Botany Buddy

The holiday has come and gone, and the annual ritual of pardoning the White House bird has gone on as planned.  This time it was a 45 lb. / 18 week old broadbreasted Turkey named Courage.   According to the AP, “Obama said Courage will spend the rest of his life in “peace and tranquility” at Disneyland.”  Of course President Obama displayed some pure honesty that we should all be thankful for when right before the pardon he said, “”I’m told Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson actually ate their turkeys.  You can’t fault them for that; that’s a good-looking bird.”  If the birds that those guys pardoned had anywhere near the future ahead or life past this bird has had they should be applauded.  Let’s face it this is the worst staging I am yet to see our of a White House that really excels at staging the “green” agenda.  Having PETA standing there with The National Turkey Federation while pardoning a genetically modified bird is akin to having Monsanto host a vegan dinner with the Organic Growers Association as they serve GMO tofu fried in pure lard.

I am yet to verify the actual breed of the bird that was pardoned, but I do know that it came from a factory farm in North Carolina.  I can also tell you this, no bird that reaches 45 lbs. in 18 weeks is a heritage bird, and most definitely has been bread for one thing…eating.    Also the all white breeds of turkey that have been bred for factory farms are all genetically engineered.  There is no naturally occurring all white turkey that comes near 45 lbs. in its lifetime, let alone 18 weeks.  The closest thing you can get to a white heritage bird is the Royal Palm, which my 5-year old friend Louie (pictured next) happens to be.  For a White House that has lauded their organic garden and served from it to world leaders, to have chosen the bird they did was a Royal missed opportunity (sorry for the pun Louie).

Having grown both heritage turkeys and two broad breasted (genetically engineered) birds, this one touches a little too close to home.  Louie, my Royal Palm,  is in his fifth year, and is as happy as can be as King of Little Creek Farm.  He does live a life in  “Disneyland for birds”.  He had a mate who lived a similar life until she met her natural fate from a predator.  Heritage birds make fantastic long term companions, as well as tasty free-range fare.  Pardoning and growing heritage birds helps preserve one of the many breeds that are becoming endangered, and encourages their comeback.  It also helps to encourage biodiversity and prevents the conditions that harbor and promote diseases such as Asian Bird Flu.   However, the broad breasted birds that are bred for eating are bred solely for one thing and that is eating.  They are bread to live very short lives and develop bodies that frankly they cannot live with or physically support.  I hate to be so harsh, but they are bred to be killed before they are forced to suffer the misery that their breeding causes.

Our first year raising turkeys we ordered two broad breasted bronze birds with the intention of having them ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas as well as our Royal Palms for pets.  After Thanksgiving came and we had done the deed with #1 (40 lbs. dressed), we decided we just weren’t up for that much bird again at Christmas and thought we would hang on to #2 and try to breed her with Louie the following year.  The thinking was we might get a smaller bird out of the cross, and since Louie had lost Marie (his mate) to the bobcat we thought he would like having a companion.  So we pardoned #2 and decided to let her live a nice long life on Little Creek Farm.  That pardon might as well have been a sentence to a concentration camp.

Broad breasted birds that are bred for eating are bred to sit in a cage and be force fed until slaughter, not free-range to their hearts content.  In fact their hearts can’t even begin to support their weight and they have an extremely short lifespan compared to Louie’s so-far gracious presence.  A turkey that gets to the weight Courage has at the rate Courage has, won’t even be able to support his weight with his own legs before long.  Unfortunately these birds are born to die, and as soon as they reach that ideal weight they are engineered to reach, they loose all the wonderful traits and personality that give turkeys their essence and that our founders found worthy of making them our national bird.

Now as for #2, she  did eventually get a name.  Unfortunately to tell you the truth by the time she got it she had lost all the personality to go with it.  Once winter set in she literally had to be carried out of the chicken house in the morning, and carried in at night.  She was obviously miserable.  She was unable to attend to her own hygiene, and she definitely couldn’t keep company with other birds.  Her breast was even permanently void of feathers because she couldn’t keep it off the ground.  What we thought was pardoning her to a life in “Disneyland” turned out to be a sentence in Guantanamo.  In the end we did what had to be done, and should have been done in the first place, and she became Easter.

I do like the message of being kind to animals, and I am an animal lover.  However, the real lesson that was missed in this wasn’t the cruelty of eating a bird that was bred to be eaten, but the cruelty of breeding things for eating in the first place.  As gardeners we are finding our roots in heirloom vegetables and discovering the superior flavors and textures.  With this year’s devastating blight on tomatoes we are even seeing how preserving that biodiversity is crucial to preventing such catastrophes.  If raised where the space, water and nutrients they need occurs naturally, these plants grow better than those tortured by over planting, over feeding, and over watering in our mono-cropped farms.

The same is true of meats as well.  Grass fed beef and pork is coming back into favor, and micro farms are even starting to grow heirloom mammals as well.  Whether you are a meat eater or not, you have to be able to recognize that we are breeding the souls out of these animals or at the very least torturing them to death.  If you have a culinary inclination you can also taste this happening.  The soul in the flavor of heritage breeds can be tasted just like it can a free-range egg or wild shrimp and fish.  It is rich and identifiable unlike the pale eggs from the poultry palaces or fish raised in mud retaining ponds on the side of the highway.  These breeds have souls and we need to protect them and encourage their proliferation.

I am certain that  Courage is a mighty fine bird.  He may not be a heritage bird that truly symbolizes what our forefathers saw in this breed, and you can’t blame him for wanting to go to Disneyland.  There must be something about him that won the hearts of these people to become the chosen one.  In the end he may have deserved that pardon.  After all he is not the one that committed the crime.  That said, he doesn’t deserve the life he has ahead of him either, and he could have been pardoned from that.

I saw this headline out of the Telegraph (UK) today: “Garden Centre Tells Men to Make Wives ‘Feel Special’ With a Clothesline“. If it hadn’t been attached to a tweet decrying the backlash, I actually would have thought, “What a great idea!”.  Of course once the retail chain was attacked for their callousness, they admitted their insensitivity and apologized; claiming that it was meant to be in jest and their catalogs were known for such dry humor.  ”Humor?” I thought…I was dead serious.  This is the kind of gift that would make my wife feel special.  In fact, such a gift has.

Three years ago, my wife started begging me for a clothesline.  Now being the obsessive compulsive designer, this was not quite jiving with my vision for the garden.  I wouldn’t admit it at the time, but the other reason was to being the obsessive compulsive one I also insist upon doing the laundry.   That way I know things are hung and folded the way I want, when I want.  A clothesline would about to add some serious effort to my weekly ritual and at a time of year when I need my rituals the most.  It also was going to add chaos to my rituals as suddenly the ability to complete my tasks was about to be controlled by the weather.  As a gardener it took me decades to get over this weather thing,  and I wasn’t looking forward to this inner struggle again.

However, we are “homestead gardeners” and in terms of our homestead palet, and our need to be green, She had a point that it did fit in.  So fate had it’s way and one day my fence guy (who like the article is from England) was here to install a beautiful new Three-board fence for our new extended goat pasture.  You see at the very front of our front yard and lawn is not a cul-de-sac for everyone to view our house from, but instead a series of three mini-pastures for us to rotate our goats and poultry through so they can “range”.  This new beautiful fence was to go right at the end of the lawn framed by two large White Oaks to take your eyes across the pasture over the valley and up the mountains on the other side to frame our view, and it does this quite well.

So after months of avoiding the clothesline and trying to buy off my wife with the fence project, The day had come to install the fence.  When James (the fence guy) arrived we had our usual chat and caught up on various projects before he drove down across the lawn to unload the materials for his guys.  They had been picking through the rock for a day already to dig the wholes so I thought I would stay away so they could complain to James and he could do his thing.  As I headed back to he house I didn’t even look at the materials as I have known James a long time and trust him with every bone of my body.  Back at my desk I looked out the window and to my surprise my wife was down there with him climbing in the back of the truck.  It turns out once he had unloaded our materials left in the bed of the truck were 2 (qty) 4″ welded steel “T’s” that he had removed from another job.

I knew I was in trouble.  My wife spent three years living in a mud hut in Africa in the Peace Corps and she is a very resourceful and determined person.  The game was on, and as James looked up at me in the window, a giant grin came across his face as he quickly lowered them down from the truck.  The last thing he wanted to do was take them home and have to put them up for his wife.   So there you have it…my wife was getting a clothes line and she was “Feeling Special”.  So for Valentines Day the gift that year that we can actually remember is my sanding those posts, painting them green, and setting them in concrete to string those lines.

Truth be had, I love that clothesline, and I love my wife.  It is an integral part of our homestead garden that sits centered between those Oaks right in front of that fence.  When the clothes aren’t on it, it looks more than appropriate with the goats behind it, the vegetable garden to one side and the woods to the other.  When the clothes are on it they add life to the landscape and their play in the wind exudes the freshness of the nature that surrounds us.  I have to say I love aesthetically arranging the clothes on it, and hanging them just right to prevent wrinkles from the pins and to get them to snap just right in the breeze so I don’t have to iron my linens.  This addition was perfect for my Monkish tendencies and our lifestyle.  That clothes line does make my wife “feel special”, and it makes me feel special too!

Anyone who doesn’t thinks that clotheslines can be romantic or make a spouse “feel special“, probably has problems enjoying a fine piece of chocolate or a tomato picked minutes before slicing.  The feeling of a fresh linen shirt touching your skin right off the line and the smell of fresh air that permeates it is one of the finer things in life.  Sliding between line dried sheets that don’t wreak of fabric softener as the cool breeze of night air drifts in through the window is one of the greatest “Rights of  Spring”.  Never mind all the environmental benefits that come along with it, If you can’t see how a clothes line can make on “feel special” than you must just have a hard time feeling yourself.

My wife is a landscape painter, and you can see her work here.   In the spring she opens the studio door and paints studies of the view.  One of my all time favorite pieces is this one of the clothesline.  If this doesn’t embody romance, then you must need a little more in your life.  It is not uncommon in the states to find people fighting for the “Right to Dry” as exclusive neighborhoods with soulless landscapes have banned them with their covenants.  My recommendation to you is if you do want to make your wife feel special get a clothesline, and try doing the laundry for her every once in awhile too.  It might just make you feel special too.

The Morality of Sustainability

I have to admit I have had this one in the hopper for some time now.  I have been preparing and wanting to write this post for a long time, but it was a commenter on Sustaining Sustainability that finally prompting me to flush it out.  We all hear people talk about what they can do to live sustainably almost every single day.  There are no shortages of arguments and evidence for how it can save us all money, and there are plenty of people learning how to make money at it.  Finding empirical evidence as to the benefits of living sustainably is as easy as finding options in the cereal aisle at the local grocery.  I constantly hear people profess all the ways we can benefit personally from helping the Earth.  What I do not hear are cogent moral arguments for why this is the right thing to do, and why as inhabitants of this earth we have a moral obligation to protect and respect everything that is a part of it.

Unfortunately the only moral arguments I hear about sustainability are actually against it.  Time and again I hear that as part of this planet we (humans) are nature too, and that our consumption of any resource on it is a natural act.  I recently even heard a Senator say that he would not support any climate change legislation until we have used every ounce of coal and drop of oil that “God has given us to use”.  I am not going to make this a discussion about the theology of predetermination vs. systematic theology (living in Christ’s image), but I do find it hard to believe that if God created us in his image he would want us to plunder and destroy the earth.  After all he doesn’t.  Beyond being part of nature as a species we have things inherit in our nature that make environmental responsibility a moral obligation.  Consider what I am about to layout to be “An Ontological Argument for a Morality of Sustainability”

An Ontological Argument For a Morality of Sustainability

Everything on this planet has an inner essence. Even physical “non living” being, such as coal, has an inner essence that allows us to identify it even if it changes form.  I can look at five pieces of coal and know that they are coal.  I can crush that coal to the point that those five pieces are no longer identifiable, but still look at that pile and know that it is coal.  The inner presence of a being is that allows others to identify it for what it is through many phases and forms of its life is the essence.

Every living being on this planet has a soul. Living beings have an essence just like physical ones, but they also have a presence beyond that which exudes their liveliness on other beings even though the physiological actions that carryout this life cannot be seen.  When I see an Oak I know that it is alive.  When I see an Oak that is alive, I can sense its life even though I cannot see the photosynthesis occurring or the transpiration from the leaves.  It exudes something beyond that essence which is its soul.  The soul also projects its presence in various forms of instincts or consciousness that beings carry out in living to ensure their survival.  The final evidence of the soul is the continued presence of essence after the soul has left and life has ceased.  Once that Oak is dead, I still know it as an Oak, and even as a specific Oak, but I can also sense that the life (or soul) is gone, and the evidence of its absence and remaining essence is further proof of the soul’s previous existence.

Everything with a soul has varying levels of consciousness and self-consciousness. Every living being has an awareness of what it has to do to survive and reacts to its surroundings.  This may be instinctual, but also may progress to various levels of will.  In any form it implies a sense of self being.   I do not believe my grass can feel it when I mow, but it does have natural instincts to guide its reaction to my mowing, and has natural instincts to seek out water for its survival.  I believe full well my dogs are capable of feeling remorse, loneliness, fear, pain and love.  I also believe they can sense it in others, particularly myself.  I do not however believe they can empathize it.  However, though my dog can sense my remorse and feel pain itself, it cannot feel my pain.

When a being’s soul progresses from being conscious of itself and surroundings to empathizing with another it develops conscience. We as a species empirically know that we can extend our consciousness to the point of feeling what other people feel, and actively seek to do so.  When the ones that we love hurt, we hurt.  When ones that we do not even know hurt and we see the cause as unjust, we hurt.  This is the ability to empathize.  There has been speculation that other primates may have this ability, but as far as we can know for sure, we are the only species whose soul progresses from the point of consciousness to conscience.

With conscience comes responsibility. As human beings our ability to empathize combined with our free will gives us a moral awareness that requires us to take responsibility for our actions.  We have an inherit sense of right and wrong. We can rationalize our way around it, but in the end right and wrong and our ability to discern it remains.  This is the foundation of morality, and with this ability comes the responsibility act within those parameters.

The morality of sustainability is rooted in our ability to empathize with other beings. Morality is not possible unless you can make that leap into another’s heart.  This ability to empathize gives us a unique ability and responsibility to act in ways that protect and respect the essence and souls of other beings.  Sustainability is rooted not in how to get the most from our resources, but our moral responsibility to protect and respect the essences of every being, their role in our ecosystem, and the ecosystem itself as a living being.  If we can empathize we have responsibility inherit in our ability to sense morality.

As beings of conscience not only do we have the ability to sense and empathize with the essence and souls of other beings, but it also gives us the ability to make decisions that knowingly destroy and harm them and in turn the environment as a whole.  No matter how much we try to rationalize it, this wrong.  Being moral beings we need to be able to own that awareness and take responsibility for it.  As moral beings we have a responsibility to recognize and protect the essence of the earth and its beings in everything that we do.

To make the claim that it part of nature to exploit the Earth and its resources without protecting its essence is morally wrong.  We may have the right in the legal sense within the laws of man.  But it is not right in the moral order of our being.  Our nature as moral beings requires us to make morally responsible decisions not just ones that we can rationalize.  The ability to rationalize allows us to make moral decisions, but it also allows for immoral ones as well for you can not know one without the other.

In the end living sustainably is not about how protecting the earth benefits us as a species, but that it is in our nature as moral beings, and a failure to live this way is not only immoral, but unnatural.

When Americans think of endangered species we rarely think of trees.  We think of birds such as the Ivory-billed Woodpecker or Spotted Owl, or maybe some fragile flower, crustacean or reptile.  Even more familiar to most Americans are the animals that we have hunted and caused the demise of ourselves, such as buffalo, wolves and bears.  All three of those we have tried to right our wrongs and reintroduced into their native habitat.  Hopefully we have made those efforts because it was the right thing to do.  Maybe it is just because we were able to see the damage we had done by no longer being able to reap the rewards of what we were destroying.

As people look at non-hunted species, sometimes they don’t see personal responsibility because they don’t kill them with their own hands.  Sometimes people don’t realize that something else they are reaping may be what is causing the devastation to something that seems unrelated to them.  Groups got really upset when people tried to protect the spotted owl by protecting the forests they inhabit.  The argument what that individuals had a right to profit from the forests, and the trees that gave a home to the owls were needed to make a living.  However while everyone focused on man vs. owl, they missed the forest for the trees.  No one realized that before they were done arguing that debate the trees that provided that habitat would endangered as well, making both the man and the owl lose.  Sometimes we have to realize that just because we have right to do something it isn’t necessarily the right thing to do.

The following is a list of American trees that have lost over 95% of their native habitat and are now considered endangered.  These trees are actually being produced more in commercial production now than they are reproducing in their natural habitat.  I wanted to bring this list to light not just to highlight some amazing trees.  I wanted to highlight how they have gotten to the situation they are in, and the importance every being has to one another when it comes to sustainability.  

Castanaea dentata (American Chestnut):  This tree is one of the most known stories of  eco-catastrophe in our countries history.  The Chestnut was the most coveted of all lumbers in the early part of the 1900’s.  As a result was the clear-cutting of almost all of the Southern Appalachians.  The practices were horrid, and reminiscent of a scene from a slaughter house, but of trees.  Lumber that wasn’t seen as fit to mill was left in place leaving entire mountains looking like salvage yards.  Stumps were left in place, and all of the ground vegetation was smothered under the debris.  Erosion was rampant, and as a result these wastelands became a breeding ground for what would become the Chestnut blight.  Species such as the black bear were almost completely lost, deer populations dissipated, and without the nuts to forage or forest to find protection from hunters Elk eventually disappeared.

Today you can still find a few old growth American Chestnuts hiding away, but for the most part they have disappeared.  They are definitely no longer a force in an ecosystem they once ruled.  You can find sprouts coming up as under growth in poplar/oak forests, but the blight usually sets in once they reach about 2″ in caliper.  This tree was once a staple of the forest.  Its nuts fed almost every creature that roamed the forest floor, including humans.  Today it is just trying to regain a footing.  There are active breeding program at Universities throughout the Southeast trying to develop disease resistant varieties, but for now it remains on the brink. 

Ulmus americana (American Elm):  In the first half of the 1900’s this tree was the most common street tree in the United States.  It’s arching branches formed cathedral ceilings over almost every street in every city.  It become an icon of American urbanism and the America Beautiful movement.  It fell victim not to greed of harvesting, or destruction of its environment, because this tree grew anywhere.  Rather it fell victim to careless breeding and commercialization that weakened the species.  While Chinese and European varieties were being imported for breeding to create fancy bark or brighter fall color, no one realized that they were weakening the species and importing a deadly disease that would bring the native species to its knees. 

Today, on very rare occasions you will find an old native specimen, but almost always it will be diseased.  For the most part this species is kept going in nurseries where young shoots are maintained as seed stock only to be hybridized with other varieties.  Many of these hybridized varieties are wonderful and are contributing to the urban landscape in a positive way.  Still, long lost, or at least hiding like a hermit in the remote corners of woods, is the majestic tree that once symbolized the industrial revolution, and the America Beautiful movement.

Pinus palustris (Longleaf Pine / Southern Yellow Pine):  The Longleaf pine was on of the signature trees of Southeast coastal regions.  This tree is very unique in that for the first eight years of its life it grows like a fireproof grass with no trunk elongation.   Then it shoots up and it sensitive to burns, but once it reaches about 10′ it becomes fire proof again and soars to heights of up to 100′.  This burning process is crucial to its reproduction and the culling of healthy forests.  The lush wild look this process creates was the image that was burned into the minds of explorers when the new world was being discovered.  The unique habit created by the juvenile plants provide habitat to all sorts of foul and wildlife and as their habitat has become endangered so have some of them.  Red-cockaded woodpeckers and indigo snakes are most at risk, but tourtouses are in line right behind them.

The fate of this tree has been doomed by two demands.  First and foremost the lumber industry.  Only a small percentage of these trees make it from the grass stage, which is most prevalent, to the full grown tree form and mature species have been harvested at an unsustainable rate.  Secondly it has suffered from development.  Its native habitat starts at the first dry ground rising from coastal marshes and rises up to about 600′ in elevation.  These are the prime development lands in coastal areas and as a result the first habitat taken to build homes and resorts.  What is not built is often cleared for agriculture.   The development has also led to fire control, and disrupted the natural growth and reproductive cycles of the species.  One final negative effect on the ecosystem is that these habitats were the primary riparian buffer for water coming off of the Southern Appalachian and Ozark mountains.  Along with their removal came the disappearance of lower level cold water streams, the silting and swamping of what were once fast moving rivers, and a host of other problems.

Quercus virginiana (Southern Live Oak):  Yes, this tree is the one we have embedded in our heads from movies like Gone With the Wind, and every other great southern movie or novel.  As we see them in all the urban settings and plantation gardens you would not think something this majestic could be in any sort of danger.  The Spanish soss and fern growing on its branches make it look as thought this species is drooping from the weight or its virility.  However, in its native habitat it is almost gone.  The boggy soil and forests of the deltas where it thrived have mostly been drained for drilling, sugar cane, and development.  These trees made up the buffers that used to protect New Orleans from the onslaught of hurricanes.  There ability to be uprooted and fall apart but continue to grow in the loamy soil that was once its home was the constant stability that held the delta together.  Now their native habitat is down to a few remaining national and state controlled forests.  Of course other species have been impacted, but the most famous impact was the damage from Katrina that was exasperated without the natural buffers these trees created to protect it.

Tsuga hetrophylla (Western Hemlock) & Tsuga caroliniana (Carolina Hemlock):  Both of these trees have suffered similar fates.  Both are the victims of over logging.  Unfortunately both were thought to be invincible as they grew like the Red Cedars of the Midwest on either coast.  In the East the Carolina Hemlock was hardly ever used for lumber,  They were usually casualties of careless Chestnut and Oak harvest and turned into pulp or used for fuel.  By the time the species was decimated people had realized it was a beautiful lumber and turned to the bountiful west coast for the Western Hemlock in its place.  Neither were able to come back as fast as they were being harvested and as a result the faster growing Tsuga canadensis (Canadian Hemlock) and various Pines have taken their respective places.

This has greatly changed the ecosystem of the forests elimating wildflowers and other shade tolerant plants that don’t tolerate the heavier shade of the pines.  Also, these native varieties could fully develop as smaller sized trees in the shade of canopy trees.  Whereas the Canadian Hemlock can grow in the shade but is naturally inclined to become more of a canopy tree.  The Canadian version is also more prone to the woolly adelgid do to the flat placement of the needles compared to the rounder needle placement of the native varieties.  Now the adelgid has set in, the Canadian Hemlock is dying at rates comparable to those of the Chestnut blight casualties.  This has forever changed the ecosystem of all the warmer climate mountain forests where the adelgid thrives.  Since the Hemlock also likes moist soils its decline is also increasing the light on mountain streams destroying native trout and salmonid habitat. 

Picea sitchensis(Sitka Spruce):  Another victim of logging, this species is also succumbing to the woolly adelgid.  One of the more tragic consequences of this parable is that this tree is the home to the endangered Spotted Owl.  When the fight over protecting the owl versus the right to harvest came to a head the harvest rate increased dramatically as it turned into a race to see how much people could harvest as while they still could.  As timber containing adelgid infested lumber moves up and down the highways it just spreads it even more.   In the end both the owl and the loggers are losing out as they are losing the tree they both covet so much.

Thuja plicata Western Red Cedar:  This tree has been devastated in its native habitat due to logging for pulp.  However, it is thriving and making a surge in cultivation.  As the Hemlocks and Junipers used in landscapes have become  more problematic and disease prone, this tree grows with relative ease.  It struggles to outpace the pines that are moving into the native habitat because the Pines grow larger and shade them out.  While in the landscape people are finding this to be a great native alternative to give the feel of a Canadian Hemlock without the adelgids or chemicals to keep the bugs at bay.  However do to massive logging its natural disbursement patterns have been disrupted permanently and it may never be able to reestablish itself against the more aggressive species taking it’s place.

These trees are just a few that are becoming more and more endangered everyday.  These trees I have chosen mainly because they have been in some way symbolic of American culture, have been a crucial part of the fabric of our forests, and have helped to convey the essence of the places we call home.  The point of this article isn’t just to create awareness of a few trees, but also to make us realize that everything we do effects far more than us.  As humans we have a capability that other species don’t:  to make a conscious decision regarding an other’s fate.

The causes and the impacts I have discussed in this post are far from all that has contributed to or been a consequence of these changes.  However with the ability to determine another being’s fate also comes the moral responsibility to do what is right for everyone and everything, not just ourselves.  Also comes a responsibility to learn as much about the situations, plants, and creatures whose existence we can alter before we make an impact.  Everyone makes mistakes unknowingly, but what determines the greatness of society or individual is how they use their abilities to correct or make amends for those mistakes and how what they use what they have learned moving forward.  Hopefully this will create another ripple in that pool of awareness that we can all pass on.