Overnight snow dusting, gone by noon. Temperature just about freezing, with an ill east wind.

On the up side, clarinet practice continues, and what was once a real pain is slowly becoming a pleasure, with practice no longer dreaded.

Here is an excerpt from Michael Pollan's 1991 book, Second Nature, which I think has implications for Lakes Michigan and Huron. (Btw, the Badger ferry is now undergoing a retrofit so that the coal ash it creates will no longer be dumped into the Lake. Back when the ferry was built, in 1952, the coal ash, along with all the sewage and garbage, was just dumped overboard. We are making progress—but I worry that it is a bit too slow.

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Second Nature (I99I)

MICHAEL POLLAN

A pedestrian standing at the corner of Houston Street and LaGuardia Place in Manhattan might think that the wilderness had reclaimed a tiny corner of the city's grid here. Ten years ago, an environmental artist persuaded the city to allow him to create on this site a "time landscape" showing New Yorkers what Manhattan looked like before the white man arrived. On a small hummock he planted oak, hickory, maples, junipers, and sassafras, and they've grown up to form a nearly impenetrable tangle, which is protected from New Yorkers by the steel bars of a fence now thickly embroidered with vines. It's exactly the sort of "garden" of which Emerson and Thoreau would have approved — for the very reason that it's not a garden. Or at least that's the conceit.

I walk by this anti-garden most mornings on my way to work, and for some reason it has always irritated me. It adjoins a lively community garden, where any summer evening will find a handful of neighborhood people busy cultivating their little patches of flowers and vegetables. Next to this display of enterprise, the untended "time landscape" makes an interesting foil. But the juxtaposition has always struck me as pat, just a shade too righteous, and walking by one day last summer I figured out why.

My mind fixed on the weeds just then hoisting their flags of victory over my garden, I recognized one of the vines twining along the fence from the field guides I'd been consulting. It was nightshade, a species, I recalled — and not without my own sweet pang of righteousness — that is not indigenous: it came to America with the white man. Aha! This smug little wilderness was really a garden after all. Unless somebody weeds it, sedulously and knowledgeably, it will quickly be overrun with alien species. This "time landscape" is in perpetual danger of degenerating into an everyday vacant lot; only a gardener, armed with a hoe and a set of "invidious distinctions," can save it.

Once, of course, this would not have been the case. But that was a long time ago; by now, we have made so many changes in the land that some form of gardening has become unavoidable, even in those places we wish to preserve as monuments to our absence. This, it seems to me, is one of the lessons of the massive fires in Yellowstone in 1988. At a certain point in history, doing nothing is not necessarily benign. Since 1972, park management in Yellowstone has followed a policy called "natural burn," under which naturally occurring fires are allowed to burn freely — before 1972, every fire was put out immediately. All those years of fire fighting left an abundance of volatile dead wood on the forest floor and that may be why, when the fires finally came in the drought year of 1988, they proved so catastrophic. Yellowstone's ecosystem having already been altered by the earlier policy of fire suppression, the new policy could not in any real sense be "natural" nor were the fires it fostered.

There's no going back. Even Yellowstone, our country' s greatest "wilderness," stands in need of careful management — it's too late to simply "leave it alone." I have no idea what the best fire policy for Yellowstone might be, but I do know that men and women, armed with scientific knowledge and acting through human institutions, will have to choose and then implement one. In doing so, they will have to grapple with the fact that, long before Yellowstone was declared a "wilderness area," Indians were setting fires in it; were these "natural" ? If the goal is to restore Yellowstone to its pre-Columbian condition, their policy may well have to include the setting of fires. They will also have to decide how many tourists Yellowstone can support, whether wolves should be reintroduced to keep the elk population from exploding, and a host of other complicated questions. Today, even Yellowstone must be "gardened."

A century after Thoreau wrote that "in wildness is the preservation of the world," Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet and farmer, added a corollary that would have made no sense at all to Thoreau, and yet that is necessary. Berry wrote that "in human culture is the preservation of wildness." I take him to mean that it's too late now to do nothing. Only human wisdom and forbearance can save places like Yellowstone.

Thoreau, and his many heirs among contemporary naturalists and radical environmentalists, assume that human culture is the problem, not the solution. So they urge us to shed our anthropocentrism and learn to live among other species as equals. This sounds like a fine, ecological idea, until you realize that the earth would be even worse off if we started behaving any more like animals than we already do. The survival strategy of most species is to extend their dominion as far and as brutally as they can, until they run up against some equally brutal natural limit that checks their progress. Isn't this exactly what we've been doing?

What sets us apart from other species is culture, and what is culture but forbearance? Conscience, ethical choice, memory, discrimination: it is these very human and decidedly unecological faculties that offer the planet its last best hope. It is true that, historically, we've concentrated on exercising these faculties in the human rather than the natural estate, but that doesn't mean they cannot beexercised there. Indeed, this is the work that now needs to be done: to bring more culture to our conduct in nature, not less.

If I seem to have wandered far afield of weeds, consider what weeding is: the process by which we make informed choices in nature, discriminate between good and bad, apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth. To weed is to bring culture to nature — which is why we say, when we are weeding, that we are cultivating the soil. Weeding, in this sense, is not a nuisance that follows from gardening, but its very essence. And, like gardening, weeding at a certain point becomes an obligation. As I learned in my flower bed, mere neglect won' t bring back "nature."

In this, my yard is not so different from the rest of the world. We cannot live in it without changing nature irrevocably; having done so, we' re obliged to tend to the consequences of the changes we've wrought, which is to say, to weed. "Weeding" is what will save places like Yellowstone, but only if we recognize that weeding is not just something we do to the land — only if we recognize the need to cultivate our human nature, too. For though we may be the earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role — that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.