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The Great Greenfly Challenge
Florian
Veteran
My annual moral dilemma has just come around again. What do I do about the greenfly on the roses? Do I save the roses and destroy the greenfly with who knows what karmic consequences, or do I let the little monsters eat every bud as it springs into life?
I can never work out the answer. Are there any gardeners here who have?
I can never work out the answer. Are there any gardeners here who have?
1
Comments
And how do you know the rose isn't sentient?
I don't claim to have scientific proof whether a rose is sentient or not. I simply go by the teachings which indicate that plants are not sentient beings (ie. comprised of the five aggregates)
@karasti
My answer was in reference to the OP. His situation seems to be a simple case of rose Vs. greenflies. It doesn't seem to involve issues about those roses being needed for feeding his family or whatever. Even if his roses were needed for something important I would try to discuss with him the situation to see if there's some way we can find to avoid killing the greenflies.
With regard to bees needing pollen that flowers produce, an important consideration here is one of intention. When we make the decision not to kill the greenflies, the underlying intention should be one of compassion for the greenflies. We should not entertain the thought, "Great! Now that the greenflies are alive, they will eat these roses and it will cause a lot of trouble for these bees and their babies". Therefore, the important thing is to be sure that we are acting with a mind of compassion for the greenflies rather than anger/aversion towards the bees and their babies.
Now, the most ideal course of action would be to exhibit compassion for both the bees as well as the greenflies at the same time. Perhaps the solution is to not kill the greenflies and allow them to eat the roses. Then buy some different plants from the shops which are immune to greenflies and put them in the garden so the bees will have an alternative source of pollens. But I wonder if this would in fact be necessary since the bees should be able to find an alternate source of pollens on their own (?)
Regarding termites destroying homes, I would follow your advice to the OP that prevention is a good option. So when I buy a house or have one built I will do all that is possible to make it termite-proof from the beginning. However, if things go wrong and somehow termites still attacked my family home and there was no way of saving it without getting rid of the termites, then I would probably decide to exterminate them. Such decision will only be made as a last resort though and with awareness that it was an unwholesome act to do so.
Wash the roses individually with water and then spray with a light soap solution - this will wash off the greenfly and then make the area tougher for them to traverse - they will likely die from the displacement.
Buy a new pesticide from a garden centre and apply in the exact manner prescribed - this will minimise the harm to the surrounding environment and kill the greenfly - it will also prevent them returning for around 2 weeks at a time.
Buy ladybirds - they look cute but they have a big appetite for greenfly - this will kill the greenfly - it doesn't last though - ladybirds have a mind of their own.
Plant shrub roses - over a few years, bush them out and feed early and regular - keep on top of deadheading - you'll have so many flowers that the greenfly and the rose can coexist.
Consider wild roses - not as many flowers - very little scent - more of a thorn bush than a plant - lives happily with greenfly.
Plant roses in full sun and away from other plants or shelter - greenfly like shade and a little humidity.
Keep in mind that most roses are engineered so though they look and smell good, they're more ornamental than natural so a certain level of human intervention is necessary to have them at their best.
Intervention carries consequence.
Plant your favourite roses or other aphid-attracting plants alongside aphid-discouraging plants. Aphids dislike garlic, chives, onions, mint, petunias. Aphids love nasturtiums. Roses grown with garlic plants or chives are much less prone to aphid attacks and both have a beautiful flower of their own during flowering season.
I don't intentionally kill bugs to protect aesthetic plants but might do so for my food plants. So far discouragement has worked well enough to not require such killing. My reasoning is that if I let my veggies die then someone else will just end up killing bugs to supply me with that same food.
Plants for visual beauty though have to fight their own bug battles in my yard so perhaps my posting is of no help to you.
Having temporary bits of flowery colour in my yard is not important enough for me to kill bugs. In the past I have used water pressure to blow aphids off my roses but have found that if I just stay out of it, bugs get some food and I still get some flowers.
It's not that I don't kill bugs but I do try to minimize it and have it really balance with my own values. Bugs that do actively become a menus to my person and can't be avoided are killed without hesitation.
Another option is to look at what they really, really like, and plant some of those plants away from your ornamentals. We did that with the cats, too, several people in the neighborhood planted batches of catnip in areas away from gardens and traffic.
@karmablues I wasn't trying to be snotty. I mostly posed my question just as something for people to think about because it's where my thought process takes me, down the line. Sorry if I sounded smart-assy.
Sing Buddhist mantras to roses and sentient aphids. Learn to speak ladybird (ladybug) ask them to patrol your roses. Your assumption that you can not talk to roses and ask them to increase their defences is an impediment and limitation of creative 'imagination'.
Hope that helps.
May the buds bloom
OM MANI PEME HUM
The main house of the Monastery had rats..many many rats.
They could be heard scampering behind the skirting boards, and during Pujas when food was offered they would appear and scurry over the food helping themselves to a grape or even dragging off a banana.
Now the problem was this wasn't in Tibet or India. This was in Scotland and we were already in trouble with the local authorities because visitors to the monastery were having picnics in the local Forestry Commision land..the last thing we needed was a Health and Safety inspectors visit to close us down to visitors...
Rinpoche did special mantras for days. These were inscribed on parchment and placed down the rats tunnels, with a note asking the rats to leave...we waited.
Rinpoche could be seen in the early hours of the morning chanting into rat holes..
The rats remained.
Finally with a deep sigh Rinpoche said to Kunga his trusty secretary ' phone Rentakill '...
There is a time and place for whimsy and flim flam. And a time and place for cool headed action.
Too late for most of it though. I'm rather prone to whimsy and flim-flam but action is called for. Or, maybe, as the roses are ornamental and don't seem to attract bees, I might let the greenfly get away with it this year. I'm not sure what my neighbours would think if I start chanting at them. I might try planting some garlic for next year.
Spray with milk? Does this work?
That's a good tip, that lavender keeps the cats away. It's another problem.
I suppose the question was a bit tongue in cheek, but it is a bit of a dilemma being faced with a hundreds of the little monsters. Washing up liquid was recommended by a friend last year, but the surfactants breaks down their bodies and it is a terrible form of genocide.
Okay. This year they get a break and the roses take their chances. Thanks for all the advice.
_/\_
I had a veg patch and fruit trees..I decided to let one corner go wild for the insects. This included a patch of dandelions. One day I was talking to the very nice chap next door and he said " I notice you have a patch of dandelions " I explained my reason. " Very nice " he said gently, " but the seeds ( the dandelion 'clocks' ) are blowing all over my veg patch "..
After that I used to remove the heads before they set seed.
I don't think we can expect others to keep to our ethical stance...
http://www.growveg.com/growblogpost.aspx?id=242
Your roses are lonely and if healthy will generate their own systemic deterrent. Just ask them to do so. Put a clove of garlic under each rose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting
Chant silently.
You are a rose. If you flower, I will cut you. To gather
We A Rose.
On top of that, early Buddhism is constrained to what they knew scientifically about physiology and biology. They had no concept of evolution or an ecosystem so life was viewed and valued on an individual basis with no regard to how overpopulation of one species can wreck havoc on the ecosystem that supports other beings including us. To them, killing a mouse was bad karma and that's all there was to it. The fact that mice serve a function as a food source for other animals and have a massive amount of offspring to adjust for this, resulting in a plague of mice and stripped fields if you eliminate the death rate simply never entered their minds. If eliminating death results in overpopulation, well then that's their karma. Guess the people who now starve deserved it because they were gluttons in a past life.
Those rose bushes? You planted them for their wonderful flowers. But those plants are genetic inbred, stunted and crippled things out of our hothouses. All of their energy goes into producing huge flowers. They do not have the defenses of wild roses against fungus and pests. If you allow parasites to thrive in your garden, then the pests and spores quickly spread to your neighbor's plants. Either get rid of the plants or use fungicide and pest killer. That's the responsible thing to do from an ecological standpoint. Leave the "are aphids sentient beings" argument to the monks who love to waste time debating such things and have nothing better to do than play with their garden.
So really, the only point I'm trying to make is, use some common sense when it comes to the rules and precepts and don't assume the old monks had some special knowledge that you lack. It just might be that you have knowledge they lacked.
I've read some on using dishsoap to spray on things to keep bugs from climbing but several serious gardening friends have told me it's best (in my case these were crawling, not flying bugs) to make a big of a moat with plastic sheeting and put some soap in it, because otherwise over time the soap soaks into the soil and it'll kill most plants along with small animals that happen to ingest it.
Over here a 'yard' is most likely a patch of concrete, so it was initially a bit confusing to hear about vegetables growing in the yard. I wonder why 'garden' became 'yard'.
According to Bhikkhu Bodhi:
Other sources describe sentient beings as being classified into four different modes of rebirth eg. A Manual of Buddhist Philosophy, William Montgomery McGovern (1923, reprinted in 2000):
Other sources state that there are six types of sentient beings in Buddhism in accordance with the different realms of rebirth eg. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed, Donald Lopez (2008): So under such classification, the entire animal kingdom is considered as comprised of sentient beings. Indeed, in the Dhammapada-atthakatha, there is a story of a monk named Tissa who dies and is reborn as a louse (small insect) in his own robes. When this louse died, it was reborn in the heavenly world.
On a science front, I thought there had been nothing that had proven that certain beings, such as insects, were conscious. What exactly do we define that as, even? It's clear some animals have it. They form relationships and seem to know they exist and seem to fear harm and even mourn deaths of those close to them. But insects, as far as I know, don't have any of those capabilities, nor do fish. Others though define anything sentient as anything that can sense or feel pain, and if you do that, then it's easier to extend that meaning to plants, too, based on current research. So I guess it depends what exactly each person sees as sentient. I don't think you can say that a maggot is the same level of sentience (or any at all) compared to a chimp or a bear or a whale. But if we are going to go to such lengths as to extend consciousness and/or awareness to maggots, mosquitoes, slugs, and so on, then it doesn't see like such a far stretch to keep extending it. Where has it been said (I'm honestly curious not being argumentative) that insects and other such animals are conscious or aware?
http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Insects_and_pest_control
Originally, you were clay. From being mineral, you became vegetable. From vegetable, you became animal, and from animal, man. During these periods man did not know where he was going, but he was being taken on a long journey nonetheless. And you have to go through a hundred different worlds yet. Rumi
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rumi
. . . as I am writing this on my Ipad, in the dark, a conscious moth, fuelled by desire for light, came to offer its contribution . . .
:wave:
@karasti - You're right, science has not shown that insects are conscious. It has not been shown that human beings are conscious either. The problem is that there is no scientific test for consciousness. There never can be. It is therefore an interesting question whether 'scientific consciousness studies' is an oxymoron, and it has been well debated in the discipline without the issue being settled.
What do I know? Maybe it's true.
Sometimes I wonder if plants and trees are sentient beings. Wasn't there a lot of studies done that more or less proved that talking to plants helps them grow and that they respond in different ways to positive and negative speech?
It also seems like it is less wrong to eat plants and vegetables rather than animals. I guess insects would fall somewhere in the middle? I was wondering the other day about the consumption of insects from a Buddhist persecptive: It seems that they are enjoyed in many countries and have a lot of protein and very little fat. I read an article online that said we may need to adopt insects in our diets in the near future due to problems caused by global warming.
Of course, that involves some advanced planning before gardening season starts. After gardening season starts, you could purchase beneficial insects and let them loose in your garden. http://www.buglogical.com/ I would say that is a better option than killing them yourself. Or, you could just do nothing and let them do whatever they do.
If sentient means the simple ability to feel and try to avoid pain, that only requires a nervous system and receptors and even insects have a simple nervous system but not plants or single-cell organisms. (And Buddha had no knowledge of viruses or germs or that his body was composed of individual cells or that the brain was a complex structure of nerve cells). But as organisms get more complex, the brain is able to feel simple emotions like happiness and sadness and a degree of self-awareness.
But we know what Buddha was getting at, when he put "avoid killing sentient beings" as a primary precept. I think a callous disregard for life is a sign of an extremely self-centered personality.
"We humans are made entirely of non-human elements,
such as plants, minerals, earth, clouds, and sunshine.
For our practice to be deep and true, we must include
the ecosystem. If the environment is destroyed, humans
will be destroyed, too. Protecting human life is not possible
without also protecting the lives of animals, plants, and minerals."
He includes minerals because they are part of the ecosystem, environment, etc. Nature, as a whole, should be protected, which of course include minerals since they are part of nature as a whole. He is a proponent of "Deep ecology".
As for trees and plants, they don't have a nervous system as we do, but they do a lot of things we didn't realize, too. They do react in a measurable way to what we would assign as pain. They even release chemicals that other trees can detect and it changes the chemical structure of those plants in an effort to preserve their lives, often by attracting what might be considered a threat to a potential attacker (ie chemicals that attract nearby bees or bugs and so on) I don't know how reliable that information is, but either way it doesn't affect how I treat plants. I still have to cut my grass. But I still hold a reverence for all things in nature, it's just how I grew up and where I grew up I guess. But to me, the reactions of a plant to positive or negative stimuli and so on is similar enough to the natural, instinctual drive of "lesser" animal species that it can't be completely discounted.
As for alien life, I've always thought that humans too easily limit what they think live can or should be. I don't mean to assume the rocks in my driveway are living beings. But I mean in other solar systems and such, it doesn't seem to me that air and water have to be the requirements of ALL life, ever, everywhere. Just because that is the type of life our planet has produced doesn't mean that somewhere there aren't beings that live on elements we don't even know exist yet.
For the aphids, I brush them off my tomatoes with a soft paint brush. The ones with wings should survive, their clones might die or they might fall/crawl onto another food plant. You can't go through life not killing anything, it's impossible.
Are plants sentient? In a scientific sense, yes. They can perceive light, touch, scent (chemicals) and pass electrical signals to each other through their roots. Are they conscious? Not in any way that we would recognise.
Also, ants don't kill aphids, they "milk" them.
On the status of plants, apart from the Vasettha Sutta stating clearly that they lack self-awareness, the Shurangama Sutra (a Mahayana text) also says the following:
However, the same Sutra seems to suggest that purity of conduct involves not harming plant life:
I also came across the following ideas of Venerable Master Hsuan Hua, a famous Chinese Zen Buddhist Patriarch monk, about how insentient beings can become sentient beings and vice versa. Never heard this theory before and I doubt its correctness but nevertheless found it interesting.
If you want a description of the functioning of consciousness then the Triptaka might be a good place to find what you are looking for...If you want ontological statements about the world then perhaps not.
Does it matter ? Not really as long as we don't expect too much in the way of ontology from the work of Buddhaghosa and his cohorts..and research increasingly suggests that it is their words that we read when we open any volume of the Pali Canon..with perhaps the odd scrap here and there which may have filtred down from the Sage Of The Sakyas...
Where Buddhaghosa et al were highly relevant is in the formation of teachings like D.O and the Nidanas...
Which has taken us off topic..I guess I could sum up my position by saying that those early propagators of the Dharma cannot be expected to provide us wholesale with solutions to problems that they did not encounter.
If we wanted to know how the ancients coped with insect infestation we would need to ask the people who grew the foodstuff which was then offered to the monks...
Not mendicants who were forbidden to grow plants for the very reason that to do so meant that killing was inevitable.
A filtering mechanism perhaps that seems to permit a certain self-orientated preservation, a reinforcement of a subjective dileneation.
An undoubtable assumption perhaps.
An invisible prison perhaps.
I knew a person who devoted her life to the service of others - her deeds were magnificent - her recollections spanned the globe - she was quite simply amazing and inspiring in her humble dedication to others... on the other hand, she was unshaken in her understanding that Africans and by extension black people, are incapable of self-governance, of determining their own destiny - they are limited as children, to be taken care of.
I never once challenged her. She was too old for the challenge.
Her understanding supported her personal needs and in turn this translated to her contribution to life - perhaps without it, she wouldn't have been driven to help so many people of all races.
Them and us brought us this far.
But we seem to be all in it together.
I think it is potentially a mistake to consider our particular relationship with reality as a more worthy pinnacle.
Whatever we glorify in sentience seems only a facet of all that manifests - enquiry thus far appears to confirm our limits in an unending intricacy.