Toad in the Hole

The last two days have been more fun than the previous week-plus, partly because (knock wood) I seem to have got the best of the shingles, but mostly for social reasons. Plus: sunshine!

Last night we got to meet and drink beer and attempt to converse with P.Z. Myers and a bunch of local pharyngulizers in a very-loud pub. P.Z. is pretty much what I expected: low-key, direct, funny, nimble, warm, and deeply courteous. I enjoyed the whole thing more than I had any right to expect, given that I’d just barely decided I had the moxie to walk over to Shattuck Avenue and stay upright for something that started at 9PM.

This was in the middle of spending two days covering a conference up at UC Davis, driving both ways both days, a bit over an hour each way depending on the day’s distribution of Highway Patrol radar cars on I-80. The conference was about climate change and horticulture, and a Davis person was kind enough to comp us as press; we couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. (Smart move: we have all manner of good things to say about the Davis Arboretum and its latest project, and I’ll do some of that right here real soon now.)

The other social joy happened in the middle of the second day of that, when Pica and Numenius took us out for a picnic lunch under a shadetree in the Arboretum. They’d picked up food from the Farmers’ Market and the Coop, and picked us up from the conference, and it was all good enough that we didn’t regret the nice lunch offered to conferees. Conferrers? (Anyway, let me insert my culinary kudos to the UC Davis student catering service.) Good chow, great company: every day should be this good.

It was interesting how parts of the days’ topics overlap, or maybe it’s just in my brain. P.Z. had just given the closing remarks at an evo-devo conference, and he said he’d carried on about how scientists should be more militant. When we got to talk a bit outside the pub, he said one other thing he’d leaned on in that talk was that scientists don’t talk enough about how much fun science is. Yeah!

After the Davis meet, I’m thinking that gardeners and our ilk (I’ve always wanted to have an ilk of my own. Haven’t you?) ought to be more militant too. And maybe, some of us, a bit embarrassed. (Invasive exotics, fertilizer runoff, that sort of thing at least.) I’ll dilate on that soon too, but I perked up my ears when the Arboretum director made a point, from the audience, about “willful ignorance.” People are being as ignorant as is convenient to them about climate change: whether it’s happening, whether it’s human-caused, whether humans can affect it, whether it’s too late, or too complicated, or “political” (and why), or just a myth. Speakers talked about “climate change skeptics” but it’s way too late for skepticism; it’s been shown pretty clearly. The phrase is “denialist.”

With all that implies.