WHY BOTHER WITH ORGANIC FLOWERS?
>
> The more the agribusiness folks mess about with transplanted genes and toxic
> chemicals and irradiation, the better the market for local, fresh, organic,
> un-messed-about-with foods.  When it comes to things we're going to put into
> our mouths, things that are literally going to become us, we consumers are
> cautious, and rightly so.
>
> But what about crops we don't eat?  What, for example, about flowers?  Whethe
r
> we grow our own or buy them in a shop, need we care whether they carry
> pesticide residues or genes from a fish?  Does it make sense to buy or grow
> organic flowers?
>
> I've just come across two articles that remind me how much sense it makes.  O
ne
> is a report on flower farms in Latin America, which export to our florists
> year-round.  I've seen some of those farms in Costa Rica.  Imagine acres and
> acres under plastic tents, not to keep out the balmy climate but to allow
> fumigation against tropical pests and molds.  Inside the tents the soils are
> dosed with chemicals of sorts and at concentrations that would never be allow
ed
> in the United States.  Nor would our workers be allowed to enter that toxic
> atmosphere.
>
> The flowers, flown to us overnight, are beautiful.  Smelling and admiring the
m
> won't hurt us.  Those Costa Rican workers do at least have jobs.  The export
> money is important to their countries.  Why should we care how they grow
> flowers?
>
> We should care because those poisons don't stay inside the tents.  They drift
> out, they walk out on the clothes of the workers, they enter the bodies of
> their children, filter into groundwater, work their way up the tropical food
> chain, at the top of which are songbirds whose return we await up north every
> spring.  Some of those chemicals attack the ozone layer that stretches over a
nd
> protects us.  Some evaporate and fall as rain or snow anywhere from the North
> Pole to New England.  We are materially connected to those flower farms, as w
e
> are connected to all the circulating flows of the planet.  Not as intimately 
as
> if we were eating the flowers, but strongly enough to care.
>
> I care about the workers, too.  I've looked them in the face. I can't be
> unconcerned about their health or jobs or children.  If those flowers were
> grown organically, there would probably be more jobs, and healthier ones.  It
> might not be possible to grow all types of flowers organically, especially no
t
> types foreign to the tropics.  It might not be possible to specialize in acre
s
> of a single flower.  The crops might have to be mixed, rotated, varied.
>
> Flowers grown that way could cost more, though maybe not, because the
> additional labor would be offset by fewer expensive chemicals.  Flowers might
> not come to us as predictably in as great a variety at all seasons.  This is
> one of those many situations where something comes easy and cheap to rich fol
ks
> because it costs distant poor folks a lot, not just in lousy wages, but in
> health and in the debasement of their local resources and environment.  That
> kind of cheap, however beautiful and predictable and convenient, I can't enjo
y.
>
> The other article that came my way was about growing our own flowers.  It was
> excerpted from the book "Step by Step Organic Flower Gardening" by Shep Ogden