We need live-and-let-live attitude to dandelions
Every spring, it’s the same thing. Everyone is up in arms about the profusion of dandelions. Now, some Calgary councillors are fretting about controlling the yellow flowers on city property.
Why is it that whenever we don’t like some living thing, our first impulse is to find a way to kill it?
And in the process, we indirectly end up killing ourselves, by adding more poisons to the environment that leach into our soil and water, and into us.
Oh, and we also end up killing other forms of life while trying to eradicate the enemy du jour — what the military calls collateral damage.
Dandelions are everywhere in the spring, but so what? It’s not like they carry diseases or pose any harm to humans. Lilacs are everywhere, too, in the spring, but no one minds, because they’re so beautiful and they have a gorgeous scent.
The monarch butterfly is fast disappearing precisely because it has become a victim of this collateral damage.
A Washington Post story from February describes how nearly one billion monarchs have disappeared in the last 25 years because “farmers and homeowners sprayed herbicides on milkweed plants, which serve as the butterflies’ nursery, food source and home.”
I can’t remember the last time I saw a monarch butterfly in my yard here; yet, when I was a kid, they were a common sight all summer.
The David Suzuki Foundation urges people to plant milkweed in their yards and gives them instructions on how to create butterfly gardens. Years ago, nobody deliberately planted milkweed; it grew everywhere along the roadsides and in fields, and the black-, yellow- and white-striped monarch caterpillars were easy to find.
Why can’t we just leave the dandelions alone? The war against them was lost ages ago, and maybe it’s just as well. Dandelions are everywhere in the spring, but so what? It’s not like they carry diseases or pose any harm to humans. Lilacs are everywhere, too, in the spring, but no one minds, because they’re so beautiful and they have a gorgeous scent.
Who appointed humans the arbiters of which innocuous and lovely things should live and which should die?
Bees and other pollinating insects need dandelions.
Dig them up one by one? Whatever for? For every one you dig up, there are thousands of seeds flying about. All you end up with if you dig them is a few uprooted plants — and an aching back. Next spring, another 50 will take their place.
Just run them over with the lawn mower whenever you cut the grass, and be done with it. Who cares? Are dandelions really worth poisoning ourselves and other species?
Humans must change their “let’s kill it” response to anything that appears to be inconvenient or in the way. This pervasive mentality ranges from dandelion warfare to the killing of bears, who must die as punishment for the stupidity of people who have habituated them to humans.
And it covers everything in between. An acquaintance told me about a year ago that a puppy I had just got should be killed because it had some stubborn health problems. That puppy has grown into a wonderful dog that’s in perfect health.
Yet, people talk as if they are the sole adjudicators of the value of other species’ lives. We need to lose that arrogance.
Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra has refused to join the anti-dandelion brigade on council.
He wisely said: “It takes a tremendous amount of resources to try and control them, and that’s a fight you’re going to lose. And it’s a fight that involves putting, you know, potentially questionable things into the ecosystem, so I’m actually pretty sanguine about that fact that we’re going to be living with dandelions.”
He’s right. We can just live with them. We can pause in our frenetically paced lives to note how pretty they are, especially when the spring rain makes them look like little yellow umbrellas being held up in the grass.
It’s not that dandelions themselves are noxious; it’s our thoughts about them that are noxious.
Humans need to drop the knee-jerk “let’s kill it” approach, and try a little live-and-let-live. Maybe then there’d even be a few more monarchs flitting about on a summer day.