My Love Is Like a Red Red..

A loyal reader of Code Red said she’d like to come away from each Sunday morning blog with one new idea about what she could do to address the climate crisis. Oh dear, what to choose? The list is so long.  Divest all your funds from banks that invest in fossil fuels! Drag your oil burner out of the basement and install heat pumps! Put solar panels on your roof!  Protect voting rights so we can pass climate forward bills that fund new electric infrastructure!  Are you already tired, reader, overwhelmed with the number of things that need to be done?

Well, I know just how you feel. I am too. Since the birth of FreeportCAN a few weeks ago, it’s been both exciting and confounding to try to understand the best way to support the colorfully feathered folks now nested together as a steering committee and her ten action committees squirming for flight and emerging into their form and function. I have much to learn!  Fortunately, there are wise friends who can help me learn how to nurture this newly born community action creature and all the life forms in it!  “Fractals,” they say.  “Emergent strategies.”   “Small is all.”    

In the course of twenty-four hours, three people tell me to read work by the author, adrienne maree brown.  One person arrived on my porch just after the snowstorm with one of adrienne maree’s books in hand.  Another loaned me a different slim volume by the same author.  A woman in the national leadership of Third Act whom I am working with on another project called Elders Going Deeper, told me adriennne is a friend, and, in the future, we can call on her.  I guess it was meant to happen that I and adrienne would, in one way or another, meet.

But on this cold, blue-skied February morning, I need a little respite from fretting about the FCAN newborn and the complexity of emergent strategies.  And I need an escape from the news that the Republican party has proclaimed that the assault on the Capitol and the violent attempt to overthrow the election was “legitimate political discourse.” Or the news that Russia is on the brink of invading the Ukraine.

In search of reprieve, my mind scans for images of lushness and warmth, hard commodities to find in bitter cold February.  Ah! Valentines Day, I think and quickly settle into visions of roses!  A little squirm of wish wiggles in my veins and I imagine a sweet-smelling bouquet of red roses standing tall in a crystal vase resting on the round walnut dining table, bare now in the middle of the room.  All I would need to do is bat my eyes and say the word please and wouldn’t it be lovely and oh you are my sweet man and out my love would go to the nearest supermarket or nursery to procure with the flick of a credit card (from that nasty Citibank) a red red rose for his Luve. 

O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune. (Robert Burns)

But where do those roses for his Luve come from? I decide to do a little research.  In his trip to the store, my luve would not be alone, for every year at Valentine’s Americans give each other about 200 million of those red red newly sprung in June (or February) symbols of love. In her book, “Inconspicuous Consumption,” Tatiana Schlossberg tells us that during the three weeks leading up to Valentines thirty planes a day fly from Bogota, Columbia to Miami, each carrying 1.1 million roses.  Those roses are then transported to other planes or refrigerated trucks and shipped all over the country. Before the oil shortage in the seventies, places like Michigan and New York grew flowers in the winter.  But when the price of oil shot up, it became cheaper to grow flowers in a warmer climate and ship them here by plane.  She reports that in 2017, 4 billion flowers weighing 200,000 tons were flown from Columbia to the United States, using 114 million liters of jet fuel and releasing 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. 

In Europe, the Netherlands is the hub for exporting flowers.  But most of the flowers are no longer grown there.  Instead, they are grown in Kenya and flown to the Netherlands where they are auctioned off at the Royal FloraHolland market, before being loaded once more into planes and flown to another country. 

But the flower industry is not only harmful for the planet but harmful for workers who are exposed to toxins in fertilizers and insecticides.  Water sources are also impacted by runoff from fertilizers.  For that vase of winter flowers set with such carefree oblivion on my table, women in Kenya walk miles to fields where workdays are16 hours long. 

I have to tell you that I have wanted to believe that those innocent bouquets of chrysanthemums and lilies that lure me at the entrance to the market with their delicate petals and soft mauves and pinks are locally grown and somehow magically preserved in some space-time vault until the very day when I need them. There is no requirement that flowers carry any label for country of origin, so it has been quite easy to maintain my denial. 

I think I have this fantasy about almost everything I buy: that it appears, that it has no past, no history of harm or disease, that it exists in a realm set apart from real dirt, laborers, factories, chemicals, trucks, planes, packaging and is, instead, there on the shelf, waiting for ME!! 

Okay, I am paying attention now to where these roses I covet come from. Is there a local grower of roses or other cut flowers where my true luve can find my Valentine pick-me-up in the middle of winter?  Rosemont, a market known for local sourcing, is honest on their website about where their flowers come from. From May to September, they source from strictly local farms, but “in the off-season, we source all of our blooms from the U.S. and Europe. We are hopeful for a more sustainable future.”

Mmmm.  What to do now!  I call Skillins Greenhouses in Falmouth and ask to speak to a grower.  They confirm that none of their cut flowers are sourced in the U.S. at this time. “What have you got in your greenhouse that is local and blooming?” I ask. They have geraniums, red and pink and white.  In a few weeks they will have some primroses.  They have potted daffodils and lilies grown from bulbs. The tulips are not yet ready. They have cineraria in many colors, she tells me. I look them up. Native to Southern Africa, they are referred to as “tender” perennials. Perhaps a tender purple cineraria for my luve?

Now, readers, I am sorry. This essay does not offer you any hope of the guilt-free solace of roses. My one action plan for the week, therefore, reads this way: Oh my luve’s like a red red geranium.