On Comparisons of Sandpiper Size and Tea Tasting: Lessons From Kaufman's Advanced Birding

My girlfriend Kelsey recently gave me a present, the newer edition of Kenn Kaufman's book "Advanced Birding". I'm finding this book has a lot of universal relevance to my life, including to the subject of tea tasting.

It's shorebird migration season, and the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge has been filling up with migrating shorebirds, including an abundance of Least sandpiper, Killdeer, and Lesser Yellowlegs, as well as smaller numbers of Semipalmated plover and a lone Pectoral sandpiper, which I have now seen twice. Identifying these birds is tough, and in many cases, size is an important clue.

One thing that Kaufman, widely respected as an expert birder, points out, is that without a size reference, it is impossible to accurately gauge size. Want an example? Look at this bird, which I photographed in the refuge recently:

How big is it? The photo alone gives no size reference. If I tell you that it is a Least sandpiper, and you know how big that is, then you have a reference. Let me give another example. How big is the same species, the least sandpiper (the smaller bird) in the following photo?

This photo was taken near Las Vegas, by Lip Kee Yap, and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The bigger bird on the left is a Killdeer, a bird, common across much of the US, which can be found both in open, grassy areas like lawns, gravelly areas like railroad beds, and on mudflats alongside sandpipers. Seeing the two birds side-by-side gives us a size reference.

Size is an important clue in bird identification, especially when comparing visually similar birds, like the greater and lesser yellowlegs, or pectoral sandpiper, which is visually similar to the least sandpipers pictured here. Just how similar, you ask? Look for yourself:

This photo is by Andreas Trepte, and is licensed under BY-SA 2.5.

Is this bird bigger than the first bird? Yes, it is significantly bigger, and if you saw them side-by-side, you'd be able to see this very clearly. But looking at one bird alone, with no familiar objects for comparison, the size is impossible to see. And without a size reference, anyone other than an expert would have a tough time knowing that this is even a different species from the sandpiper in the first two photos. Both species have essentially the same plumage pattern, and both have yellow legs, and very similar bill shapes and sizes, and body shapes as well.

But check out these photos of a pectoral sandpiper alongside a Killdeer, or two pectoral sandpipers near a least sandpiper, and you'll see that it's hard to confuse these two species of sandpiper when you see them with a clear size reference, such as side-by-side, or near another species of familiar size. The pectoral sandpiper is much larger!

Back to tea:

I've lost count of the number of times I've described a tea as being "more bitter than" or "sweeter than" another tea, or having more of this aroma or that aroma, when I was only tasting one tea, and comparing it to memory. Do I really know this for sure? In a coarse sense, yes. I can probably tell that a stronger-than-average Irish Breakfast tea is more bitter and robust tasting than a lighter-than-average Darjeeling First Flush, just how, in the field and without a size reference, I can probably tell that a turkey is larger than a sparrow, even if I am only seeing one bird.

But for subtle differences in taste, I'm not sure we can know these things with much certainty, without actually tasting teas side-by-side. I wrote about some time ago, about how mood affects how we perceive taste. When comparing to memory, there is the possibility of remembering things in a skewed fashion. Our memory of an earlier tea when we try a new tea and make a mental comparison may be clouded by our expectations of how we think the new tea is going to taste, and tainted by how favorably we feel about the companies selling both the tea we are drinking and the tea we are comparing it to in our mind.

I'm not convinced I have the ability to be particularly accurate when it comes to these sorts of things.

What do you think?

How much do you think you can tell about how a tea you are drinking compares to a tea in your memory? Do you think the subtle tastes and aromas of tea is easier to compare without direct reference than the size of a lone sandpiper on a distant mudflat? Or do you think we can sometimes be a little over-confident with our comparisons of a tea we are drinking to another tea in our memory?

Top 5 Most-Viewed Tea Photos on Cazort.net

A website that I also run, but do not publicize very much, is Cazort.net. Cazort.net is a rather old site, pre-dating Facebook. Before I founded RateTea, I used to post some tea reviews on that site. More recently, I started uploading photos there. A few of these photos relate to tea.

This post highlights the top 5 most often-viewed tea-related photos hosted on Cazort.net. These are not necessarily the best or prettiest photos, just the ones that get the most views. If anything, I think these tend not to be the best photos, with perhaps one exception of a photo that I like. For dramatic value, this count will proceed in reverse:

#5. Loose Leaf Tea Sample Bags:

This picture was featured in my blog post Ideal Tea Sample Sizes: How Small, How Large? I personally think the post is much more interesting than the photo, and have no clue why the photo is getting so many views.

#4. Iced Green Tea:

I do think this is a rather pretty photo, probably the only photo on the list that I think has good composition.

#3. Back of Tea Bag Wrapper, Dong Suh Brown Rice Green Tea:

Huh? Yeah, your guess is as good as mine. Not sure why people would want to look at this.

#2. Starway Loose Green Tea Tins:

This is the photo of one of the teas that I featured in my post Cheap Tea: Loose-leaf Teas Offering Outstanding Value.

#1. Dong Suh Tea Bag Wrapper:

Yes, this is the number one most-viewed tea-related photo on my site. The photos of loose-leaf tea all get considerably fewer views.

Some things about the web really don't make much sense to me. What do you think? Do you have a theory as to why the photos of the Dong Suh tea wrappers are getting so many views?

Elevation and Climate: Visiting Boreal Forest on a Mountain

One of the things that I have become fascinated in in recent years is weather and climate. This interest is evident in the level of detail about weather which the articles go into on RateTea's pages on the various tea-producing regions. One of the key factors in tea production, which is explained in more depth on the page about climate, geography, and tea production, is elevation. A quick summary of the influence of elevation on climate is that temperatures get colder and precipitation (rain and snow) gets greater as elevation increases. And, as hikers at very high elevations are aware of, the air gets noticeably thinner.

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Massachussets, where I went to the top of Mount Greylock. Mount Greylock is quite remarkable from an ecological perspective. From a distance, it looks a lot like any of the other surrounding hills, but when you actually climb to the top, you will find an ecosystem quite remarkable for a point so far south:

Pictured above is a meadow on the edge of Boreal forest, or Taiga. Boreal forest is common in Canada, Alaska, and the extreme northernmost parts of the continental U.S. But Massachusetts is far enough south that only a small amount of this ecosystem exists, only at the top of this one mountain. Boreal forest reflects the adaptation of plants and animals to cold temperatures, long winters, and short summers. Some of these adaptations include:

• Trees have a conical shape. This helps to shunt off the heavy loads of snow falling in the winter, so that the trees do not lose limbs. Evergreen trees (like pine and cedar) growing in southerly climates tend to have a rounded shape, because there is little to no snow in the winter; round shapes capture more sunlight, but increase the risk of limbs breaking during a snowfall.
• Most plants are evergreen. This is because the temperatures are so cold that there is not enough time for the nutrients in the soil to break down and become available to plants; because nutrients are scarce, plants cannot afford to drop their leaves each year. Incidentally, the tea plant's evergreen status is also an adaptation to low nutrient levels, which is why it is able to survive on rocky outcroppings like those in the Wuyi mountains.
• Deciduous trees have light-colored bark. Think aspen and paper birch (white birch). The temperatures are so cold in winter, and the sun is at a low angle, so that if a deciduous tree (which drops its leaves in winter) were to have dark-colored bark, the sun shining on it horizontally would heat the bark so much that it would crack. This is the same phenomenon of thermal shock that I explained in my earlier post about why teaware can shatter when pouring boiling water in it. The light color of the bark reflects the sun and prevents the heating and cracking of the bark.

These ecosystems extend even farther south, at even higher elevations. For example, one can find a similar ecosystem in the mountains of New Mexico, although there, the ecosystem only shifts to boreal forest somewhere around 8,000 feet. Mount greylock, pictured above, is under 3,500 feet.

Birds galore:

As a birdwatcher, I was excited to explore this ecosystem to find birds that normally only winter or migrate through the areas where I live. It was July, a time when migration has stopped and usually only breeding resident songbirds are found. And I found quite a few birds that I normally only see during winter or migration, including white-throated sparrow, dark-eyed junco, purple finch, winter wren, Blackpoll warbler, yellow-rumped warbler, Blackburnian warbler, black-throated blue warbler, and black-throated green warbler, among others. The Blackpoll warbler in particular is a species that breeds only in boreal forests.

Above is a photo I took of a singing white-throated sparrow, near the summit of Mount Greylock. In Southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware, these birds are normally only winter residents.

Try looking for the changes in ecosystem with elevation:

If you have the opportunity to hike or drive to the top of a tall mountain in any region of the world, I would recommend doing so. It will not only help you to learn more about ecology, but it will also help you to see firsthand some of the aspects of how geography influences climate which are most important in the production of tea. If you live in an arid climate, such as the southwestern U.S., you will be even more able to see the phenomenon of how precipitation increases with altitude.

These same factors control where the tea plant is able to be grown. In drier countries like Kenya, tea is only able to be grown at higher elevations, where rainfall is higher. But as the elevation becomes too high, temperatures eventually become too cold. In humid climates, tea can be grown the whole way to sea level, and in colder regions, it can only be grown at low elevations.

What do you think?

Do you think much about elevation, and its influence on climate and ecosystems? Have you ever noticed these sorts of changes, when driving or hiking? Do you live in an area with easy access to mountains or changes in elevation? Do you live in or have you ever visited an area that is dry or cold enough that you can see major changes in an ecosystem as elevation changes?

First Impressions Can Be Wrong: a Juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-heron

This post starts out talking about a bird, but if you are patient, it does relate to tea. Recently, this Friday, June 29th, to be specific, I was in Cobbs Creek Park, on the western border of the city of Philadelphia, near the Environmental Education Center at the end of Catharine street, and I spotted this bird:

People with only minimal knowledge of birds might recognize that it is a type of heron. The cryptic plumage is a clue that this is a juvenile bird; juveniles begin with camouflaged plumage, because birds tend to be most vulnerable to being eaten by predators during the first year(s) of their life. As the birds age, they become more experienced and better able to stay safe, and they take on their brightly-colored plumage that helps them to defend a territory and attract a mate.

First impressions can be wrong:

When I first caught a glimpse of this bird, my first impression was that it was probably a juvenile green heron, because, of the birds that look vaguely similar, that bird would be most common and likely to occur in this habitat. But then I realized that it was a night-heron, a primarily nocturnal species of heron. A tip-off is the bright red eye, adapted to seeing at night. Then I thought, oh, wow, it is probably a black-crowned night heron, something I would be excited to see in this city park, but would not think entirely out of the ordinary. But upon examining it in detail, I found that it was actually a yellow-crowned night-heron, quite an unusual find anywhere in Philadelphia, but especially in a city park like this, and, on eBird, never recorded in June. Click the photo to find a page where I explain how to tell apart the juveniles of these two bird species; the easiest clues are the long neck and legs.

I find that the process with which I progressed through different (false) impressions of this bird parallels the process with which I experience many things in life. Sometimes first impressions are spot-on, but in other cases, especially with things that I do not experience often, they can be way off. I've only seen a handful of yellow-crowned night herons in my life, and they have usually been adults in very bold, distinctive plumage.

What makes an expert?

Recently I spoke with an experienced birder who had once had the opportunity to bird with Kenn Kaufman, a famous naturalist and author of several well-respected field guides to birds. The birder I spoke with was struck by how Kaufman would look at very common birds extensively, often examining them for a considerable length of time before calling out what they were. Most birders (including, often, myself) will quickly call out: "Oh look, it's a such-and-such." whereas Kaufman was examining the bird in detail, ruling out all the possibilities of rare, unusual, and unexpected species that it could possibly be. Maybe Kaufman is such an an expert on birding because he suspends judgement until he has enough evidence to form an accurate opinion.

On tea:

Often, when I sample a new tea, I have a bunch of impressions about it. I see how the dry leaf looks, I see how it smells. If it is a tea that I'm familiar with, my impression of what it will actually taste like when brewed is often quite accurate. But, especially if it is a type of tea I am less familiar with, my impression can be way off.

The same is true of tea companies. Recently I wrote about grasping the aesthetic of a tea company, a process which can take considerable time. There are many stages of first impressions in this process, including looking at their website, reading or hearing about others' opinions of their teas, and tasting the first tea, and then later ones. But I find that it often takes extended sampling to really form an informed opinion. I can form an impression very quickly, but, like with the case of the heron pictured above, it might be wrong.

I don't particularly have a life goal of becoming an expert on tea (or birds), but I do feel inspired by this occurrence to suspend judgement and pay more attention, both to tea and birds.

How about you?

What are some times in your life, both pertaining to tea, and other matters, in which your first impressions have been way off?

FTRN Fair Trade Photo Contest: Submit Your Photos Of Fair Trade Tea Producers

I am very interested in promoting fair trade in the world of tea, as it is a sad reality that the bulk of the profit margins on tea production still flow primarily into wealthier countries, whereas the poorer countries that account for most tea production enjoy a much smaller share of the profits. Fair trade is a powerful social movement, which aims to address this disparity of wealth and empower producers, as well as to work to promote sustainability in the communities that produce the goods imported into wealthier countries. There are a growing number of fair trade certified teas on the market, but tea remains a relatively small and obscure product within the total aggregation of all fair trade certified products.

A contest for fair trade photos:



I recently learned that the Fair Trade Resource Network is having a photo contest. The contest is already open, and will accept submissions through June 26th. Since I know that some of the readers of this blog have traveled to regions of tea production, and some of them work for tea companies that sell fair trade certified products, I wanted to bring this contest to people's attention. I think it would be great if there could be some photos submitted to this contest that come from areas of fair trade tea production.

The contest is time-sensitive: photos submitted sooner will appear higher up in the list for voting. Currently, there are only four entries though, making it an excellent time to submit new entries. The current photos depict producers of baskets, beads, bananas, and coffee. You may also want to see the winning photos from 2011's contest for ideas. Winning photos will be featured in the FTRN's calendar, with the top photo shown on the cover.

Could Tea Be Grown Commercially In Puerto Rico? Probably, But Not As A Major Crop Like Coffee

In the United States, tea is grown commercially in a handful of locations, including Hawaii, South Carolina, Washington State, and Alabama. These operations cannot compete with other countries for producing tea as a bulk commodity, but several commercial operations persist, probably in large part due to the novelty factor of teas produced in unusual regions. RateTea's page on The United States as a tea producing region has more information on these locations, and the relationship between the climate in various parts of the US and the feasibility of growing tea there.

Prior to visiting Puerto Rico, I never thought much about the possibility of growing tea in this region. Tea is grown commercially in Latin America, in Guatemala; I recently tried tea from Guatemala, Los Andes from Shanti Tea, which was good, and interesting, although it was CTC tea and not among the best black teas I have tried.

Also, prior to visiting, I did not realize how mountainous Puerto Rico was. Look at this photo which I took from a car while driving across the island:

The highest point on the island is 4390 feet, or 1338 meters, considerably taller than the highest point in my "mountainous" home state of Pennsylvania. Puerto Rico, incidentally, mostly uses the metric system, using liters, kilometers, and Celsius, but, in an odd reference to the US way of doing things, displays their speed limit signs in miles per hour.

Coffee in Puerto Rico:

Puerto Rico currently grows a substantial amount of coffee commercially; the coffee is a product of pride among the locals. A lot of people talked about it, and I saw it for sale many places on the island (in contrast to the states, where I infrequently see Puerto Rican coffee for sale). Puerto Rico also grows a substantial amount of shade-grown coffee, and interestingly, many of the birds in Puerto Rico rely on shade-grown coffee plantations as habitat.

The above field guide, Birds of the West Indies, which I used in Puerto Rico, and which I'd recommend as the best compact field guide to the region that I was able to find, explicitly mentions shade coffee plantations as a habitat of a number of bird species. Shade coffee plantations, although nowhere near as rich a habitat as natural rainforest, provide a rainforest-like habitat which can be valuable for bird species whose natural habitat has been mostly destroyed by humans.

The climate in Puerto Rico:

Puerto Rico's climate is tropical with seasonal rainfall, and moderate variability in climate from one region to another. The southwest of the island is semi-arid, supporting tropical dry forest; the higher altitudes support tropical rainforest, including El Yunque, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S., and part of the national forest system. Much of the region has what would be considered a tropical monsoon climate. Unlike South and Southeast Asia, the monsoon pattern is weaker and has two distinct peaks, with a brief wet season in May, followed by a brief dry season, and then a longer, wetter season Aug-Nov. Other parts of the island have less variability in rainfall.

The following map, from the National Weather Service, shows how the average precipitation for Puerto Rico varies in different regions:

To see what effect this difference in rainfall has on vegetation, look at this photo from El Yunque, which is located around that bright purple spot of high rainfall on the map; in spite of the fact that it did not rain at all when we visited the rainforest, there was water everywhere, and lush, dense vegetation:

Contrast this with the tropical dry forest, Guanica State Forest, which was full of agave, cacti, and sparse tree cover, with short trees letting a lot of light through:

Although some of Puerto Rico is probably too dry to grow the tea plant, I suspect that there would be substantial areas in the mountainous interior of the island, with cooler temperatures and higher rainfall, where it would grow well. I also imagine that the asymmetrical bimodal precipitation pattern, with short and long wet seasons, could result in unique tasting teas, with harvests from different times of year having different qualities of flavor and aroma.

Economically, tea probably would not compete favorably with coffee, which fetches a much higher price per acre of production in most of Latin America, but an artisan tea operation, growing unique, high-quality tea, and appealing to an audience of tea enthusiasts willing to pay a premium for something different, might be able to survive. Another model, using tourism, perhaps eco-tourism, to supplement the income of the tea operation, might also make it possible for a tea garden to support itself in a region where the economics don't seem to line up; the Los Andes tea garden doubles as a nature preserve and offers eco-tourism opportunities, and the Charleston Tea Plantation in South Carolina, owned by Bigelow, also offers tours and various special events.

What do you think?

Is this just a crazy idea, or do you think a commercial tea operation in Puerto Rico could be a worthwhile undertaking?

Systems Thinking and the Benefits of Thinking Holistically About Tea and Everything

This post is about systems thinking, which is related to thinking holistically. Wikipedia has an extensive article about systems thinking; it's a useful article, but is a bit rough around the edges. Here I want to explain, in the context of the world of tea, what systems thinking is, and how it can benefit you.

An illustration of systems:

A system, generally defined, is a combination of interacting components which form a cohesive whole with interesting properties of its own.



Pictured here are four systems: M51: Cosmic Whirlpool, two colliding galaxies, some tea gardens in Ooty, Tamil Nadu, India, a tea shop in Kunming, Yunnan, China, and a diagram of a typical plant cell (which could easily be the cell of a tea plant). These pictures illustrate that systems can exist at vastly different spatial scales, from the cosmic to the microscopic, and that they can be natural or can involve human civilization.

Systems are complex, and often exhibit bizarre, interesting, and beautiful phenomena, which is what leads people to describe them at times as complex systems.

What exactly is a system?

A system is more than just a collection of things. If you collect a bunch of loose teas and throw them in your cupboard, you have a tea collection, not a system. A system is something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You might have a system of organizing your tea, but in this case, the system lies in your thoughts and practices, not the teas themselves.



This picture, titled "Tea in the Garden" by Albert Chevallier Tayler, shows a group of people gathered for tea. Groups of people are examples of systems.

Have you ever noticed that when a group of people gets together, the group takes on characteristics that the individuals in the group do not have alone? In some cases, a group might be much more effective at solving problems or getting work done than the individuals alone, or perhaps a quirky and fun sort of humor comes out, but in other cases, conflicts arise that did not exist when people were just operating as individuals. These new properties of the group are one of the key features of complex systems. Any group of interacting people forms a system: families, communities, classes in school, businesses and organization, casual social circles, political groups.

Systems are ubiquitous in biology and ecology. Individual biological cells are systems, as they have many individual parts that work together in complex ways. Within the human body, there are many systems: the circulatory system, the digestive system, the brain and nervous system. A person, or any life form, is also a system.



Cities, like one of my favorite cities pictured here, are systems.

Systems also abound in business: each individual business is a system, and the economy of a town, city, or region is itself a system. Furthermore, businesses operate within and are constrained by systems, including the economic system of society as a whole, as well as local and national political systems, and the system of culture in society, as well as local and regional subcultures.

Systems thinking vs. mechanical or linear thinking:

I find that systems thinking is best described by contrasting it with other types of thinking, which I like to call mechanical thinking or linear thinking. Mechanical thinking treats things as machines, and tends to use reductionist reasoning (understanding something by taking it apart or looking at the pieces). This type of thinking is highly logical, and is often very good at solving problems that are clearly stated.

Mechanical thinking has its place; without engineering, which is a discipline founded mostly on linear thinking, we would not have the complex buildings or technology that many of us take for granted in our modern world. And straightforward, linear thinking is also necessary in many aspects of life, and business. But this way of thinking can be severely limiting when dealing with systems when we rely on it exclusively.

Examples demonstrating the misapplication of mechanical thinking:

• This tea, which tasted great yesterday, tastes bad today. I must have steeped it too long, or used water which was too hot.


• I want to make more money through my tea website. I need to get more visitors to my site, to increase the conversion rate (rate of making a sale) for visitors, or to increase the amount of tea purchased per sale.


• My tea growing operation (or anything-growing operation) is struggling to make ends meet. I need to find some way to cut my costs, or increase the yield per acre.

These misuses of mechanical thinking can lead from relatively unimportant consequences, like a person puzzling for no good reason at why they can't brew their tea properly, to more serious ones, like an online tea company owner making some bad business decisions, to catastrophic ones, such as agribusiness engaging in farming practices that lay off workers and destroy the environment.

One particularly straightforward example of the failure of linear thinking, in engineering, is explained in an article I wrote about flood prevention. An individual property owner can protect themselves from some short-term flooding damage by making changes to their property to run water off their property as quickly as possible. But, collectively, if everyone in a region follows these practices, catastrophic flooding will become a much bigger problem. The optimal solution for a region as a whole is for each property owner to minimize the runoff from their property.



Much of the flooding that happens in the U.S. is preventable, as it is caused by land-use practices that speed the runoff of water.

There are numerous similar issues in tea production, and in agriculture in general. I don't have any experience with tea cultivation, but I have a lot of experience with small-scale gardening, and I have researched the agricultural system in the U.S. a lot. Here in the U.S., mechanistic thinking has resulted in a move towards monoculture crops, cultivated by chemically-intensive farming methods...fewer people are involved in farming, the farming happens in ways that are damaging to the environment, and the produced food is of much lower quality.

Systems thinking, or holistic thinking, can lead us out of these sorts of binds. Thinking holistically is an essential part of sustainability. Systems thinking does not replace or contradict linear thinking, it just steps back and looks at the big picture in addition to the details. Often, whereas linear thinking is good at answering questions that are correctly posed, systems thinking is good at evaluating whether we are asking the right question, or coming up with creative solutions.

Examples of systems thinking in these same cases:

• This tea, which tasted great yesterday, tastes bad today. Maybe I steeped it too long or used water which was too hot, or maybe I'm perceiving it differently because I'm in a bad mood today, or because I ate different food before drinking it.


• I want to make more money through my tea website. I could try reaching a new audience, try improving the experience people have on the site, or try carrying unique offerings which will make my company stand out.


• My tea growing operation is struggling to make ends meet. Maybe by developing new cultivars, pioneering new ecologically-friendly farming methods, I can attract attention and sell the teas for a higher price. Maybe by banding together with other tea producers, we can solve problems that we cannot overcome on our own. Maybe we can find ways to eliminate middlemen and more directly access the higher profit-margins historically available in Western markets. Maybe we can influence local or national government policies and regulations in ways that reshape the business environment in ways that are better both for me and for my community.

The latter approach is highlighted in the approach Kenya has been taking to tea cultivation. RateTea's page on Kenya explains this in more depth. The approach being taken in Kenya does focus on bottom-line factors like cost and yield-per-acre, but it also seeks, unlike agriculture policies in the U.S., to reduce costs through reducing energy and chemical inputs, and to create cultivars with a broad range of adaptability in the face of global climate change, which poses a particular risk to farming in Kenya, where much of the country is too arid for normal western-style agriculture. Another example, which I discovered through a post by Jackie on the Tea Trade forums, from a different part of the world, is happening in India, where small tea growers are creating their own brand of tea, an idea that came up in self-help groups of small tea growers and tea factories. The people involved in this movement have also worked to encourage the Tea Board of India to get on board with some of these initiatives, and they seem to be having some success.

What do you think?

Do you think about systems and systems thinking? Do you find systems thinking helpful in your life and/or in your business?

The Benefits of Mindfulness - And An NPR Program

Mindfulness is one topic that I like to write about, and one that comes up frequently in the context of tea culture. Wikipedia has good, separate pages on mindfulness in Buddhism and mindfulness in modern psychology; the two concepts are not identical, but overlap quite a lot.



A mindful state is not characterized by a straight, narrow, or perfect focus; it is more like this zigzagging path, straying a bit from side to side, and being full of distractions and imperfections, yet having a clear direction.

A little over a month ago, I listened to a program on NPR's Science Friday about mindfulness, called Be Here Now: Meditation For The Body And Brain, which contains an interview with one of the authors of a book called Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. Although this program does not mention tea, it explicitly mentions food a number of times, talking about how, as people get caught up in fast-paced lifestyles, they often stop paying attention to how their food tastes. If you are interested in mindfulness, you might really enjoy the program.

In case you don't have time or aren't interested in listening to it (I'm often not in the mood for listening to radio programs or podcasts when I'm reading blogs), a brief summary of some of the key points that I took from it are as follows:

• Many of us, in our society, have very fast-paced lives, and go through much of our days on "autopilot", preoccupied with worries, and often not paying much attention to the moment, which includes both paying attention to the thoughts going through our heads, and paying attention to physical sensations, like those in our body, or the flavor and aroma of the food and drink we consume.


• A lack of mindfulness corresponds to a continually heightened stress response in the body, including changes in the relative activity of different regions of the brain. This can put us at increased risk of depression, and can exacerbate or directly cause psychological disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder.


• Simple exercises in mindfulness, such as paying attention to the sensations in our body, our senses, and the thoughts in our mind, can promote a more mindful state of being in our lives. Even a few minutes a day spent meditating in a certain way can produce profound changes in mind and body.


• When in a more mindful state, we actually become more productive, and we also have greatly improved capacity for empathy.

This summary represents my understanding of the program, not necessarily the views of the people hosted on it. But I found that overall, the program strongly resonated with my experiences.

If you ever feel busy, stressed, overwhelmed with worry or anxiety, or if you have trouble with depression, agitated mood, or irritability, I think you might benefit from listening to this program. I found it very helpful and informative.

Photographing Tea For Your Website

This article continues my series on best practices for tea company websites. This article focuses on an issue of key importance: photos of your tea. Some of this advice mentions product pages for each tea, something that not all companies have, but that I recommend.

I'm not the best photographer; it's not something I choose to put a lot of effort into, I mainly take pictures to document my experiences. You can see some of my photos (not just of tea) on Cazort.net photos. As you'll find, many of my photos aren't the most artistic or well-composed. But I do observe other people's photos a lot, particularly, in the course of my work on RateTea, photographs of tea, and I've made some observations about what personally makes a good impression on me. As with my other posts, this represents only my own subjective opinion, but I hope it can be useful to others.

These are the best practices that I have found:

• When photographing loose leaf tea, use lighting that shows the tea's color as it will appear to others.
• Photograph loose leaf tea from an angle and in a configuration that shows some depth, showing the texture of the leaf.
• Compose your photos so that the customer can clearly and easily distinguish between the different teas you offer.
• For brands of tea which produce packaged tea (whether tea bags or loose-leaf tea) sold in retail stores, on the product page for each tea, show the packaging of the tea as it appears in stores. This will help people locate your product on the shelf.
• If you sell loose-leaf tea in retail stores, packaged in tins or other containers, make sure to display photographs of the loose-leaf tea itself.
• Ideally, also photograph the brewed cup and, if you are catering to connoisseurs, the used tea leaves after steeping.

Use lighting that shows the tea's color as it will appear to others:

There is no such thing as truly neutral lighting; every object looks different in different lighting. Natural lighting changes based on whether it is direct or indirect, based on time of day and year, and the weather. Artificial lighting is highly varied--fluorescent vs. incandescent, and the decor of a room profoundly influences the ambient lighting from reflection.

When photographing tea for your website, you can't be perfect or objective, you need to make subjective judgment calls. I personally like to photograph loose-leaf tea in bright, indirect sunlight in a mostly white surroundings, but sometimes, especially for teas that do not naturally show much variation or texture, I like to photograph tea in direct sunlight, as it can make the texture of the tea more boldly evident. I recommend avoiding flash photography when photographing loose-leaf tea as it makes composition more difficult.

The goal in lighting when photographing tea is not to be perfect, as there is no perfect, but rather to be close enough that when someone looks at your tea in typical bright lighting, it will look similar to how it looks on your website. Here is an example of a company, Rishi Tea, which I think does a good job of matching the color and lighting of their teas to how they actually look.



Not all companies do as good a job of this. Below is an example, from Shanti Tea, a relatively new, sustainability-focused Canadian company specializing in loose-leaf teas, shows lighting in photography which I think is a little on the dark side, with perhaps more of a yellowish tinge:



These photos show the leaf clearly, show artful composition, and clearly depict the individual character of each tea's loose leaf, but the color looks slightly darker than normal. Update: I recently had an opportunity to see Shanti Teas' teas in person, and I was able to verify that the color scheme on the website seems darker and more yellowish / reddish than teas actually look in bright light.

Although lightness can be subjective, I think it is better to error on the side of brightness because tea leaf tends to have a darker color, among common everyday objects, and thus, a brighter leaf allows a person to more easily assess what the leaf actually looks like.

Photograph loose leaf tea from an angle and in a configuration that shows some depth, showing the texture of the leaf:

The composition of the photo of loose-leaf tea is very important. If you just photograph the top of the contents of a bin of loose-leaf tea, it will not look very interesting and will not do a great job of showing what the leaf actually looks like. But, if you separate the leaf and photograph the leaf sparsely against a white background (as Rishi does, which you can see above), the resulting photo, artful as it may be, will not look much like the bulk leaf that will arrive when the customer purchases it. As much as I think Rishi's photographs are beautiful, my personal preference is for photos that show a mass of tea gradually spreading out to sparse leaf, so that the viewer can see both what the bulk tea looks like, as well as the inidividual leaves.

Here is an example of a photo I took:



The tea is White Eagle Long Life from Imperial Tea Garden, a tippy green tea from Hunan province. This is by no means the best photo that could be taken of this tea, but it illustrates the key concepts I want to communicate about how to position a tea: the white background around the edge of the photo shows the individual leaves of the tea, whereas the mass of tea in the upper right shows what the bulk loose-leaf tea looks like. The focus is in the foreground of the picture, and the rear is blurred, mimicking the experience that people get when looking at an actual object in real life.

For an example of this method used on an actual tea company's website, check out the following screenshot of green teas on the website of Chicago Tea Garden:



Each of these three teas show a border with the texture of the leaf visible, as well as a mass of loose-leaf tea with some texture to the pile of tea as a whole. Personally, I like the two photos on the left, with more variation in texture, more than the photo on the right, which is more uniform. I especially like the photo of the Bi Luo Chun.

Compose your photos so that the customer can clearly and easily distinguish between the different teas you offer:

This piece of advice is common sense, yet a lot of tea companies do not follow it, perhaps because it can be difficult to follow. I find this point is especially true when dealing with black teas, especially Assams, a little less with Darjeelings or Yunnan teas (which tend to show more variability in their appearance).

But no two teas look exactly alike. If you look at the teas side-by-side, you will find some way to distinguish them, and you can then focus on their differences in your photographs. And if you cannot figure out a way to distinguish them, then use the composition of the photos to create two vastly different-looking photographs. Make the teas look different. There is no single right way to photograph a given tea, so, even if you have a catalogue of dozens of similar-looking black teas, it's possible to take unique-looking photos of each one.

Look at this example from the Assam Tea Company; all of these teas are black teas from Satrupa estate in Assam, yet look how different they appear, even in this low-resolution screenshot:



If your company uses the same base tea to create flavored tea blends, and if you flavor the teas using extracts, a good solution is to photograph the tea against a backdrop of the whole ingredient that you have used as the flavoring for the tea. For example, for an orange-flavored tea, photograph the loose-leaf tea in front of a sliced orange, or include some cinnamon sticks in the background of a cinnamon-flavored tea.

And of course, the inclusion of whole ingredients in your flavored teas rather than relying strictly on extracts or flavorings, besides leading to superior flavor, also has the added benefit of making your loose-leaf flavored teas look different. Here is an example of flavored teas from Adagio Teas, showing how the inclusion of whole ingredients can make loose-leaf tea look vastly different, even when the same base tea is used in multiple blends:



Show the packaging as it appears in stores:

My piece of advice to photograph and display the tea packaging on your website is more applicable to certain tea companies than others. In particular, this point is probably only relevant to tea companies that sell their products in retail stores other than their own dedicated stores.

When customers visit your website, some of them may be looking to buy tea, but a large portion of them may simply be looking for information on your products. If your company primarily sells packages of tea in stores, having pictures of your packaging is very important.



The above example from the Twinings USA online store clearly shows the packaging of both the loose-leaf tea and tea bags offered by Twinings. This is important as Twinings mostly sells its tea tins in other retail stores, where shoppers will need to recognize and locate it on the shelf. However, I think it would be an improvement if Twinings showed photographs of the loose leaf as well.

Photograph the brewed cup and, if you are catering to connoisseurs, the used tea leaves after steeping:

I also think that it is important, besides showing what the leaf looks like, to show what the brewed cup of tea looks like as well. If you photograph the brewed cup of tea, in contrast to my recommendations for photographing the dry leaf, I recommend using consistent lighting and composition. The reason is that the primary point of photographing brewed cups of tea is to show the color of your brewed teas relative to each other. Some will be darker than others. Pick lighting that shows the variability, but once you pick the lighting, stick with it so that your customers can see which of your teas are darker than others.

Doing this well is a lot of work, and I can understand that for smaller tea companies with a large catalogue, it may not be worth the effort. However, there are some smaller companies that still do this. Here is a screenshot from the homepage of GreenTea Japan, a small tea company specializing in direct-sourced Japanese green teas. Look at the astonishing variability in the colors of the brewed cups here, keeping in mind that these are all Japanese green teas:



When exploring GreenTea Japan's site, you will see pictures of the brewed cups of each specific tea this company offers. The differences among types of tea (such as from one sencha to the next) are subtle, but noticeable.

What about photographing the used tea leaves? I think that this practice is very important if your company caters to connoisseurs. Why? Many teas are tightly rolled, twisted, or folded, and, in most cases, you cannot fully examine the visual qualities of tea leaf until after the tea leaf has been steeped in water for some time. The used tea leaf often provides more in the way of information and visual cues about the tea's quality than the dry leaf.

The following screenshot is taken from the site of Life in Teacup, one of my favorite tea companies, also a very small company. This screenshot shows the entry for Yongchun Fo Shou (Bergamot) Oolong Superior Grade, a green se chung oolong that I found very interesting. This photo shows the brewed leaf and the color of the brewed cup:



The close-up photo on the website shows the whole, intact leaves with no visible breaks, identifying this as a high-quality whole-leaf tea in a way that looking at the tightly-rolled dry leaf could not show.

That's all for now.

There you go. I'm not the best photographer, but I do look at a lot of photos of tea in the course of my work on RateTea, and I have a good sense of what looks good and what doesn't.

What do you think?

Do you agree with the recommendations offered here? Since many of the readers of this blog are better photographers than I am (I know, because I've seen some of the people who comment here post beautiful photos on their own blogs), do you have anything more to offer?

Infusing the Flowers of the Christmas Camellia - Pretty But Not Tasty

I really love infusing flowers, either mixing them in with tea (especially black or green teas), or using them as an herbal tea of their own. I have a big bag of rose petals at home that I bought at a Mexican store (where they are really inexpensive) and I frequently steep on their own. Recently I wrote about a blooming Christmas Camellia that I found growing in my neighborhood, and I observed that the flowers had a wonderful fragrance that was similar in many respects to the floral qualities exhibited by some green oolongs.

I thought, maybe I could infuse the petals in hot water, like I do rose petals, or like people do the sepals of the hibiscus (roselle) plant. Here is a picture of the petals and flower centers (which I included because they were the most fragrant):



I used boiling water and steeped for quite some time, I did not time it exactly but it was a longer infusion. Here is the resulting cup:



It looks pretty, but unfortunately, it did not taste good to me. I would describe the infusion as having some of the tannic qualities of black tea, but in a muted way, a sort of underlying unpleasant bitterness, and some of the cooked fruit quality reminiscent of hibiscus tea, another quality I dislike. The floral fragrance of the fresh flowers was completely lost. I sipped it a bit to sample, but did not drink it.

I like experimenting in life. Sometimes you need to try some things that you don't like in order to discover the things that you do. Even though this didn't turn out that well, I'm still glad I tried it.

Warning! Do not experiment infusing random flowers:

As a side note, I want to warn people that it is not necessarily safe to go around infusing non-food plants. Everything I have read about Camellias has suggested to me that all parts of the plant are non-toxic, not just to humans but to mammals in general, and I have read that this particular species is used as a food plant, with its seeds used for oil, and that it also is used to produce an herbal tea.

There are some flowers commonly used as landscaping plants, however, which are highly toxic. If you want to experiment with brewing up an herbal tea from a plant that is not normally used for herbal teas, do some background research first to make sure it is safe.

What about you?

Do you think this plant just isn't good to infuse? Or perhaps would the flower taste better if dried first? Or perhaps is the issue that I used a cultivar selected for its visual appearance and not aroma?

An Unusual-Shaped Mug

One of my friends, Allison Bishop, has made some interesting pottery. While at a cookie party at her apartment (where, incidentally, some very high-quality loose-leaf teas were consumed), I noticed this mug that she was drinking tea from:



I really like the way this mug looks, but I also like the way it feels when holding it. It is handleless, and best to hold with two hands.



There is something organic and earthy about it. It also got me thinking about drinking tea from a relatively wide, flat mug, and I realized that I had never drunk tea from a mug or cup with a wider, flatter shape like this one.

Christmas Camellia (Yuletide Camellia) - Camellia sasanqua

I live in a climate relatively far from where the tea plant is commercially grown, in a region where it can only be grown as a peculiar, delicate garden specimen, in highly sheltered areas. I've heard that there are a few specimens of tea plants growing around Philadelphia and Delaware, but I have yet to see one.

However, I recently stumbled across a more cold-hardy camellia, and I wanted to highlight it both because it is a beautiful and somewhat unusual plant, and also because it sheds some interesting light on the tea plant and on how the relationships between different plants in the same genus tend to work.



The plant pictured here in this post is the Christmas camellia, scientific name Camellia sasanqua, placing it in the same genus as the tea plant. This plant is about as closely related to the tea plant as a crabapple is to a commercial apple, or about as close as cabbage is related to mustard. Plants in the same genus but different species can sometimes (but not always) hybridize, and usually share certain major similarities, but they can also have major differences (Bunchberry, a tiny plant growing on the forest floor in cold climates, is in the same genus as dogwood trees).

The next picture shows an immediate similarity to the tea plant in the sprouting leaves; I'm curious to return in the spring to see if this plant looks even more like the tea plant when it leafs out in the spring:



The Christmas Camellia is so named because it tends to bloom around Christmas time...very unusual as there are very few flowers blooming at this time, let alone ones as showy as this one. I am quite curious what the natural pollinators of this plant are, as insects tend not to be active in cold weather, and most bird pollinators have departed from temperate climates by this point in time.

This plant is not native to North America, and I would have mixed feelings about planting it. It's beautiful and offers a unique landscaping opportunity with the timing of its blooming, but I usually recommend avoiding the use of non-native plants for landscaping. This is certainly not an invasive species though; it is hardier than the tea plant but still a bit of a stretch for gardeners in the Philadelphia area. This plant is thriving, but it is in a city, in a sheltered location, planted close to a building and surrounded by other broadleaf evergreens. However, I will note that there are cases of other broadleaf evergreen plants escaping and becoming invasive species, including English ivy and privet (which becomes semi-evergreen in areas as cold as Pennsylvania). Both of these plants have adapted to a colder climate than their native habitat and have become a problem, choking out native plants in wild ecosystems in eastern North America.



Similarities in aroma between these blooms and tea:

I want to conclude this post with one final note about this plant, another point of similarity between this plant and the tea plant. Its blooms smell very similar to some of the floral qualities in greener oolong teas like Qi Lan or Tie Guan Yin.

I'm quite curious if this plant could be used to produce a tea-like infusion. I've been wondering about this for a long time; see my old post other camellias for tea, in which I mention this species. One point which I find compelling as a reason for pursuing herbal teas made from other camellias than the tea plant is that they are naturally caffeine-free, which might make them attractive to some people. I may try seeing if I can produce some sort of tasty infusion from this plant at some point. However, given that I'm no expert in tea processing, and that this plant has been cultivated primarily for its blooms, it seems like it may be a bit of a stretch to produce something that would actually taste good. I'll keep you updated if I undertake any project like this, which may need to wait till the spring.

How about you?

Have you ever grown this plant, or other camellias? Have you ever tried making a tea-like herbal infusion out of this plant, or any others?

A Walk in The Cemetery

I like the idea of moving away from writing specific reviews of tea, and finding other ways to capture the experience of tea. I am in Cafe Clave, and I just finished a cup of South Indian Select from Novus Tea. For me, tea is often a refreshing break. Another way I take a break is by walking in Woodlands cemetery. Here are three photos I took in this cemetery in October:



A red-tailed hawk carries a stick for its nest.



I frequently encounter Chinese characters when reading tea-related topics online. I rarely encounter them in this cemetery. This tombstone caught my eye and got me reflecting on the bonds that form between people across different cultures, which you can often see in the names and inscriptions in this and other cemeteries.



Institutional-looking high-rise dorms rise from behind the organic row of trees. The dorms belong to the University of Pennsylvania, a school which, at least to me, evokes connotations of order and control more strongly than a typical university. This is the view as I walk back towards the exit of the cemetery.

I find there is something inherently slow-paced and reflective about cemeteries. They are old, and provide markers of lives past. This particular cemetery has an organic nature to it, a wildness, that I like very much. As I leave it to get back to work, I reflect on these things.

The interplay between order and chaos, between control and freedom, is one of the topics that seems to come up again and again when I think of anything relating to food, drink, and ecology. I can taste it in my cup of tea just as I feel it when walking back into the city, from this cemetery.

Green Chaos: Randomness as a Source of Inspiration

I recently read a post on Tea Musings, titled Green Chaos, which references a term used by John Fowles in his essay The Tree. In case you don't read or know of this blog, it's a collection of original poetry and, as the name suggests, musings. The posts are brief, expressive, and I find often calming and nature-oriented. This blog offers an interesting contrast to the standard, cut-and-dry, "talk directly about tea" approach that many of us (including myself, usually) take to tea, and I find it very refreshing and inspirational.



The photo pictured here is from Rittenhouse Park in Newark, Delaware, a deceptively large forested park nestled in between suburban areas. This park and its forest are oven overshadowed by the two nearby parks, each of which has larger tracts of forest: White Clay Creek State Park and Iron Hill Park. But I find this park and its wild forests beautiful as well.

This is the sort of green chaos that I find inspirational: it is a forest where trees and other plants grow wild, and it shows an intricate and almost endless pattern of order emerging from chaos, flowing into more chaos, with yet more order emerging. This is the world in which we thrive, feel most alive, and realize our full potential, not the tightly controlled environments that we often create around us in the modern world.

Wild ecosystems as a source of inspiration:

Inspiration is very important to me. In my work, I create things...writing, poetry, sometimes images, websites, software, ideas, and systems. And as hobbies, I create music, and improvisatory dance (swing dancing and blues dancing). I also create food when I cook, and when I grow and dry herbs, and sometimes blend them, to make herbal teas or flavored teas, usually just to drink by myself. All of these activities require inspiration. Even things that are often viewed as mechanical or technical, such as programming, require great inspiration to me. When I'm inspired, I can finish a task in a tiny fraction of the time, and do a much better job of it, than when I'm trying to mechanically trudge through it. I also need to use inspiration to solve problems in my daily life, from complex problems involving human relationships, to practical ones like how to reattach the knob to my antique dresser that fell off because the bolt was stripped.

Inspiration is not a luxury, it's a necessity.

If you read this blog a lot, you'll know that I often like to cite my sources of inspiration. Often, I'm directly inspired by another person's blog post, or a conversation I read on an internet forum. But there are other, more indirect, and possibly more important sources of inspiration in my life.

Chaos as inspiration, randomness as a resource:

If you are skeptical that chaos can be a source of inspiration, I want to provide you compelling proof of this fact, from a realm that is about as highly ordered and as un-chaotic as one can get: the realm of computers.

One of the things that I've done over the course of my life is server administration. A server is a computer, usually housed in a data center, which is the physical location for websites and other web-based services. Servers are at the very core of the internet, but many of us are not aware of them or how they work. Administering a server is something that relatively few people are familiar with. Indeed, now I use a managed virtual hosting plan to host my websites, and I only do small tweaks to the administration, but for a while, I was doing everything myself.

One interesting thing about understanding the inner workings of a server is something called the entropy pool. Servers actually have a need for randomness--it sounds crazy, but randomness is actually a valued resource under certain conditions, such as the highly controlled conditions in a data center. One of them is in the generation of cryptographic keys. If you want to create an encryption scheme, you need to have random numbers. If the numbers are not truly random (i.e. if they are generated by a simple algorithm) they can be predicted, and thus, the encryption can be easily cracked. Even in the world of computers and technology, randomness, or chaos (which can be referred to as entropy) can be a valued resource.

Back to nature:

We cannot live without nature, and I think all of us would agree on that. We depend on the Earth's ecosystems for our clean air, water, and also for our food, other natural resources, and of course, our tea.

But in addition, we also depend on the randomness of nature for inspiration. Without the randomness, our lives would be sterile. We would not be able to create things, to solve problems, or to do anything that requires creativity.



The dry leaf of this pouchong / bao zhong tea shows a similar interplay between order and chaos of the forest above. Unlike computers, it exhibits an organic sort of structure, a lot like the structure of the forest above, or this blackbird flock below:



What are the sources of inspiration in your life? What are the sources of chaos and randomness that you find most inspirational?

Aesthetics: What Purposes Do They Serve?

This post is inspired by a discussion on the Tea Trade Forums about the new East India Company, in which we began talking about whether or not luxury and idealism are necessarily at odds with each other. The general sentiment seemed to be that, to a degree, they are. But this post is not directly about that...it's about aesthetics.

In the discussion, David Gall posted a comment about how he appreciates beautiful objects, whether it be handmade art or well-designed electronics (he gives Apple computer as an example). I certainly think that aesthetics and beauty have great value, both for me and in general.



Some things, like sunsets, seem to be nearly universally appreciated as beautiful. But aesthetic senses, the sense of what things are beautiful, also vary hugely from person to person and culture to culture. One thing I think about a lot is the degree to which our aesthetic sense is culturally constructed, and can be changed. I like to think critically about aesthetics, and ask the question:

What effect is our aesthetic sense having on our lives, on our society, and on our environment?

Aesthetics produce real-world results:

Aesthetics are by no means superficial...they impact nearly all choices we make in life, from which products we choose to buy, to which streets or roads we choose to drive or walk on, to where we choose to live, to which clothes we put on in the morning. And, although some of us may not fully admit it, they also impact which people we choose to associate with. Many of the ways in which aesthetics shape our lives are subconscious...we make decisions to choose one thing over another, and these are sometimes major choices that impact our lives and the lives of other people as well.

An example of aesthetics having ecological impact:

One of the aspects of modern society in which subjective and highly variable aesthetics can have far-reaching ecological impacts is that of the grassy lawn. Pictured here are two patches of grass or lawn in Bryn Athyn, PA. The first:



And the second:



I chose these two photos because they are about as directly contrasting as you can get, at least, in Bryn Athyn at this time of year. Which is more attractive to you? The top picture is more lush and vibrant; the bottom picture is more barren looking, but shows greater diversity, both of color (with the two different flowering plants), and biodiversity. If you know me at all, you'll know that I prefer the aesthetics of the second picture.

When choosing something like which tea to drink, our aesthetic sense is mainly a question of personal taste. But in the case of these two pictures of patches of grass, there are actual impacts of choosing one aesthetic over the other. The top picture depicts an unnatural lawn, heavily treated with chemicals to maintain both a lush green color and a monoculture of one plant (and you know how I feel about monocultures). The chemically-intensive maintenance of this lawn has negative consequences on the environment, and even on humans--that lawn is actually on the campus of Bryn Athyn College, in an area where people often walk barefoot, thus exposing themselves to whatever chemicals were sprayed on the grass.

The second picture of grass, an untreated area, has much greater biodiversity, not to mention that it is less resource-intensive to maintain. More biodiversity means greater ecological value, and most importantly, there are none of the negative impacts associated with using herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. It looks a little bleak if you're used to the aesthetic in the first picture, but there's beauty hiding in the bleakness...the photo is taken during April, after all. If you are at all familiar with Pennsylvania's climate and ecology, you'll know that Pennsylvania does not naturally have lush, light-green colors year-round. April is a time in-between the browns and grays of winter, and the lush green foliage of spring...plants are beginning to bloom, but there's still a lot of brown and gray about. I personally find it beautiful.



This final photo shows a polluted stretch of the Delaware river, viewed from National Park, New Jersey, to remind us that, just as chemicals wash off and flow downstream, our actions flow into consequences. Fertilizers and chemicals used on lawns and in agriculture and industry kill wild animals, devastate ecosystems, contribute to cancer and other chronic diseases in humans, and destroy fishing industries downstream. This stretch of the Delaware river could be pristine; there could be abundant fish here, and it could be safe to eat these fish. In our current world, it is not.

Imagine what it could be like. And now:

You can choose your aesthetic sense:

You can choose which of the two pictures of grassy lawn to prefer. In this case, it's not a matter of personal taste. Choose the second one.