THE BEING OF WILDFLOWERS
To exist for an organic being is to live. And to live is to gain sustenance from the earth's material resources, to defend oneself against the perils of being, and to reproduce one's kind. This is what life is all about at its simplest. Existence as a living thing just "is." And the continuation of that "is", to repeat, requires the getting of a living, self-defense, and reproduction. These imperatives form the basis of life for anything organic, wildflowers included. To meet these imperatives is no piece of cake for the vast majority of organic life. Earth's resources are limited and everything ultimately must compete against everything else for access to the necessities of life. Nature is a tough task master. Success in the competitive race is a question of evolutionary adaptation to a resource niche. Occupy a niche to flourish. Only the well adapted survive.
The exception to the resource scarcity rule is modern humanity. By virtue of our capacity to produce beyond biological necessity, we have time left over in the day to do something other than obeying the biological imperatives. This is called ecological release. We are released from the scarcity imperative. In short, we human beings have time to engage in experiences in the world for their own sake. We can tell stories, dance, play softball, or write philosophical tracts. We can contemplate the wonders of being and the beauties of nature. We can do work simply for the purpose of satisfying our creative impulses. And we can sit around trying to figure out the meaning of life on earth. These things wildflowers and other biotic organisms can't do.
The odd thing is that despite the blessing of ecological release humanity in the modern world has gotten stuck in the trio of life's imperatives and has become as a result a bull in nature's global china shop. We have become paranoid about getting a living and defending ourselves and spend way to much time at producing material possessions we do not need, absorbing way too much of nature's resources in the process. We collectively possess a will to material power that defeats our underlying desire to experience the wonders of life and to fulfill our creative impulses. The fact that we have ecological release leads us to the "bull in a china shop" manipulation of the natural world requiring huge amounts of energy from fossil fuels that shoot excessive volumes of greenhouse gases into the earths atmosphere. These gases (mostly carbon dioxide) are transparent to the incoming light rays from the sun, but absorb a proportion of the reflected infrared energy that bounces back into the outer space. Their accumulation results in a warming of of the earth's atmosphere and a change in climatic conditions faced by its plant and animal species. This result is a diminished capacity for some wildflower species to defend themselves from perils they face, to get an adequate living in the form of solar energy, nutrients, gases such as CO2, and water, and to produce more of their own kind. Nature would be better off if we took ecological release seriously as something to be treasured and used for qualitative experiences rather than an expansion of our power for material production. We have ecological release but we produce as if we are perpetually threatened with material poverty, as if there is no tomorrow without more material stuff.
Why should we as human beings care at all about anything so frivolous as the lives of high mountain wildflowers? Doing so is unlikely to expand our productive powers, make us wealthier, or solve the problem of unemployment. The best I can do in justifying such care is to claim that doing so may help us wean ourselves off of our current imperative to perpetual economic expansion and its attendant environmental threats. Exploring the lives of wildflowers gives us an endlessly fascinating and aesthetically pleasing project that will keep us off the treadmill of endlessly expanding material production and give us something to do in the world that is environmentally benign. In short, get out there and enjoy the drama and adventure of the lives of wildflowers.
GETTING A LIVING
Water, mineral nutrients, space, sunlight and CO2 for photosynthesis, and an amenable temperature; these are the mother's milk of getting a livings for a wildflower. Plants, like any living thing, must devote time and energy to the essentials of building and sustaining organic life. The essentials of getting a living is conceptually easy to state, but the devilish reality is in the complexity of the details. Photosynthesis for example, the process by which sunshine, CO2, minerals, and water are converted to energy plants can use to live, is a complicated business not easily understood.
DEFENSE
DEFENSE
For a wildflower, nature is filled with evils that have to be avoided or subdued for survival--herbivores, parasites, damaging weather events, competitors appropriating necessary resources. Organic life is no piece of cake. Wildflowers, in addition to being objects of beauty, have to be tough. Some engage in chemical warfare by producing compounds that repulse or debilitated their enemies. Some develop toughened skins on their plant parts to defend against freezes or droughts. Some engage in symbiotic relationships through quid pro quote deals with other organisms that take up the work of defense on behalf of the flower in exchange for nutrients. Some wildflowers avoid damage from summer downpours by simply closing up their flower parts for business when it gets cloudy.
REPRODUCTION
Sensuality, connection, and nurture; these are the essentials of wildflower reproduction. On top of being good at self-defense and an aggressive seekers of life's resources, wildflowers must be objects of attractive beauty in the eyes of their pollinators. It's the pollinator that transfers pollen from male to female flower and thus male sperm to female egg. Only those wildflowers with the ability to self pollinate from their male stamen to their own female style can be ugly ducklings. They don't necessarily need pollinators to reproduce, although they do at some point to avoid the problem of insufficient genetic diversity and inbreeding depression. Flowers nurture their young, but they do so primarily through the legacy of energy they leave behind within the seed's embryo for the seedlings initial emergence. Parental care is limited to perennials who sometimes shade their offspring seedlings in dangerously hot climates. The same task is often better performed by unrelated shrubs with a comparatively expansive and deep shadow.
UNDERSTANDING BEING
Understanding is a mental and material process about which we humans lack much real understanding. This lack points up humanity's strictly limited capacity for perception, especially of its own mental functioning. All we have is our perceptual senses as our window to the world. We may well have more luck in understanding the Being of a wildflower than our own. Its Being is driven by real necessity, but ours is driven by a destructive mock necessity. We think that we have to devote the bulk of our day to getting a living, but we don't. We think that continuous economic expansion is essential to employ everyone, but it is not. We think that life's meaning comes from material possessions, but it doesn't. It just might come from getting to know the Being of Wildflowers and the dependency of that Being on humanity's behavior.
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