Last Friday - Murder at NASA - beyond mere attempted

17 years ago

I saw it with my own eyes. It was ghastly. Heartbreaking. Outrageous. The kind of tragedy that can leave a person who witnesses it changed forever, painfully, irreversibly.

Many GW members have no doubt heard about the NASA astronaut who has been charged with attempted murder.

But I saw actual murder at NASA. At the Space Center in Houston. Right out in broad daylight. Images brought to us by media simply cannot compare. This was sickening. More sickening to see how, over the past week, the deed has gone unreported, perhaps...covered up.

I'm talking full-blown, "first degree" CRAPE MURDER.

Whacked plants. "Abducted and beheaded." At least a dozen, probably more, crape myrtles at the Johnson Space Center suffered the ultimate humiliation short of annihilation. It was a mass abortion of natural majesty.

I'm not talking mere dwarfs cut to 6 inches. I'm talking 20-, 25-foot TREES (at least several of them). Three- and four-inch thick trunks or branches, sawn through - to use a term many might identify with from current events: "Britneyed." Only, this was involuntary.

I could not believe it. I work occasionally, and occasionally my work takes me out to JSC. They have this beautiful campus-like landscape with large artificial ponds and small streams, plus diverse wildlife, even deer. One who visits there often enough might even come to recognize "regulars" among the animals. My favorite has become "Tumor Duck" - one mallard drake with a knot on his head almost the size of - well, his head.

And until last Friday or sometime thereabouts, JSC had some of the local area's most picturesque crape myrtles.

But no more. Those CMs may as well be extraterrestrial mutants, monuments to plant-care stupidity of astronomical proportions. What was done to them ought to be a CRIME - or at least, an offense that warrants severe civil liabilities.

For a branch of the federal government that has as part of its mission "understanding our home planet," the sight of the whacked CMs was beyond disappointing. To think that NASA has perhaps caved-in to the rapacious winter job security rackets for the...let's call them "residentially transitory" landscape maintainers...erodes my confidence that the agency will ever get its act together well enough to lead us, through its (historically) distinctively excellent scientific ways, to a less polluted, more "footprint-light," human impact on the very environment, the preservation of which is absolutely necessary for our species' survival and sustenance.

How can anyone reasonably expect our human species to survive, let alone prosper, anywhere else on the Moon or beyond, when here on earth the evidence is so overwhelming that we are, in the aggregate sense at least, incorrigible "net destroyers" of everything we touch?! (Including our own kind.)

The 2007 Crape Murder at JSC just might be enough, even for me - despite how late in life and frail as I now am (and despite how shy I have always been) - to embark on one final, high-profile earthly quest: to push back on the visual pollution, real damage, and negligence to the biosphere that is evidenced by "landscape mismanagement."

Will I go to court and have NASA hauled in to defend itself? (as if its permission of the 2007 crape myrtle pruning is defensible!) Will I set up yet another non-profit "center" focused on education and advocacy, dedicated to bringing judicial and legislative action to bear on cases of environmental negligence? Will I take the "Ultimate Jackass Plunge" like one of my similarly superannuated close relatives recently did, and move from mere political consulting to outright political candidacy?

We'll see. But at JSC, the damage is done, and it cannot be undone. That negligence must not go unpunished. And our society's tolerance for continuation of such negligence must become ZERO.

Or else, we may as well simply "kick back;" take some more mind-altering, addictive drugs; tune-in to the imagery of some space telescope (assuming that such a machine that works can be built by hordes of drug and sex addicts); party like every day is Mardi Gras, in between bouts of gratuitous, pseudo-principled violence and oppression against one another and ourselves; and await (with wide eyes full of wonder and "righteous indignation") the inevitable arrival of that asteroid or comet that will put an end to our debaucherous, environmentally ruinous "Ground Hog Day" train wreck of history.

I just knew I should not have read that thread about the theft of the rose bushes...but I read it anyway.

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Comments (21)

rick_mcdaniel
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Hehe. I recently asked about pruning back a tree in the school's atrium, so it didn't block me from photographing on some steps there. (groups and such)

Well, NO SIR....we have a "service", and they are the only ones who are permitted to do that. Naturally, I requested that the "service" take care of the problem for me, so that I could work there.

Well, when they got through, they had cut about 3 times, the amount I had in mind, in the first place.....but at least I could work again.

Yup, that is plant "professionalism" at work.
bossjim1
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Are you being humorous, or are you seriously this upset over the way someone else prunes their trees? I hope no one gets that upset because I cut my grass off where it is flat on top instead of allowing it to seek it's natural height and growth structure. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and evidently a whole lot of people like the look of crapes pruned, me included.
Jim
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rick_mcdaniel
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
awwww.....I was just being amused. You take things way too seriously.
pjtexgirl
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
They did it all over Fort worth too. These cacked trees look so bizarre! I have no special fondness for CMs so it doesn't bother me too much. Watching them clear cut another patch of Oak forest to put in a strip mall/POS suburb makes me want to cry.PJ
rick_mcdaniel
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
PJ, that is gonna continue, as long as we continue to expand the population.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.
pjtexgirl
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
I have to disagree. There are empty older houses all over the place that would make fine homes. In fact they're probably better built than the more recent homes.Some of them have a unique look you can hardly find anymore(cape cod,victorian or colonial) The money you sink into a new home could turn an older home into something special. PJ
beachplant
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Stop the crape murder! My hubby is going over to prune the ones at our rental property next week. He asked me for the right way! What a guy.
PJ, I live in an old "unique" house. Want it? It's always something. Tally HO!
pjtexgirl
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Tally,I meant 50 or 60yrs old. They have some beautiful "fixer uppers" from the 1800's in the historical district of FW that I wouldn't touch without a contractor's licence and money to burn. They are gorgeous tho. PJ
bossjim1
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
I take things way too seriously? Gee Rick, I was quite amused also, but wasn't responding to your post, but to Stitches, who somehow got us from pruning crape myrtles to the total destruction of the world!
Jim
rick_mcdaniel
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
PJ, you shoulda seen enough movies about remodeling older homes to know it leads to WAR! (Of the spouses, that is.)
rick_mcdaniel
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Ah Jim, clarity is a good thing.
prairiepaintbrush
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
*peering at Stitches* I've had a few beers too...

PJ, I agree with you. I'm just not a CM fan. For me a plant has to have one of the following qualities: I have to be able to eat a part of it, or it has to smell good, or it has to benefit birds or bugs. Don't think CMs fall into any of those categories.
carrie751
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Maybe not, PPB, but it's beauty certainly brightens my garden, and that makes me happy.
stitches216
Original Author
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Upset? Me?! Upset?! Naw, I'm just gettin' started. G'Mornin' y'all!
bossjim1
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Mornin' Stitches!
Jim
maden_theshade
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Last summer I actually saw a hummingbird at my lavender crepe myrtle. That really surprised me. For one, I wouldn't think that light purple color would be attractive to them, or there would be anything there for them to eat. I've never been fond of the lavender colored crepes, but that made me look at them differently.
roopooroo
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
My lowly little 4-ft CM does benefit the birds - since they eat its berries all winter.
prairiepaintbrush
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
HAHAHA Stitches, you funny. :)

Okay, GOOD, I'm glad the crapies DO offer benefits to the wildlife. I'm moving them to my okay plants list.
stitches216
Original Author
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Lavender or purple will likely be the color of the next CM we put in our yard. I prefer purple, mainly because it should give a more appealing contrast to the blue of the vitex we envision planting next to it.

I can understand the interest in pruning to maintain a certain "fill" of foliage and bloom in a certain space. What I don't understand is how that awful, whacked look can be tolerated, even for a moment, while awaiting the return of the next season's growth in that desired look.

Not meaning to sound all self-righteous here...it's just my gardening style, to use plants that are suited for the space available to them, instead of filling a space with a plant that has to be pruned to hideous (my opinion) to keep the plant within bounds, even if the view of the whacked look is only temporary.

If I put, say, a CM variety with a mature size of 15 feet in a 5-foot space, that would just be too much work for me to keep the plant in bounds every year. I would want a plant with a mature size that fills the 5-foot space.

I'm not a crape myrtle expert. But experience and intuition tell me (correctly I believe) a couple of things about the "radical annual pruning" of CMs (just my alternative term for the "murder"):
(1) It weakens the plants overall;
(2) It possibly deprives the plants and visiting wildlife of mutually beneficial, balanced and natural interaction, and
(3) While enabling more concentrated bloom and dense top-growth, it raises risk of losing what might be preferred (a more appealing resultant appearance, that is) to storms or pests because of the naturally weaker new growth.

My memory is always "dumping," but I believe I remember seeing some summer storm damage to CMs that were whacked the year before. So all the CMs had for foliage and bloom were the short, weak new branches all clustered together. Maybe I just saw some photos of that damage. Anyway, the damage made them look as if they had never leafed-out and bloomed at all, because all the new growth was torn and bent down, if not torn completely off. Those images, more than any others, swayed me away forever from the "murder" manner of pruning.
pjtexgirl
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Hacked CMs look like a broom made of twigs to me. I don't dislike CM's I'm just not crazy about them. They feed the aphids(CM "rain" is aphid droppings BTW) that keeps my predatory bug population thriving and birds do nest in them. I've never seen a bird eat the berries tho. I can't see a reason not to believe it. They are a bit overplanted where I live too. I like unusual ornamental trees.PJ
stitches216
Original Author
17 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
I would insist on only one CM in our limited space if I could.

But in our house is a better person than myself who likes CMs almost as much as roses.

Last Friday - Murder at NASA - beyond mere attempted

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