Gardening, Diversity, Peace, and Place:
A Conversation with Alan Kapuler, Ph.D.
By Chris RothPaintings by Alan Kapuler
Alan Kapuler, Ph.D., is Research Director of Seeds of Change organic seed company, founder of Peace Seeds (now Deep Diversity), plant breeder with a special focus on nutrition, and pioneer in the development of kinship gardening, an approach which emphasizes the importance of conserving biodiversity. A winner of the Westinghouse high school science talent search, Alan studied biology at Yale (where he graduated summa cum laude at the age of nineteen) and molecular biology at Rockefeller University, where his cutting-edge research earned him a Ph.D. and a professorship. In the early 1970s, disillusioned with the values and activities he felt his academic work was promoting, he left his career on the East Coast and arrived in the woods of the Pacific Northwest as a bucket-hauling, shovel-wielding aspiring gardener. He soon started saving his own seeds, started a small seed company, and the rest, as they say, is history. He has survived a ten-year struggle with lymphatic cancer, and is also an accomplished, prolific artist; some of his paintings accompany this interview.
I first met "Mushroom," as his friends know him, twelve years ago. Since then, in my role as an organic gardening teacher at small nonprofit ecological education centers, I have brought many groups of apprentices to his gardens to work and learn with him. He is a fascinating, gentle, passionate person with an encyclopedic knowledge of the plant world, wisdom to match, and the gift of seeing and articulating the connections among biological, cultural, personal, and spiritual issues. I wasn't sure how his stream-of-consciousness speaking style would translate onto paper, but I decided to find out by interviewing him. This conversation took place on an early Spring day in one of Alan's greenhouses in Corvallis, Oregon.
- Chris Roth
TL: What do you think of when you think of sense of place?
AK: I think of species--the biological species that inhabit a local area. Half the plant species on the world are local endemics. They like to grow in a certain region where they've grown up, where their forbears grew up. They have developed into species, they have come into existence, in place. Place is the determinant. What we mean by place is the cross-section of forces that lead to an environment: sun, water, weather, geography, geology, soils, all the life forms there. The internal milieu and the external milieu act to give us, at the interface, diversity. Place is an entry to diversity.
And we can remove that by removing the species. We can make a place into a parking lot or into a housing project. We can eliminate the little mustards and little umbels and little grasses and little legumes that gave rise to, and supported in their lives, the fabric of microorganisms and insects and birds and mammals. So place is a biological relationship in planetary time having to do with our own abilities. We generate, we destroy, we interact, and we have the potential to diversify what we call place.
The temperate zone has much more homogenous populations and many fewer species than the tropics, because the cold acts to limit the diversity. Where freezing doesn't happen, another level of diversity manifests itself. If we take a place in the temperate zone, we deal with certain issues all the time: what is going extinct, what's going to go extinct, why is it going extinct?
It's going extinct because when we made the agricultural monocultures we eliminated all those little plants that had insect cohorts that created a food web that allowed for many different kinds of plants and insects and microorganisms. The herbicides make it possible to kill every plant in the field, which could never happen before. That's genocide.
When you eliminate all these seemingly inconsequential little species that grow in these fields, you have true, sterile monocultures--as opposed to monocultures that come simply by planting only one thing repetitively in a field. We are now genociding the diversity as opposed to simply minimizing it. In one case, we usually leave a few of this and a few of that and so there are relic species; in the other case, there's nothing left.
There's also a heart chakra aspect of sense of place, which is comfort. Anybody who's had a real emotional experience in an old growth forest will understand this. You come back into old trees and there's shelter in an emotional way that's indescribable in a rational sense. The forest's nature is shelter, and literally water, warmth, security, abundance, food, happiness. All the stuff that helps the soul explore a world is present in those old growth trees and what they mean for everybody. They create place, and there's nothing that replaces that aspect, because no matter how you talk about trees in a materialistic, rationalistic model, all the critical things that trees do are left out of the equation when the economics runs its bottom line.
We have accepted a totally depraved view of reality in order to run an economic model which is clearly a failure. Sense of place is in some ways a cognomen, an icon or a label for a whole set of phenomenology that comes with an integrated ecosystem which is healthy and functioning for the collective well-being, working in a positive way to secure as many niches and as much diversity and as much shelter as can be. That's interesting because the forest and the world we live in is an evolutionary mosaic. There's a long history of events that have taken place, and what we see are the survivors. We're at a time when we can travel and get access to plants and organisms that come from the whole world. We've been moving A to B to C to D to E and rearranging it, and so there are "alien species." Agriculture is really the alien species biology.
Is the wheat we grow a native species? No. Of all the crops we grow, virtually none of them come from here. Everything we do in agriculture is alien species. The apples come from Turkistan, the pears come from China, everything else comes from South America or some other continent. Nobody eats the local crops like camas and Pacific silverweed; there's no commercialization of a Willamette Valley crop. We have an alien-permeated reality at the current time, and where human beings are around there are only relic populations of anything that corresponds to what might have been there a million years ago.
The other day we had a discussion of science in our household. Science pretends to give us reality, and yet until science addresses such issues as what is the soul, how does it actually get involved with our bodies, what is going on in existence beyond the material realm--until science ties those things together, science has virtually only a little bit to do with reality, but not very much. In that sense we shouldn't be overconcerned with the science that everybody is preaching as if it's the ultimate truth about the physical particles. Einstein had an intuitive knowledge that was obviously worth listening to as intuitive knowledge, that God doesn't throw dice, that our lives are not accidents, that the creation has a whole level of design implicit with fulfillment as soul at its core.
Yet somehow science and economics have been twisted to tell us that the meadow filled with flowers is less important than the bottom line, or than the housing project to put up cheap houses out of polluted material, exploiting and extorting people to work on jobs that they can't stand to promote activities that lead to poisons and bombs and guns, to maintain power and control over what?--something that isn't even ours, and when we were born here we had no idea about. All of that stuff needs to go.
TL: What is the relationship between agriculture and sense of place? Gardening is a way for many people to get back in touch with their place, but when they find out that they're growing mostly alien species, they may question it.
AK: We'd starve if we didn't grow alien species. My own sense is that nature works from new combinations. So there are many reasons to be supportive of alien species and the fact that this is just an ongoing process. One might still say, "Oh, in this particular area that once had none of these alien grasses in it, we're going to pull out the alien grasses and make a little area which is a native prairie." I think that's fine. The notion that one's going to regenerate the prairie at a big level is nonsense because you're not going to take agriculture and land development away from the society. Some things are just not going to be approachable.
And there are ecological and practical issues here. Logging and mining companies are destroying the forest in southeast Asia, and all the lady's-slipper orchids there are being turned into compost, and somebody says to you, "I have fifty of these plants, would you take care of them?" Now that means you need a greenhouse and warmth and attention, and so you're going to put some of your resources into maintaining something in an artificial environment that comes from another ecosystem. You might ask, "Why don't you put them in a tropical place where they'll grow well, rather than bring them to the temperate zone?" But there are complex issues here. We don't know much about diversity. So when you can buy a few seeds from something which comes from far away, and you can even grow a little plant of something that ultimately gets huge in your own greenhouse, and see what a young plant looks like, and how it grows up, and maybe make a bonsai, you learn about it.
Learning about diversity is a critical part of why alien is not alien. Alien's just a bigger self. And the same is true if we happen to meet somebody coming in on a UFO, or if there's another set of inhabited stars and solar systems. They are alien only in the sense that we don't have a view of ourselves as encompassing all living creatures. If we're kin with all life, then any living creature is just more of life, and so it's not alien. We can ask ourselves, "How does it fit, or what is its relationship, or how do I deal with it?" But that's not the same as saying, "I'm going to condemn it and I'm going to extinct it, because now it's growing in my back yard and the Forest Service and the Ag. Department say that it's a noxious weed."
We don't do a very good job of planting diversity in our parks or in our neighborhoods. We have made stupid rules that eliminate fruit and forage that's good for from our landscapes, so what we're doing is paying rent on barren ground.
We need a land reform in the United States, and a social reform which encourages people to go back to the land and live communally and grow food and take care of ecosystems. This means that everybody who's a backyard gardener has a $400 deduction allowance on their taxes. They save up their receipts for the amendments they bought and for the tools they needed and for the wheelbarrow they wanted, and the state and the national government gives a tax rebate for gardeners. If we do that we will encourage this United States to become a garden--not a garbage heap and not a strip mall, but a garden.
Gardening is healthy, it's interesting, and it promotes diversity. It gets you out of the box watching television and being an audience, always being catered to, pandered to, and ripped off while your resources are squandered. As a gardener you can fulfill a destiny: God is closer to you in the garden than anywhere else. That's not true if you spray poisons and you kill every bug and you discriminate, but if you have a touch, and you get into the flow of the beauty of nature, you have a chance to feel the illumination that comes with love and peace and goodness.
TL: Getting back a little to the alien question, what happens when an alien starts extinguishing the native species? For example, in Alton Baker Park in Eugene some people go in and pull out English Ivy because it's smothering all the natives.
AK: I pull out English Ivy also, and I see that that is simply a good response to an observation about what's going on.
As I said, the agriculture is alien species. Now Luther Burbank's blackberry is all up and down the coast and is one of the best wild-forage food plants that anyone has developed, and the birds have agreed with that. As far as I now know, according to Rick Valley, that it is Rubus procera, which is the European blackberry. So the European blackberry is loose on the coast in the Pacific Northwest, feeding people as an outlaw. People spray it, people curse at it, people dig it up, and the birds keep eating the berries and the hippies keep going out and making great blackberry jam and blackberry pies.
What I lament is that we haven't planted apple trees as the settlers who came here did. When I came here thirty years ago I could wander around, and I still can, in back roads and far places in Oregon, and find apple trees in the fall that give all sorts of heirloom and interesting fruit. We could plant this state in the same way--there could be beautiful trees and shrubs. Blueberries grow beautifully; all the parks should have hedgerows of blueberries. Everybody's worried, "Oh, what about the poor commercial people who sell blueberries?" Well, they spray most of their blueberries, and all of us don't want chemicals on them, so why not have parks with blueberries that are unsprayed so people can go get them? There's plenty of room for commerce, and there should be no worry about people being able to feed themselves when they pay taxes to towns and to the state and to the nation. Why don't we give it back to the people by having stuff in the parks that people can pick?
You go to the store and you get Granny Smith and Golden Delicious and Red Delicious, maybe five kinds of apples if you're lucky. Well, there are eight thousand kinds of apple varieties. We could plant another three hundred heirloom varieties of apples, little ones, very sweet ones, crabapples, ones that have unusual shapes, ones with unusual colors, ones with unusual flavors, and ones with medicinal properties. We could put them in the parks and we could have a fabulous fall where we really have harvest, rather than going to the store and buying plastic eggs and flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark. It's easy to see, without looking too far, that what we hold as sacred is not widely promulgated in this society of commerce. So why don't we give it back to our people, the beauty that the world has, and that is available in our ecosystems?
We see that people in the Near East are struggling for water, in other areas there are droughts, in some places there's so much snow and it's cold all the time. We live in a fertile place with great potentiality. We should be planting fruit trees and shrubs and beautiful flowers and endangered species.
Oregon State University is a famous agricultural school. Does it have a garden of the endangered species in the state of Oregon on campus so everybody can look through and see, "Oh, that's rare, and that's disappearing, and that one, this is the only population left"? These are the kind of things we need to implement if we expect to have a world which is going to make sense to some kids, and if we want society to grow out of the karma of the fear of war, the threat of war, the constant misuse of energy, and the misuse of economics. Wall Street spins the wheel to exploit the earth, to take the third world and their resources and turn them into wastelands, and to turn the first world into a hierarchy where the richest are the ones who have the most power. The ones who care about humanity are frequently left to die without having the recognition and the help they need to engender a growth of everybody.
TL: There are obviously paradoxes, where you have to figure out where the line is. For example, you could be trying to conserve a plant that's being made extinct by oil drilling, heating the greenhouse to keep that plant alive with that same petroleum.
AK: Very good, that's right, so some of the issue is access to the right circumstance. If that plant would grow better in the tropics, it's probably better to grow it in the tropics. If it grows in the temperate zone outside and you don't need to heat it, then you could do that. I have several greenhouses and I heat them, so I use petroleum, natural gas, to heat the greenhouses, and I use hydro-generated electricity from the grid. The more I live the more I see the contradictions. I don't like the circumstance I'm in, in that way.
I have to point out another level of this. In the winter when it's rainy and cold and very difficult in many ways, psychically, emotionally, and physically, coming into a warm fragrant greenhouse is a psychic uplift which is very good for our spirits and souls. And I think that if we had more greenhouses that were filled with beautiful gardens which we could walk through in the winter in this ecology, we would help our health a great deal as a society. So we need to ask: how much does it cost to heat plastic greenhouses, acquire the metal frames and all the appurtenances it takes to keep a beautiful garden alive in the season, and what does the society spend its money on that maybe you could funnel from one thing to another? For example, one could look at the amount of energy it takes to print up junk mail, the amount of energy it takes to overpackage the goods that we have, and it's clear that we waste a great deal of resources. I think that one could change the balance. We don't exactly say we live in a sustainable society--most of us know how far we are from sustainability.
Sustainability has often not even been considered. I'm reminded of the sequence where the green revolution wheat and rices reduced the size of the plants, made them have bigger seedheads with a lot of grain and very little fiber and fat. The people who used those to make their housing and roofing found they got more grain, but they couldn't keep themselves dry. They ended up having wet grain, and they lost grain, and so the green revolution was not only a failure, but it destroyed a whole aspect of a way of life.
Is this a successful model for the way we're going to develop the world and a society? We can't be gullible and trapped and seduced by lies--like the idea that we will grow more food on less ground because we'll use genetic engineering to manipulate the efficiency of the chloroplast. There are always consequences, and nature has had a long time to develop photosynthetic systems and balanced ecology to be able to make an inhabitable world.
We think we're going to simply tamper with it and then turn it loose into the biosphere. We've already done this with genetically modified organisms coming from big powerful corporations that have manipulated the USDA and the FDA to release untested genetically engineered soybeans, canola oil, corn, into the common food system. This is a crime against all of us. It's against all the laws and principles that were set in place to protect us, and it got done in the name of corporate greed and power.
We've been told lies about better living through chemistry--we're going to be cleaning it up for a long time. Atoms for peace, the pollution we have to deal with from radioactivity--we're going to clean it up for eternity. We have to be very careful what we allow in genetic engineering. If we wonder about alienness in the way we run our ecology, what about alienness in our food system? We now change genes and manipulate stuff in ways that have never happened, and we put it out for everybody and we never checked it out.
TL: That whole thing seems to be just a further step of the green revolution: we're taking away the local sense of place, the locally adapted species and varieties, and replacing them with this monoculture idea that someone, some big corporation, can own.
AK: Absolutely. That's right.
TL: Do you want to talk a little about the direction of your research?
AK: In the last ten years I've been working for the public domain as a plant breeder interested in nutrition and diversity. I am very grateful that Seeds of Change continues to supply organic seeds, and it's a tremendous job to maintain a network to grow open-pollinates and heirlooms, to keep selecting out good lines of each of the crops, to search among the diversity of heirlooms and crops and vegetables, the ones that backyard gardeners can feed themselves with and could save their own seeds of and that are worth passing on.
I've taken many F1 hybrids and turned them into open-pollinated lines and put them back into the public domain as good new varieties. I have made some crosses in the Mendelian sense, made some interesting sunflowers and marigolds.
In collaboration with Carl Jones, Jennifer Peterson, and in particular Dr. Sarangamat Gurusiddiah of Washington State University in Pullman, I also do free amino acid analyses of the vegetable juices. We're asking, within the vegetables, "What can I grow that has a nonviolent aspect, a nutritional diversity, and a future for humanity?"
I'm beginning to work on the flora of Belize, especially the orchids. I would like to help in the conservation of all sorts of species. There are 4000 species in the country, 350 species of orchids. I'm just starting to get into it.
I also need to heal myself from lymphatic cancer, or have God show me what to do to promote the healing. That means I need to study more medicinal herbs, and I'm interested in medicinal plants with a new look now. I've begun to work with Rosita Arvigo, who wrote a book called Sastun. She worked for ten years as an apprentice with Don Eligio Ponte, who was one of the elder Mayan curanderos, healers, from Belize. I find myself becoming an apprentice to her, in order to learn about and practice some herbal medicine directly.
TL: Whenever I come here or hear you speak, it's just so obvious that there's so much good work in these areas that people could be doing. You have so much knowledge about different kinds of plants, but many people can't even identify a single bean plant. They don't know where to start. It seems as if there's a problem with the ways that most of us are living our lives, when we don't have time or space to consider most of these things. Is there any advice that you would have for people to free themselves from all the distractions that keep them from the real work?
AK: The first thing is take a good deep breath. (laughs) And then make a list of all the things that you're attached to. And when you get to your ego, circle it, and get an eraser and erase it. I think that there's the recognition that we live in a fabric, of people, communities, societies, world, all these interactions, that we are not alone or isolated, we're part of a many-leveled web of many things. It's getting our priorities in order. What do you really want to have happen in the time of your life?
In a world where there's violence and fear and greed and misuse of power, all these things eventually come back upon myself. If I want to see something meaningful happen, I have to work on those issues. And how am I going to work as an individual on big, complicated, difficult issues? It starts right at home, and the food system is a good place to begin. So one starts with food, and then one starts looking inside food: "Why do I eat this? What is this? What do I like? Which do I like because my mother told me it was good for me? Which one do I like because my father grew it in the back yard? What are the patterns that I have--like my grandfather would take me fishing so I like to eat fish? How is it tied together, the fabric of our placentation in this world?"
Because although we don't have the umbilicus from our moms, we have the umbilicus to this food system that is sustaining us. When I became an adult, I realized that in life I'm going to eat, so I need to grow some of my own food. That got me to saving seeds, it got me to realizing that in seed-saving I'm completing a cycle every time I harvest the seeds and plant them again. So I'm not totally exploitative, I'm beginning to be involved in the nurturing and the maintaining aspect of it.
As your interest grows in gardening, you begin to pay attention to the other organisms. And you may wake up in the morning and look at the sun, or take a deep breath of air and say, "This air is polluted, I gotta move," or you have some orange juice and you taste a chemical taste in the back of your tongue and say, "I'm going to buy organic next time I do this," or you finally decide, "Oh, I'll spend 35 extra cents for the broccoli because it's organic."
Part of what we're brought up with in this society is the view that we are individuals, isolated, with our own lives and our own this and our own that. That's sort of like a heart with a steel shell around it. Your sensitivity, your telepathic and immunity functions are pressed into minutes. The sense of I is very tiny and it's frequently sad, alone, and unhappy. It's always searching for a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a satisfaction or a thrill or something to entertain, so it's always outer-directed.
In this process of becoming inner-directed and then getting in touch with your soul, the soul being directly in touch with the divine, you see that you're connected to a larger fabric of existence, and your life takes on another aspect. You realize that we want to have people be happy, and you ask, "How can we serve them to be happy? What does it take to have them go through experiences which make them more fulfilled and hence able to love better?" All those are the ties that bring significance.
I want to serve peace on earth. I remember, twenty-five years ago, I got to the point where I realized, somewhere around my thirtieth birthday, "What good is it going to be if we fight war, if we drop bombs on gardens, if we destroy ecologies that we have no relationship to? That will not make a world that we can tolerate. So I have to devote myself to peace on earth. How do you do that?" And then someone says, "Not you, how could you be so self-important, how could you believe that you can contribute to that?"
And yet, at the same time, what else can you contribute to, right? You can plant more flowers. I watched it as I first I grew up in a nuclear family, then went and lived communally in the hippie era. What was the hardest thing to get done? The dishes! Everybody had very high ideals but nobody wanted to wash the dishes. Everybody wanted to eat bread when it came fresh out of the oven, nobody wanted to go out into the fields and pick the wheat and clean it and grind it and turn it into flour.
And I realized, ah, those are the issues. So, from the desire to work for peace to washing the dishes to building a composting toilet to growing fruit trees and gardens and saving seeds and doing kinship gardening...the fabric all is one, it's all the same.
TL: Part of the message is that the kind of life you're talking about isn't just easy, and, you know, la-la land. It involves hard work, maybe not in the sense of the old agricultural paradigm that life is miserable, we were expelled from the Garden of Eden, the physical toil of farming is our punishment for being alive, and so forth...but still, tenacity is necessary.
AK: I believe that the struggle is spiritual, that each one of us has certain gifts, certain problems, issues, realities, that we need to work on. We can improve our spiritual health. So that's an ongoing reality, in our focused relationships with people, in our close relations with everyone we work with, in all the engagements we have. There always is room for improving the outcome, the consequences. So if we work on that, that's where the real change is. That's the place where you find wisdom, where you turn the chaff into gold. It's in the places where you get angry, where you're unhappy, where you have challenges, where you whine and complain, where you blame somebody else for something that you did. Those are the issues, where you could have done it better with a little more work, you could have broken through your being tired or your ego or your pattern for drinking the next fifteenth cup of coffee, or you could have said, "Oh, I'm going to use a tofu burger instead of going to get a cheeseburger."
There are places where you can decide that nonviolence is important to live for, and those characteristics become available as you strive to grow spiritually. As that happens, you become more able to feel fulfilled. So I struggle, I have lymphoma, sometimes it hurts, sometimes I wonder, "Oh, should I go to the AMA and let them give me chemotherapy and shrink the nodes and forget about it?" And then I ask myself, "Are you going to be seduced by that line? They can give you toxic chemicals, but then you're never going to know how to heal it in a natural way. You will not have contributed to other people who are going to get this disease. Are you going to figure out how to do it? Already ten years you're alive past the diagnosis. You did macrobiotics, it worked, you did a Hoxsey tonic, it worked. These things work for a while and then it comes back. You have to figure out the next thing. You're involved in healing."
We're all on the path, and so the more we're able to really carve a niche into the heart chakra and get real connections to God and then manifest it in this society, that's what we need. The gardening helps, and the right livelihood helps, and the suffering...Dylan said it, he said, "Isn't it interesting, those of us who have suffered intensely share so much more." So part of it is, not looking for suffering...but attachments, as the Buddha taught, bring suffering, desire brings attachment, and ignorance brings desire, so we should look into the roots of our ignorance and pursue a path of enlightenment to be able to bring transition and transformation.
Chris Roth is editor of Talking Leaves and author of The Beetless' Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook.
Contact Alan Kapuler c/o Deep Diversity, P.O. Box 15700, Santa Fe, NM 87506-5700.
�1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
We welcome your letters!
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