the world's most environmentally friendly shoes." The organic hemp fabric fits the contour of my foot snugly. The recycled tire soles are firm. They don't bounce and cushion like the gel-filled shoes I wear to run or walk long distances. I wear the Blackspots to work. I pedal in them down Dunlavy. Last week, another bicyclist called to me.

"Are those Blackspots?" he said. He had some on too. "You're the only other person I've seen wear them," he said. Now we greet each other whenever we pass. Maybe we'll have lunch. Become friends.

It's fitting that my wife gave me the shoes on the day our girl was born. Like our baby, the Blackspots were made by a union. That is, a unionized factory in Portugal that operates with decent labor conditions. Neither the shoes, nor our baby, were made by a corporation that maximizes profit at the expense of human well-being. Also like our baby, the Blackspots are vegetarian. No leather. My Blackspots seem to be growing too. The loose ends of the thread running down the center seam are fraying, getting longer by the day, like our baby's astonishing hair.

As a final comparison, note that in my family's culture we put a black spot on a baby's face to keep away bad luck. The black spot, or najar as we call it, is meant as a mark of imperfection so that evil spirits do not linger around those we love.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Don't Look, She's Breastfeeding

Our blog has recently experienced a surge in its readership. In February we had about 600 "unique viewers" and this month we've already had 1200. So I've been looking very carefully at the reports our server host produces and I noticed we've gotten several hits from Google searches on lactation. Here are the exact search phrases: "lactating breasts pictures," "free lactating stories," "pictures of male breasts lactating," and "dad daughter lactating stories." I'm not saying that Miah's recent posts about breastfeeding are the sole reason for the growth in readership. It does seem, however, that a not insignificant portion of visitors to Green Parenting really want to see and read about lactating breasts. Are you breastfeeding women (and apparently men) looking for information and validation? Are you people seeking lactation as pornography? Are you just curious?

About a month ago, my wife, my baby, and I had the chance to eat a Sunday jazz brunch at Brennan's, a high-class restaurant in Houston. Just to give you an idea, there's no street parking and the valet service costs $5 without tip. Feminist Economics, the journal where I work, was hosting and the bill was covered by a generous donor. We'd never have gone otherwise. What I love about Houston is that it doesn't really have old money at its center with all the brown, black, and working class white folks at the periphery. Houston doesn't have a center (except maybe profit and speculation). When we walked into Brennan's though, I saw the closest thing Houston has to old, white Southern genteel society. This was the culture I knew intimately as child in Mobile, Alabama. Sons and daughters of the Confederacy.

But there we were enjoying ourselves with feminist scholars from China, Canada, France, and all over the US. They were a quirky bunch. Miah and I were at ease. A jazz quartet played us some standards. Our baby dug it. The trumpet player made funny faces at her during his solo. During the meal, she started to whine and fuss so Miah discreetly breastfed her at the table. After eating, she fussed again and I could tell she needed to urinate. So I stood up, picked up my baby, and put her over my shoulder. Right at the next table, I caught an elderly woman galking at us. She had magnificently big, permed hair. She was wearing fine Sunday attire. I imagine she had just taken her grand kids to a stuffy Episcopalian service.

Why was she staring at my wife, my baby, and me? I wondered. Was it that Miah and I are an ethnically-mixed couple? That our baby is a mongrel? Was it that Miah breastfed at the table in a fine restaurant? Was it that we even dared to bring a three-month-old baby at all? Did the woman stare because it was I, the man, who picked up our baby, assumed the role of caregiver, and headed to the bathroom? Or could it be that our baby is so tremendously beautiful, she could not help but stare out of love or jealousy or astonishment? I took our baby into the Men's room, took off her diaper, held her over the toilet, and made a psssss sound. I wish the grandmother could have seen my baby then. Does breastfeeding in public surprise you? Behold elimination communication!

Miah and I have never set out to use our baby as a political stunt. We're not really lactivists in the militant sense. We haven't staged milk-ins at Starbucks. Breastfeeding and elimination communication are part of our daily lives. And yet, that morning at Brennan's, and later in the reports from the server host, I was reminded how feeding a baby triggers strong reactions and has huge consequences. Politically, socially, economically, ecologically, spiritually, aesthetically, emotionally, erotically. Like the whole world is at play in that simple act of the body, two bodies. Whether you are an radical lactivist or not, whether you were raised by a pack of wolves or with the manners of Queen Elizabeth, you can't resist looking.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Six Weird, Green Things (Zombie Limbs In the Compost & Organic Gothic)

Over at Busy Mom she wrote about 6 weird things because Wacky Mama and Motherhood Uncensored tagged her. I'm a fairly new blogger and think it might be not WRONG to live out another person's tag, but sort of UNCOOL. About anybody whose ever gone to Elementary, Jr. High, and High School with me will know what the blogging community might only be suspecting at this point: I am VERY uncool. Luckily, because I've decided to write about the 6 weirdest green things I’ve noticed since beginning this blog. To add to my potential blogging inetiquetteness, I've rearranged the order of the last three posts for clarity's sake:

1) Zombie Limbs In the Compost: Those beetle larvae beneath GreenDaddy’s composts may be saving the earth by chomping on all our leftover sludge but they look like a corpse’s translucent, swollen fingers, they move like accordions, their little legs look sharper and more evil than regular bugs’, and I don’t believe they are harmless. They sleep just fifty feet away from my bedroom window.

2) Organic Gothic: One Sunday afternoon -- when Westheimer, Houston’s hip/liberal/gay/tattoo/antique/coffee house strip is most busy -- I caught myself sauntering through all the hullabaloo dressed in the raggedy post-baby outfit I live in these days: black former-running pants with a hole in the crotch that I’ve closed with a safety pin, and a nursing top I’d love if it hadn’t inexplicably developed a fuzz ball colony on the the little panels covering my boobs, and nowhere else (a construction flaw, I’ll point out, not a byproduct of the boobs!). This is the outfit I live in. On this particular Sunday, my ensemble was completed by my three month old daughter hanging over my right shoulder in a purple and gold striped sling and flamingo pink sunglasses, and a brand new pitch fork slung:
a) Menacingly
b) Ridiculously
c) Provokingly
d) Unfashionably
e) All of the above
over my left shoulder. On the way TO the hardware store I noticed lots of people pointing and laughing at BabyG, because she was very cute in her sling and her hot pink sunglasses [picture forthcoming]; on the way home FROM the hardware store I noticed lots of people pointing and whispering at me.

...And now, it appears that aside from being uncool, I'm also too obsessive a writer to create a short list. MO LATER.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

3rd Weird Thing: Got To Beet It To Love It

3) I wet vacuumed our old couch (and by the way, although Rug Doctor cleaners are called steam cleaners, they aren’t. I mentioned this to my father and he said, “Right. You pour boiling water in them.” Am I alone in figuring that because all the machines have the word “steam cleaner” written on them, I should expect them to steam clean?....) Anyway, I 'wet-vac'ed the couch using the organic laundry detergent instead of the bottled Rug Doctor mix. It procured a nasty black liquid that sure made me happy I'd taken the trouble. However. After an hour or so of cleansing, my couch still looked like its usual dull, faded-minty green self.

Not to worry. I liquefied 5 beets and 1 giant purple cabbage** in my juicer; I added two bottles of black cherry juice concentrate to that; and finally, I added about half a gallon of water. Then I smeared it all over the couch with a kitchen sponge. Application took about half an hour. To set the juice stain, I started ironing it. (Note to Self: Even though setting the iron’s temperature at the hottest temperature dries the couch, it also scorches it. Use a low temperature.)

I only had enough mixture to cover half the couch. I need to make another batch for touch ups, and to finish the seat cushions and arm rests. However, the couch is a MUCH better color than the Zombie-skin green it used to be. It is more like the color of an embarrassed zombie. A light pinkish purple for those of you not in-the-know.

The most obvious downsides are that the couch stunk a little for a couple weeks, and that it isn't particularly better looking than it used to be.

But the perks! There are no end to the perks...for instance, before, I had an ugly couch that I had been saddled with, unexpectedly; now I have an ugly couch that I created. I had a hand in creating its ugliness. I saddled myself.

Also, BabyG will be allowed to spill anything she feels like on that couch, forever. And I can always know I have stained a couch with beets, a bit of knowledge that I think will make me feel pretty content, on and off, for years to come.

** I read an article about vegetable dyes on the internet. Turns out beets make a dark stain, initially, but that purple cabbage stains last longest. So my recipe was a sort of covering all my bases type thing.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Last Three Weird Green Things (Mystery, The Obvious Boob Thing, & The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All))

4) Mystery: I'm still thinking about number 4.

5) The Obvious Boob Thing: My breasts make milk. After living so many years with my breasts fulfilling certain functions (like attracting...bees and... bouncing around during softball games) they have suddenly become utile in a much less abstract way. I have this very, very fat babe wholly due to the boob milk.

Related, very weird question (I actually have a lot of questions, but this sort of encapsulates all of them.): If I was on a desert island with scanty food sources, with a handful of people, would I be able to feed them all if I ate all the food and breastfed them? Or at least, would they live a little longer than they would if there was no breastfeeder?

6) The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All:

Something Like This:
Turned Into This:

Friday, April 14, 2006

Index

Here is an index of our Green Parenting posts. I did my best to organize them by topics that parents will find useful. This index was last updated on Aug 24, 2006.

Introduction
ACTIVISM
BOOK REVIEWS
CELEBRATIONS
CHILDCARE FAMILY WORK
DETOXIFYING
ELIMINATION COMMUNICATION, DIAPERS, BABY WASTE
FOOD AND GARDEN
GREEN PARENTING IN ACTION
HOME PROJECTS
IDENTITY
MEDIA
MISCELLANEOUS, FUN
MONEY MONEY MONEY
PREGNANCY, LABOR, & BREASTFEEDING
PRINCIPLES
RECYCLING AND WASTE
SURVEYS
TOXINS


Introduction
Why We Started This Blog

ACTIVISM
We Marched for More Than Reform
Yimbys Nimbys and Wimbys

BOOK REVIEWS
Diaper Free: Potty Training Indian Style
Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
Raising Children Toxic Free
Dr. Spock – A Forgotten Guru of Green Parenting?
Ecokids-Raising Children Who Care for the Earth
Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World

CELEBRATIONS
Happy Birthday!!!!
Green Natural Gift Ideas for Baby Showers and Holidays
We Hauled out a Holly: Our Native Christmas Tree
Green Tree
It Ain't Easy Being Queen

CHILDCARE FAMILY WORK
Never a Net Loss in Love
Mr. Feminist
Canned Spinach Beats Potato Chips: How Dorothy Saved Me
Perspective
Oh, Winsome Death: Ramblings
Updates
motherhood, d'oh
A Recent Interview with My Five-Month-Old Daughter
Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
Be the Change You Want to See…Or Not

DETOXIFYING
Cleaning & Products
Natural Cleaning Products Update/Product Review
Natural Cleaning and Green Cleaning Solutions by Miah
Natural Cleaning and Green Cleaning Podcast
Bicycling Without Antiperspirant
Pets
Sunday Afternoon Conversation With My Husband
Black Cat Green Cat 1 of 3: Fatty
Green Cat Flea Bait 2 of 3
Green Cat, Flee Fleas: Integrated Pest Management
Disease & Alcoholism
TIPS
A Poem for the Alcoholic Grandmother
Misc
Third Weird Thing
The Green Virgin and the Toxic Whore
Green Inventions That Aren't

ELIMINATION COMMUNICATION, DIAPERS, BABY WASTE
I May Be Ten Days Old, But I Wasn’t Born Yesterday
Diaper Free: Potty Training Indian Style
EC Milestones
How To Wash Cloth Diapers at Home
Natural, Homemade Diaper Wipes
Potty On! Elimination Communication at 8 Months

FOOD AND GARDEN
Canned Spinach Beats Potato Chips: How Dorothy Saved Me
Here's What's Fishy
The Incompetent Gardener
More Organic Rice Cereal Please
Beets are Green
Thrush Music – Hark!

GREEN PARENTING IN ACTION
Green Parenting in Panama – The Navas Family

IDENTITY
Brown Man, Green Dad
Toxic Love
Toxic Loss
On the Legacy of Vasumati Desai
We Marched for More Than Reform
Miscegenation Smiscegenation – Are There Gods for Mix-breeds?
Raksha Bandan
On the Legacy of Bismillah Khan

HOME PROJECTS
Natural Cleaning Products Update/Product Review
Natural Cleaning and Green Cleaning Solutions by Miah
Old Couch Advice?
Kate Schmitt is Better Than Fire, Fabric Paint & Glue
Natural Cleaning and Green Cleaning Podcast
Third Weird Thing
Sunday Afternoon Conversation With My Husband
TIPS
A Poem for the Alcoholic Grandmother
The Green Virgin and the Toxic Whore
Green Inventions That Aren't

MEDIA
We Don't Have a TV
The Mother We Love to Hate
More Britney Smears – Pretty in Stink
How I Became a Green Dad Despite Disney's Devious Designs

MISCELLANEOUS, FUN
Found Poem
Six Weird, Green Things (Zombie Limbs In the Compost & Organic Gothic)
3rd Weird Thing: Got To Beet It To Love It
Last Three Weird Green Things (Mystery, The Obvious Boob Thing, & The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All))
non sequitoria, utah, blather
Hating Green

MONEY MONEY MONEY
You’re Too Poor and Ugly to Live Green
Must Green Parents Be Poor Parents?
Atoning for a Sin
A Blackspot Birth

PREGNANCY, LABOR, & BREASTFEEDING
Don't Look, She's Breastfeeding
But for Lack of a Boob
Breast Wielding: Yes, Hippy: No
The Cervix and the Heart
Green Natural Gift Ideas for Baby Showers and Holidays
If Your Mama's Belly Were the Globe
Last Three Weird Green Things (Phew)
On Watching My Wife Give Birth
A Blackspot Birth

PRINCIPLES
Understanding Your Fears and Transforming Them
Who’d Want to Be Gandhi’s Child?
Impurity is OK
Complementarity
Boundaries and Mystery: My Unborn Daughter's Desire
A Recent Interview with My Four-Month-Old Daughter
Recent Interview With My Six Month Old
A Recent Interview with my Seven Month Year Old
Living Small

RECYCLING AND WASTE
Composting 101 - My Secret in the Backyard
Composting 101 - A Wormderful Intro Podcast
Composting 101 - You Don't Have to Be Perfect to Let Things Rot
Composting 101 – Compost Bins and the Third Eye
My Secret in the Backyard, Part II
A History of Magic and Muck
Covet (and Love It) by Miah
Two of Six Weird Green Things

SURVEYS
Flea Killing Pomade for Men

TOXINS
Don't Drink Out of That Bottle!
The Man Who Would Have No Plastic
Toxic Love
Toxic Loss
Toxic Love Podcast
Green Cleaning: That Smells Like Vinegar Not Windex
Green Parenting Starts in Bed
No Shit Toxicity
Your Baby and the Sewer
Raising Children Toxic Free
I Am Queen Moron
Untitled

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

We Marched for More Than Reform

We marched on April 10, 2006 in Houston, Texas. The protest, which was one of many across the US, was organized in opposition to a House bill that would make undocumented people felons and in support of a just reform of immigration policies. Miah left from home with the baby and drove straight to the starting point, Guadalupe Plaza. I left from work with two colleagues by Metro Rail. At the last stop, we met up with two more people, one of whom had her baby with her in a stroller, and then walked towards the plaza. A contingent of the Free Radicals band joined us so we walked and danced to the accompaniment of drums and saxophone. We nearly got to I-10 when we saw the thousands weaving their way under the highway. The march had already begun.





A man on stilts dressed like Uncle Sam was at the front. Behind him was a man in a wheelchair holding a sign that read “WWII Vet.” There were a series of banners that led the way. Most of them were in Spanish. I learned Spanish informally so these translations are rough, but I think the signs said, “We are workers, not criminals” and “110% Native American.” A group of four men with feathered headgear, bare chests, and what I would call a dhoti danced in a Native American style. Miah and our baby were near the head of the march, so we all joined up and walked together. We were in the middle of a Central American contingent. We shouted out in unison, “El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido” and “Si Se Puede.”

“Thank you for supporting us,” a man said to me smiling.

“Thank you,” I said. What I wanted to say was that immigration laws don’t just affect Latinos. I’m not supporting his people. He’s supporting my people. I have a family friend who was detained for three months without ever being formally charged with any crime after September 11. My participation was not strictly out of goodwill for unnamed others. I didn’t march out of liberal pity. I marched because I’m angry. I marched for the uncle I never knew. I was sad that the 50,000+ were almost entirely Latino, even as I was grateful that this one community stood up for all the others – Arab, South Asian, Asian, European, and African.

My spirits rose wildly once I started to realize how many people were there. Houston is too flat, I thought. It was hard to see an end to the people. Then I realized there was no end. I wanted to be in a helicopter for a moment so that I could grasp the enormity of the march. The route was a bit isolated. There weren’t very many people watching us. We couldn’t wave our signs for spectators. We passed by the city jails. I hope the prisoners heard us. Policemen watched us coldly from a balcony. I know that even though their faces were even, in their minds they knew, and we knew, that no amount of force could contain us and that the legislation the House passed was already dead. We shouted slogans for each other, to galvanize our solidarity. People started to improvise chants and make jokes to each other. I felt brotherhood and sisterhood. The march was long. It gave us time to become familiar with people who had been strangers.



“USA, USA, USA!” people shouted as they waved American flags. It was astonishing to see how this act, which I usually perceive as jingoistic war-mongering, took on a subversive meaning. The freedom of movement and universal citizenship – this is perhaps the most important struggle during our times. I was marching for Palestinian migrants in Kuwait. I was marching for Burmese migrants in Bangladesh. For the Algerians in Paris. For the Biharis in Bombay. For the Sudanese in Cairo. For the Bolivians in Buenos Aires.

One young woman stared me down as she shouted “USA, USA, USA” until I started shouting it with her. I felt good about it. The US constitution simultaneously initiated the Human Rights movement and codified chattel slavery. America contains both – liberation and domination. On April 10, when I shouted “USA, USA” it was for the liberatory force.

Miah carried our baby in a sling and even breastfed her as we marched. Then we put her in the stroller and she slept even as the chanting went on around. The march ended at Allen’s landing, where the first anglo immigrants started settling Houston. We picked a spot under a tree. Other families followed suit and pretty soon there was a calm little pocket of babies giggling, sleeping, and crawling amid the bustling mass. Our baby may not have known where she was, but I hope that the vibration of hope and people power settled somewhere deep inside her marrow.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

A History of Magic and Muck

In my last post, I satirized two attitudes that infuriate me. The first is good old American consumerism dressed up in green, saying in a deep, earnest voice that it is our duty to buy insanely expensive products that supposedly save the environment. The second is that there's no point in even attempting a green lifestyle because it is too expensive unless you want to be a dirty hippy. We should find a happy medium, you might say. Extremes are always bad, right? I'm more in favor of exploding the questions that trap us between two static poles. We should set a green agenda that is ambitious but not dogmatic, material but not consumerist, focused on individuals in families but engaged with the sociopolitical situations that we live in, and internationally-oriented without exoticizing the other. We've got to get beyond sheeshy green verses hippy green.

If you've been reading this blog consistently, you know I've made compost into a kind of metaphor for everything, a way of decomposing the familiar categories that hold us back, and coming up with something fertile. The following history is my way of suggesting an alternative, a third way of approaching green living.

******

Rivers and brooks crisscrossed the land. A half-man, half-goat played his flute in the woods. A hunter who ogled a nude goddess was turned into a deer. Garbage, as we know it now, was not practiced. People left their peelings, the uneaten innards from the hunt, and their own evacuations wherever they might. The world was their bathroom. If they turned their campsite into a dump, they moved on. They foraged somewhere else – the next meadow, another continent. The earth was its own waste management system. Then people took to agriculture and they built cities. That is when composting was first born. The earliest instances of writing – the clay tablets from Akkad, the capital of an empire on the Euphrates – mention the manuring of soil. Instead of moving their homes around, people carried their detritus out to the fields. As civilizations spread, so did composting. The Greeks, Early Hebrews, and Romans all described compost. The Arab Book of Agriculture describes the value of crushed bones, wool scraps, wood ashes, and lime in compost.

The invention of modern composting is attributed to Sir Albert Howard, an Englishman who lived in colonial India from 1903 to 1931. He promulgated the Indore Method, named after the state where he carried out his research, in a book called The Waste Products of Agriculture. The hallmarks of the Indore Method, and its many derivatives, are 1) the layering of nitrogen and carbon rich materials and 2) the turning or aeration of the pile. Hot backyard piles and industrial composting are largely derivatives of the Indore Method.

Sir Albert believed that the introduction of improved crops and better soil management could improve the total agricultural output of India. Unlike his peers in Europe, he did not look at nature as adversary, but as a teacher or the “Supreme Farmer.” Indian farms were just one step removed from the ideal of nature. He wrote, “The agricultural practices of the Orient have passed the supreme test – they are almost as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie or of the ocean.”

According to Louisa Albert, his second wife, Sir Albert saw in India a vast laboratory of composting, “a series of 100,000 experimental plots which were plain to the eye.” He traveled to Baluchistan and Kashmir, Sikhim and Nepal, and into Sri Lanka. He noticed that agriculture in the countryside was average but “where human excrement was daily deposited, was infinitely richer.” He lamented like other Englishmen that Indians did not use cow excrement to the same effect, but instead had to use it as fuel. Sir Albert was determined to use his resources as the Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore to develop a way of creating a manure from unused agricultural waste like cotton stalks, grass, hay, leaves, and urine earth, mixed with some cattle dung.



Louisa sums up her father’s genius, “The solution of the manurial problem of India was thus to be found in the combination of animal and vegetable wastes. Yet India herself, in spite of her 100,000 'experiments', could not provide the final formula of success.” But the story is only half-told. Louisa herself notes that Sir Albert named a co-author to The Waste Products of Agriculture, an Indian by the name of Yeshwant Wad. Ironically, it was Wad – the child of the mystical Orient –who provided the scientific rigor of a trained chemist. He carefully documented the nitrogen ratios in each of the composting experiments. For some reason, Wad is never credited as a co-founder of modern composting. He is given little more mention than the nameless Indian men and women who constructed the compost bin, stacked the cotton stocks, mixed in the manure, and carted out the soil to the fields.

I have focused on the fact that modern composting was developed in colonial India, because it reflects one of the central tensions I feel as a parent. I always seem to end up in India whenever I start to dig into alternative parenting and green living. This has to do, in part, with India’s important place in the world, the depth of its history, and the innovations of its people. Or am I imagining my way back to India? Am I searching it out? I could be obsessing over India because I fear that my daughter, who is half-White and half-Indian, will be lost to the homogenizing forces of American culture. Its feels so odd to discover my own cultural through European or White American reformers. This story of Sir Albert, Yeshwant Wad, and Indian peasants is odd. I want to bare witness to its oddity in all its fullness.

Sir Albert was ridiculed by his European peers for his faith in “magic and muck.” He must have been a strange gentleman to devote himself to the study of Indian waste. Consider Florence Nightingale’s one-year public health mission in India. This what she had to say by the end in 1870, “[Indians live] amidst their own filth, infecting the air with it, poisoning the ground with it,” and “polluting the water they drink with it...some even think it a holy thing to drink filth.” Nightingale’s sense of compassion, her famously tender nursing of and advocacy for British soldiers in the Crimean war, seems to have failed her in India. Whereas Sir Albert studied waste management in India with a keen eye and helped improve it, Nightingale saw her own prejudices reflected back to her. It is not Sir Albert’s fault that the historians of compost give no credit Yeshwant Wad. At least Sir Albert had the courage to work with an Indian chemist and list him as a co-author. To think that modern composting was invented through the partnership of elites and subalterns – a churning of science and tradition that defies the boundaries we too easily believe in – this is the type of story I want to tell my daughter.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

You’re Too Poor and Ugly to Live Green

She’s on the cover, he’s on page twenty-six with his hands in the garden. They have two pure-bred Afghans named Ahab and Ishmael. They feed "the boys" one pound of raw, organically-raised beef every Sunday. Their home and backyard are perpetually in renovation – a little bit greener each time – most recently on a Budhist theme. Two SUVs are parked in the garage and for this they are embarrassed; they have a Prius on backorder. Their compost bins were custom built by an artist who needed the money. God’s compost bins, fit for clippings from the Elysian Fields. They had their lawn replaced with drought-resistant native plants. They have nine garden plots. The fennel leaves and carrots are almost ready. If they don’t grow their ingredients, they buy them from the farmer’s market. Keep the change, she says to the local farmer, dropping a twenty for a basket of squash. They eat chocolate made from cacao grown on a cooperative farm in Guatemala. Their dining table was fashioned from salvaged wood. They replaced their year-old bed with an Amish mattress made from tree-tapped rubber. They wear hemp shoes sewn by Portuguese unionists. They buy soaps made without petroleum-based perfumes, toothpaste without lauryl sulfates, and deodorant without aluminum chlorhydrate. They are white. He’s forty-nine and she’s been in her late twenties for fifteen years. They do not have children. The earth is their child. They live within two miles of a Whole Foods. They have tickets to the Oxfam famine banquet next Saturday. They donate to the Wilderness Preservation fund and cook portabello mushrooms while camping outside of Joshua Tree. When they visit the Galapogos islands, they do not step off the path. It’s a delicate ecosystem, he says. He’s a lawyer who specializes in corporate bankruptcy and she’s a green interior designer. Her signature move is to place an abstract, organic cotton couch in the middle of antiques – ottomans, chests of drawers, and floral rugs. They put their savings in Socially Responsible Investing mutual funds.

And you! Let’s just say you’re not quite poor enough to get food stamps. Whenever someone mentions Whole Foods, you smirk and say, “Whole Paycheck.” You would wear Blackspot Shoes, but they’re twice as expensive as your regular sneakers and your feet are extra wide. You’d like to garden and compost, but you live in an apartment that doesn’t have a backyard. If you put a plastic compost bin in the parking lot, your neighbors would complain about the smell even if it doesn’t smell. They would claim that there are more cockroaches since you moved in. You sleep on your grandmother’s old bed. The only thing that’s green about your mattress is that it caves in like a river valley when you lay down. You have about as much chance of living a green lifestyle as you do of becoming a Baywatch star. Come to think of it, the woman on the cover of that issue of Organic Style sort of looks like a Baywatch star. If you tried to live green, you’d look like some kind of worthless hippie. Not to mention you have a colicky baby and you’re a single mom. No, you have two babies and both you and your partner work full time at desk jobs. That’s not it, you have three boys – ages two, three, and five – who just might shake the house off its foundation before bedtime. It takes about all you’ve got to heat up some Hamburger Helper and open a can of fruit cocktail for dinner. Anyhow, you were raised on preservatives and you turned out fine…mostly. Face it. You’re too damn poor, ugly, and busy to live green.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

On the Legacy of Vasumati Desai



My maternal grandmother, Vasumati Desai, died Wednesday March 22, 2006 at the age of 88. I simply called her Ma. She was living with my uncle, Yogesh “Hiru” Desai, and his family in Baltimore. Maryland. When he returned from work that Wednesday afternoon, he tried to wake her up from what seemed to be an unusually long nap. Ma was already gone. Her expression was calm. There was no sign that her last moments were painful. Hiru mama told me that her eyes were half closed and that she held a tissue in her hand as if she had just wiped her nose. My dad, who was there shortly after Hiru mama found her, added that Ma’s face was turned towards the window. Ma’s heart had weakened in the past few years and her heart beat had been unsteady. She could still walk and largely took care of her own needs. Nobody expected that particular day would be her last. She probably had a sudden, massive heart attack or stroke.

Ma was born on February 19, 1918 in Porbandar, an old city on the coast of the Arabian sea. Incidentally, Ma shared her birthplace with none other than Mohandes Gandhi. The Mahatma was born in Porbandar several decades before my grandmother. Unlike Gandhi, Ma never led a struggle for national liberation. She did not turn her life into an international movement for justice. Richard Attenborough did not and will never make a three-hour film on her life. On the grand scale of History, she was an ordinary person. A mother, a schoolteacher, a good citizen. However, I feel a deep urge to set down in writing – for posterity! – some of my knowledge and memories about her.

Ma’s parents (my great-grandparents) were Chaganlal and Champak Bakshi. Ma once told me that her father's held himself as stiffly as a cane. He was a school headmaster. I imagine that he was an immaculately kept and crisply dressed man. Their home life, however, was not disciplinary or harsh. They had progressive ideas for their time. The men, women, and children ate their meals together. They supported the education of their daughters and they found a husband for Ma who would do the same. She completed a masters degree in English after her marriage to my grandfather.

There were some unusual things about Ma that I attribute to her upbringing. For example, all her children addressed her by her first name – Vasumati. This is unusual in any culture, I think, but it is especially unusual in ours. She was also uncommonly observant of people. She tried to understand people’s psychology and their motivations. The word she used was swabow, which she translated as a person’s nature. “Swa” means self. It also appears in Gandhi’s two favorite words, swaGreenDaddy (self-rule) and swadesh (made by one’s own country). Ma’s strangest habit of all was to tell people that she loved them. I’ve never known another Indian of her generation to say “I love you.”

Ma lived in Bombay until my grandfather, who we called Nanaji, died in 1992. Unlike the other children in my school, I could not just go to “grandma’s house” for the weekend. Visiting her meant two days of plane flights from Mobile, Alabama through Atlanta then London to Bombay. In those days, we packed our bags full of VCRs, telephones, watches, and other gadgets, because India still maintained customs and tariffs to protect its own post-colonial economy. Nobody talked about globalization back then. We could only make the voyage every four years or so. We could only stay for one month and had to split that time between all our relatives. Those visits, however brief and far between, were formative for me. For the rest of my life, Ma and Nanaji’s home in Goregam, a neighborhood of Bombay, will be the real and authentic India to me. The refrigerator that gave you a jolt when you reached for the handle, the firm beds hung with mosquito nets, the midnight honking and bustle from the street, and the open gutter. When I think of Ma’s house, I feel an overwhelming mix of awe, pride, and shame that I believe most Indians feel about India, but that first generation Indian-Americans experience in our own acute way.

About a year after Nanaji and Ma moved from Bombay to Ahmedebad, Nanaji died. A year after that, Ma moved to the United States. She was so lonely and isolated then. I think she experienced our comfortable American lifestyle as a golden prison. She stopped wearing a gigantic red bindi. Her wardrobe consisted of white saris. Ironically, after all those years with the electrocuting refrigerator, it was our kitchen that terrified her. It took us years to get her to operate a microwave. She skipped meals if no one was there to cook or warm up food for her. The woman who ran a Bombay household only a few years before was no more. She did not wail or cry in front of me, but her resignation was painful to see. But she survived this period and bit by bit emerged into a routine life of reading the Gita, watching television, waiting by the window, and hanging out once we got home from school or work.

For the next ten years or so, I spent a huge amount of time with Ma. I’m not sure I can say what I learned from her. We chatted in English usually. I extracted a type of family history by peppering her with questions. She was just such a kind, loving, unassuming, intelligent, observant, and quietly determined woman. She tried to reason with me if she disagreed with my choices – like when I quit medical school – but ultimately respected my final decisions. If we talked on the phone, she always ended with that courageous and somewhat awkward “I love you.”

Ma’s funeral was the first Hindu funeral that anyone in our immediate family had organized or even been to in America. She was taken directly to a funeral home from Hiru mama’s house. Her body was refrigerated, but not embalmed. The service was held just a day and a half after she died. A priest conducted a short sacrament during which he had Hiru mama fashion five balls out of flour and water. They symbolized the five elements of the universe – earth, air, fire, water, and ether – and were placed next to Ma’s body. The casket was a card board box that my mom wrapped with one of Ma’s saris. My mom and my aunt, Jagruti mami, also had to help the funeral directors dress Ma’s body in a sari. The funeral directors did put make-up on Ma’s body. They even put some lipstick on the lips which I thought was a bit funny. I think it was the first time those lips had ever worn lipstick. It was Ma's bare feet that caught my attention. Her big, wide feet. Toes all the same length because she wore sandals all her life and never shoes. I list all these details because I think the funeral was just as Ma would have liked it – unassuming, not wasteful, and dignified.

After the sacrament, I helped role the body out the building, across the parking lot, and into the crematorium. It was basically a large shed with a metal structure inside that kind of looked like an oversized pizza oven. Several funeral directors placed the box with Ma’s body inside onto a gurney and then into the furnace itself. They closed and bolted the door. Hiru mama pressed down two switches and there was a roaring sound. At that moment, most of the seventy or so people gathered there collectively lost composure and cried.

I didn’t cry then. At least, I don’t think I did. I actually felt lightness. Even joy. Ma’s death was enviable. Her last moments weren’t on a crash cart or in a hospital bed rigged with tubes. She did not live a fairy tale life, but she did live a full one. I did not have any regrets about our relationship. I listened to her until she was tired of talking. Ma never got to see or hold my daughter, but for the past year she said the same thing to me, whether on the phone or in person, every time we talked, as if she already had one foot on the other side and she knew what she wanted her last words to me to be. “Bless you and MaGreen and BabyG," she said, "Be happy. OK? I love you.”