About basilbias.com
Any herb guide[1] will tell you that basil was once thought to be incredibly potent. Some thought this little green plant could bring true love, guarantee a safe trip to the afterlife, or even protect against (a similarly named) dragon. Others were under the impression that basil was associated with the devil, and that smelling it could “breed scorpions in the brain.” Now that magical thinking is out of fashion,[2] we no longer attribute such powers to herbs (reserving our awe for miracle drugs instead)[3] and we prefer to think of them simply as flavoring agents.
I’d be lying if I claimed to have been up on basil’s rich folklore when I chose to name my blog after this particular plant. But basil seemed fitting for my environmental blog because, a, it’s green, b, a small amount of it goes a long way, and c, well, it’s an anagram of my name.
For me, the simple act of cooking a meal from scratch is imbued with poignant political significance. When I pop out to the garden for a few basil leaves to add to my tomato sauce, I can’t help but feel resourceful. By sticking a few seeds in the ground and giving them some water periodically, I can decrease my dependence on Ragu®[4] to source, bottle, market and ship my sauce for me. A homegrown and -cooked meal not only saves energy, but it also restores health[5], and strengthens friendships and families. I am thoroughly convinced that, with a little foresight, small changes in our daily lives can change the world.
I don’t think I’ll make a good blogger, if the point of blogs is to provide instantaneous, unedited commentary on current events.[6] First off, I am incapable of writing without revision, or even of thinking without revision. (Case in point: that very sentence did not appear in the original draft of this paragraph, and I changed the wording and punctuation a total of three times.) I’m just not a blurter. Secondly, I am decidedly not a news junkie: I feel sufficiently abreast of world events when I read a few articles on nytimes.com every day or two, and I can count on one hand the number of times I watched the news on TV in the past year (a few presidential debates, election night and inauguration morning.) But I tend to think that the purpose of blogs is to counterpoint traditional media by being biased, by synthesizing the fragmented information we are bombarded with everyday (and digging up that which is maybe not so accessible) and developing a coherent and necessarily subjective perspective, all the while being open to (and providing a place for) healthy questioning and debate.
Thus, my primary goal here is to develop and share my thinking on environmental issues. To avoid the apathy-inducing Mo effect,[7] I decided to put my thoughts online. This way, I have a convenient mental construct of an audience to conjure up to motivate me to write, and you can subject yourself to my sometimes-depressing (sorry, but we are talking about the possibility of global catastrophe here) writing in small, easy-to-swallow doses. Needless to say, I am thrilled when people comment on what I’ve written, but I understand that sometimes just reading is enough…
[1] Or even Wikipedia.
[2] For which we have DesCartes to thank. However, rationality has its limits: DesCartes himself was so convinced by his own notion of animals as machines that he vivisected his wife’s dog to see how its “gears” worked. (See Colin Spencer’s History of Vegetarianism for more gory details.)
[3] There are now 205,000 different kinds of prescription drugs available (according to Joy Williams.) With that many to choose from, it’s no wonder they are routinely prescribed as the first recourse for every conceivable problem. And if the first drug doesn’t work (or has too many nasty side effects) try another!
[5] Store-bought processed foods are almost never as healthy as their home-cooked counterparts. For instance, despite overwhelming evidence that high-sodium diets cause kidney stones and high blood-pressure, most processed foods still have staggering amounts of salt. The nutritionist Marion Nestle explains why:
[Salt] encourages eaters to consume more. Salt brings out the flavor of natural foods, yet disguises the artificial taste of processed foods. It is cheap and extends shelf life. It makes you want to drink more. And it binds water and makes foods weigh more; you pay more for this weight.
[6] Which it is according to Arianna Huffington.
[7] Mo is the character in Dykes to Watch Out For who is endlessly ranting about one or another horribly depressing aspect of our country’s politics or culture. Although her rants are often really insightful, the other characters mostly ignore them, not because they aren’t also deeply concerned with the issues she brings up, but because her negativism is draining and her fixations futile.