Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Earth Day, ISU, and Ada Hayden
I remember the first Earth Day. I was in junior high school and a group of us students picked up roadside trash while carrying signs proclaiming Earth Day. The young and idealistic were leading the way to a better future where humans would live in harmony with nature while saving the planet in the bargain. Sound familiar? Could it really have been 38 years ago?
Be that as it may, Earth Day and the focus on environmental causes exerted great influence on me when it came time to choose a college and a field of study. I knew I wanted to do something with the outdoors, preferably with plants. I chose to study forestry at Iowa State University. Well, the forestry program turned out to be the wrong choice for me, and I soon changed my major to horticulture. Then horticulture turned out to be the wrong career choice for me, but that's a long story for another post.
This post is really about defending my alma mater against snide remarks by Michael Pollan. I planned to finish reading The Omnivore's Dilemma for the last Garden Bloggers' Book Club, but I was so flabbergasted by the following passage that I couldn't continue.
I spent a couple of days on the Ames campus, which really should be called the University of Corn. Corn is the hero of the most prominent sculptures and murals on campus, and the work of the institution is dedicated in large part to the genetics, culture, history, and uses of this plant, though the soybean, Iowa's second crop, gets its share of attention too.
Huh? I wrote and rewrote a lengthy rebuttal to this nonsense, but I'm going to whittle it down to just this. It is indisputable that Iowa State University is home to the state agricultural college in a state where corn is the largest cash crop, and you would therefore expect them to devote some resources to studying it. But to suggest that nothing else goes on there is a failure to observe, at best, or a fabrication, at worst. You only need to look at enrollment numbers to see the truth. In the current semester, undergraduate enrollment in the College of Agriculture is fifth among the six colleges that make up the university. The college with the largest number of students is Liberal Arts and Sciences with 5154 students, followed by Engineering (4056), Business (3221), Human Sciences (2657), Agriculture (2554), and Design (1726). If you're interested in seeing Iowa State's beautiful campus and learning more about the various artworks there, here are a couple websites for you to visit - Points of Pride: Art and Art on Campus. You will find little corn.
In honor of Earth Day, I'd like to draw your attention instead to an Iowa State alumna who studied the native praire and worked to preserve it. ISU has many distinguished alumni, but Ada Hayden, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. at Iowa State and a member of the Botany department from 1910 to 1950, was pondering the effects of increasing cultivation of row crops before Michael Pollan was born. A brief except from her writing:
But will this myriad-strained cultivate corn, rotated with its oriental leguminous neighbors, maintain health and productivity in an artificial environment in a manner comparable with the native grassland plants which are natural products of their climatic and edaphic environment?
...
The prairie itself has intrinsic merits aside from its bearing with reference to crop insurance. It presents a colorful display of flowering plants throughout the growing season; it is the potential source of economic plants whose uses have not yet been explored. It affords opportunity for the study of the life histories of animals, the knowledge of which has a practical bearing upon their integration with the agricultural environment. It serves as a standard of reference for landscaping, it constitutes type specimens of the native vegetation and soil associations, and provides living examples of the fauna and flora which are indispensable in educational work.
Partly through Ada Hayden's efforts, a 240-acre prairie remnant was acquired by the state in 1945, to be preserved and studied. She was truly ahead of her time. And at Iowa State. Imagine that.
Labels: ada hayden, earth day, iowa
7 Comments:
Good for you, Entangled - be true to your school ;-]
Ada Hayden's words are beautifully written and posting them here is a fitting way to mark this year's Earth Day.
What a pity the lantern slides of the Prairie were lost!
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
I've been to the Iowa State campus several times and it is beautiful. Much nicer than the Hawkeye campus where I went. Perhaps Pollan was stereotyping the general populaces' notion of what the curriculum must be like at a agricultural school, to engender sympatico with his writings?
The last time we were there which was more than 5 years ago, all the talk was about re-introducing or reclaiming lands for the native prairie. Someone is listening to Ada Hayden!
I enjoyed reading your post. Good for you!
Annie: Your comment made me realize that I didn't actually know what a lantern slide was. Now I do, and I feel the loss. I found a series of Ada Hayden's later snapshots, but I wonder how they'd compare to the lantern slides.
Ki: I was only once in Iowa City, to visit a friend who had transferred there. I don't really remember the campus, but I think we didn't spend much time looking either.
That's precisely what I was thinking about Pollan's comment! And I think it's unfortunate that he felt the need to use such a tactic. I'm now very skeptical of his writing, where I was very receptive to his ideas before.
Barbee: Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you for your well-written post defending our Iowa State University. It has also been one of the leading veterinary universities in the United States. Grant Wood is more than just a painter of "corn," although he definitely has ties to Iowa in more ways than ISU. Also, ISU has an enjoyably beautiful campus. :-)
Ada Hayden was a woman ahead of her time - it's too bad that Michael Pollan hadn't mentioned her. Interestingly, I just had an exchange with someone about the corn section in Omnivore's Dilemma. Of all his writing to date, I found this the most tedious and pontificating part of the book. He made his point and didn't need to beat us readers over the head with it.
I was pleasantly relieved to discover that his latest book, In Defense of Food, made his points succinctly and was a good read.
Shady Gardener: I'll always remember my Iowa State days fondly. As far as I can tell, Pollan didn't even see (or didn't really look at) the Grant Wood murals in the library. I think he's writing about something he saw in the Agronomy building.
One of my college roommates is a graduate of the veterinary school at ISU, and many more of my college acquaintances wanted to attend but couldn't get in. It was said at the time that it was harder to get into veterinary school than med school (don't know if that's still true or not).
Kate: Do you think I should give Omnivore's Dilemma another chance? I wanted to read the book partly because of the section on Polyface Farms which is a couple hours from us in central Virginia. We buy their products locally when we can find them (they sell out quickly). I was just so torqued off about the Iowa State jab that I put down the book in disgust.
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