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
posted by Entangled at 9:15 AM ::: Permalink
:::
Leave a Comment
7
comments from:
Annie in Austin,
Ki,
Barbee',
Entangled,
Shady Gardener,
kate smudges,
Entangled,
