None of the plants pictured here should have sprouted. Yet they did and seem to be thriving; thistle and mustard plants growing between chunks of rock along the railroad tracks on Lakeville Street and a dandelion growing in the crack between wood and a rock wall.

Jan's comment on the photos attached to my 'Hanging Gardens of Petaluma' post said they show the determination of life. Penny said the plants growing in the rock wall are a living testament to the force of cosmic optimism. To me, people living in the harsh extremes of desert heat, arctic cold or inner city slums is every bit as amazing as seeds sprouting in a rock wall.

When I observe plants growing in the most unlikely of places or read about the living conditions endured by people who live in impoverished countries, I see manifest the flame that burns within all life and how, given the smallest chance, that flame is driven to shine brightly.

With so much sadness and strife in the news it would be easy to grow pessimistic about life. In spite of the problems we face today, I am reminded daily about how good we have it in America. Yesterday I drew inspiration from the simple beauty of a flower. Today I have been inspired by the indomitable spirit of life.

I'd like to disagree with one aspect of Godzilla's comment to my blog about cigarette butts. While I agree that smokers use the world as a giant ash tray I don't believe they think about it at all. I believe smokers tossing butts is a reflex, a non-thinking habit.

Let me recount a short story that took place two days after I took the photos of cigarette butts.

I was walking down the Boulevard. As I walked past the smoke shop, a young man stepped outside of the shop and threw a butt onto the sidewalk. When he realized he had almost hit with the butt, he apologized. I stopped and for a moment looked at the butt and the smoke still curling from its lit end. Then I turned to the young man and asked him if he ever thought about the consequences of throwing butts into the street; no he hadn't. I described to him as best I could in a few short sentences the negative impact billions of cigarette butts have on the environment. After he picked up his discarded butt, I asked him to make an effort not to throw butts into the street anymore. I also asked him make the same request of his smoking friends. After the conversation we introduced ourselves and shook hands.

I don't know if our conversation will have any effect on the young man's habit of tossing butts. Neither do I know whether he will encourage his smoking friends to stop tossing butts. But I do know that for the brief span of our conversation, a smoker and a non-smoker found enough common ground to discuss the topic of cigarette litter calmly and without anger or accusations.

Smokers are not aliens or evil people. Smokers are our friends, our family members and our co-workers; they can be reasoned with. If non-smokers engage smokers in conversations similar to the one I had with that young man, I believe the number of cigarette butts tossed into our beaches, rivers, sidewalks, streets and parks would decrease dramatically. As long as non-smokers passively accept the ugliness and negative environmental impact of discarded butts, non-smokers bear some responsibility for butts in the street.

Finally, if you think cigarette butts aren't that big of a problem, San Francisco spends $44 million annually picking up litter, and the mayor's office says $10.7 million of that is attributable to cigarette butts. (Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry_id=40346)

The good.

On Saturday, May 2nd the 14th annual Petaluma River Cleanup took place. On a rainy Saturday morning, approximately 100 people met at the Petaluma Marina parking lot. After a small breakfast, they walked, paddled and drove to places along the Petaluma River and hauled trash and recyclables back to the Marina parking lot. By the end of the day, the volunteers had hauled almost ten cubic yards of debris from the watershed.

The butts and the ugly.

That same night, an unknown number of patrons of downtown Petaluma bars formed in groups outside the bars and as they talked about life tossed hundreds of cigarette butts onto the streets and sidewalks of Petaluma. It rained that night, washing many of the butts into the Petaluma River.

Cigarette filters pose a threat to wildlife that mistake filters for food and ingest them. Used cigarette filters are full of toxic chemicals, tar for example, and those chemicals leach into the ground and waterways, damaging living organisms that contact them. Also, since most filters are discarded with bits of tobacco still attached, cigarette butts further pollute our environment with nicotine.

Smokers, when you finish your cigarette, put it out and put the butt in the trash. Please, don't throw butts into the street anymore.

If cigarette smokers started properly disposing of their butts, there would be a lot less litter. How much less litter? "It's estimated that trillions of filters, filled with toxic chemicals from tobacco, make their way into our environment as discarded waste yearly." (Source: Cigarette Litter and How it Affects Us; http://quitsmoking.about.com/od/cigaretteingredients/a/ciglitter.htm )

Please, if you smoke cigarettes, make a promise to properly dispose of your cigarette butts.

Please, if you smoke cigarettes, try and convince as many of your fellow smokers as you can to properly dispose of their cigarette butts.

And if you don't smoke, do whatever you can to keep butts from littering our beaches, rivers, sidewalks, streets and parks.

Butt wait, there's more-

I am an unabashed Petaluma promoter. There is so much to do in this town and so many activities and events to attend that it seens as if something fun happens every week. The latest event was Petaluma's salute to American Graffiti. For a day a large section of the downtown turned into an open-air auto museum, the likes of which many Americans would be happy to pay admission to.

Last year the photos I took focused (pun intended) on the autos; the emblems, insignias, hubcaps and other details of the fine, old vehicles on display.

This year I decided to concentrate on the people/crowds in attendance with an eye to including local landmarks that identify Petaluma as the site of the show.

There is a world wide transportation system that works all day, every day moving plant seeds quietly and efficiently, without burning fuel and that goes largely unnoticed by most of us. The majority of the work is done by the wind but people and animals also help move seeds from one place to another.

And those seeds wind up in the most unusual places. These photos were taken in the parking lot that sits below Petaluma Boulevard between Playa Azul and the pool parlor near the intersection of Washington Street. It's not hard to imagine seeds blowing into the cracks between the stones that make up the wall. What is difficult to understand is how these plants could sprout and take root without any soil to sink their roots into or any water to keep them alive.