Wednesday, August 13, 2025

This is the seventy-fifth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

As a gardener and groundskeeper, it always surprises me how much death is involved in the nurturing of life. I have pulled weeds by hand, cut them down with a string trimmer, covered them in salt, and even burned them with a propane torch. Then there are the pests; bags full of Japanese beetles, epic battles against tomato hornworms (they bite back), and the gopher trap that ended up catching a crawdad? No idea how that got in there. Sometimes it feels like I do more killing than sustaining, more ending than beginning. But that is really how our ecosystem is designed to work.

All¹ forms of life depend upon the death of another form of life to continue theirs. We eat both plants and animals that must die to be consumed and their elements integrated into our own. Lesser animals do the same. While plants can technically survive on nothing but sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, they thrive and become their healthiest when given nutrient-rich soil, and the easiest way to provide such nutrients is from the death and decomposition of other plants, even better if there are some decomposed animals in there too.

The weeds we pull up get turned into compost to feed the plants we want, or burned to make ash that helps the soil in other ways. Death leads to more life, and if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be done.

1  I’m sure there’s some kind of organism out there that exists totally independently, without relying on anything else dying, but I’m trying to make a point here.