Creek Running North

If you LIVED like this, it would make it so much easier to dismiss the closed minds that cannot wrap their minds around something so complex in its simplicity.

Alas, no.  For you it HAS to be scientifically measured to be true.  Well!  For this (now former) Creek Running North reader, that’s the FIRST sign I’m being taken for a ride.

Good DAY, sir.  I hope you find some avenue of connection.

Ladies and gentleman, Ms. Dawn Eden.

Is this the book that says carrots SCREAM when you pull them from the ground?

Back in November, I was on vacation in California’s Eastern Sierra. I stopped at a natural hot spring site (Travertine, I think it’s called) near Bridgeport and ended up in a pool just at sunset with an early middle aged couple. Usually the experience includes some sort of reverence for the mountain quiet, but in this case, five minutes after I got in, a mini-van rolled up and a woman who reminded me of the “Fat Babe” cave woman from the BC comics – big, brash and loud – got in with us.

She proceeded to tell us everything there was to know about “energy� and “healing� and ... ghosts, earth spirits, flying saucers, wise aliens who created humans with genetic engineering, reincarnation, on and on. She had the whole New Age package (and then some) in her head, and earnestly erupted with it, at top volume, for a good half hour before anybody else could get a word in.

As low-key and gentle as I could make it, I said “Just for a bit of balance, I’d like to put in here that nothing you just said has any basis in fact.�

Shocked the hell out of her. The four of us talked about it for a bit, fairly calmly, with me focusing on the subjects of evidence and reality, but by the time I got out, she’d said “I think you’re arrogant and closed-minded, and I don’t like you at all.�

Whew.

I just re-read the comment from “Hmmph.”

“Good DAY, sir.  I hope you find some avenue of connection.”

Yeah, Chris, how can you be soooo darned disconnected?

Search your feelings, Luke! Let go! Use the Force!

BTW, follow Ilyka’s (Hmmph!) name link and read her beautiful piece on her mom.  Just wow.

Now if you would just have a good colonic cleansing and start on that raw food diet, all those negative thoughts would disappear with the toxins in your body.

Sounds like you have a bad case of malicious animal magnetism to me.

I do, bridgett, and I barely know you!

Wilderness people break more new-agey; toxics people break more crank-y.  Dealing with that is part of being an environmentalist (no, before the denialist troll happens by, it’s not the fundamental basis of environmentalism—environmentalism is more scientifically informed than just about any other social movement.)

My “favorite” memory: at a conference, in a meeting about sewerage sludge application on farms.  (There are some things that pass from the human waste through treatment and can possibly be taken up by the crops, like some metals.) A kindly grandmotherly type told everyone that this was an AIDS risk to people eating the food.  (NOTE: this *IS NOT* really an AIDS risk.)

Oh, my, that book!  I read it when I was in elementary school (weirdly, at the same time there was also an old music 8-track with the same title lying around the house).  In fact, it inspired my science project - I had three groups of seeds, which received the same amounts of water, sun, soil, etc., and talked nicely to one set, ignored one set, and was “mean” to the last.  Weirdly, they did show a gradient in terms of how well they grew, with the “nice” set growing taller than the “ignored” and both taller than the “mistreated.”

But, yes, the book itself is crap, strange anecdotal datum notwithstanding.

Rana:

Weirdly, they did show a gradient in terms of how well they grew, with the “nice� set growing taller than the “ignored� and both taller than the “mistreated.�

The MythBusters did a similar thing a few seasons back with different types of music added to the mix as well as “nice” vs. “nasty” phrases.

Turns out plants grow best to speed metal.

No kidding.

Turns out plants grow best to speed metal.

Really?  That’s hilarious.

=v= I’m a wilderness/toxic environmentalist, so I never know how to feel.  What I want to know is why the Amazon reviewer is so pointedly avoiding all mention of 4/29 Truth!

Ah, yes—plants and polygraphs and neo-animism.

Why do so many people need to anthropomorphize the natural world in order to feel any connection to it?