Garden as if your life depended on it
Hat tip to Henry for alerting us to Ellen LaConte’s piece on producing your own food. linked below.
This is catching on here in our new little town of around 20,000 souls. Hereabouts it’s a church thing. The Adrian Ecumenical Forum has just begun making donation community gardens, one 500 square footer that will be prominently visible from the main intersection at the center of town. The Presbyterians are doing it. The Lutherans are doing it. The Methodists are doing it. The Disciples are doing it. The Catholics are doing it. The United Church of Christ is leaning forward.
Adrian (our town) is home to the Adrian Dominican Sisters, a fearless order of social gospel women. One of them that is about to return to the motherhouse is Carol Coston, who helped found Sisterfarm, a permaculture complex in Texas. There is talk of a forest garden on the ADS property near their college – Siena Heights University. My new best buddy, Fr. Bob Schramm – who has the biggest bilingual congregation in this region – has caught the bug, calling this move to the soil “providential.” Siena Heights has a student group that will start gardening this Spring, and a recent teach-in on food praxis was attended by about 250 very switched on people.
The prison here even has a garden and a greenhouse, and we are partnering with them to use their greenhouse and promote their prison garden program… which the men who work there value a great deal (it’s a living place among the living dead).
Spring is a time of renewal, and these things feel like renewal. Good news ought to be shared. Now, here is Ellen LeConte’s piece:
Spring has sprung—at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it—and the grass has ‘riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food—all of which are also becoming more expensive—or less food.
In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it’s 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!
Henry:
I forget if these have been posted here before, but here go two more good sites:
http://onestrawrob.com/2010/12/evolving-suburbia/
Institute for Local Self-Reliance:
http://www.ilsr.org/
31 March 2011, 12:44 am31 March 2011, 12:42 am
Kim Sky:
Unbelievable look at poverty — March 6 60 Minutes Program.
Virtually nothing like this has been reported on US television, which makes this piece all the more shocking!!!
Link: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358682n&tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.9
I suggest everyone watch the first ten minutes of this show.
And yes — the hunger thing — wow, I have friends not eating for a day or two at a time. Told them they don’t need to go hungry with me around. I guess I’m going to have to get more aggressive? Heck, I don’t know, so confusing confronting the shame, the pain, I’m at least saying, the “recovery” has not happened — at all. You’re lucky you have a job (that barely, barely pays).
Without food, without shelter, growing food, waiting ? how many months.
I know, I know — spring is here, hip, hip!
Blessing to all!
31 March 2011, 7:27 amDeAnander:
I would like to observe a moment of silence for Hisashi Tarukawa. I’d like his name to be remembered.
Farmer Commits Suicide:
From Asahi Shinbun:
Worse still, he saw it coming:
Thirty years of steady effort, passion, care and love destroyed overnight. Not so much by the quake and tsunami — those are disasters from which healing is possible. But the contamination of his beautiful crop by the permanent taint of radiation from the nuclear plant… a lifetime’s skill and knowledge trashed, just like that — his land maybe poisoned for generations to come… There are no words for such a loss.
Hisashi Tarukawa was farming as if our lives depended on it — which they do.
But he and his land and his crop were destroyed by people who specify and build technology as though our lives depended instead on having a bigger TV and larger neon signs, more air conditioners and fancy kitchen gadgets — growth at any price, more more more. People who worship money as if our lives depended on it, which they don’t (or shouldn’t).
Tens of thousands of lives have been, and will be, laid waste by the disaster, particularly its nuclear aspect. But our little primate brains are not well-equipped to understand and grieve for mass death. There’s something anaesthetising about the sheer numbers, as there often is with major trauma: we feel a splinter or a small cut more immediately and painfully than a life-threatening bullet wound, or so I’m told. I realised this when I found myself weeping quietly, for the first time since the tsunami, when I read about Tarukawa-san’s suicide. Here was a tragedy on a human scale, something my little monkey brain could grasp fully, and yet containing within it every element of our present predicament and possible doom.
I would like to see Hisashi Tarukawa remembered. I’d like to see something named after him. He was one of the amorphous elusive “Us” who are living and feeling and acting, within our limited powers, against the death-cult. He was a friend of the earthworm and the compost pile and I feel that this somehow made him a friend of mine.
His loss is a paper-cut by comparison to the total butcher’s bill from this dead-end technology. But I feel it keenly.
1 April 2011, 3:12 pmStan:
Amen.
1 April 2011, 3:58 pmIrene Reti:
Well said, De. I’ve been thinking about how the community supported agriculture movement that so many of us value was started partly by women in Japan and I was wondering about organic farmers in Japan, but had not heard about Tarukawa. You are so right that the scale of disasters happening all around us is anesthetizing, and renders our lives absurd.
1 April 2011, 4:17 pmStan:
FDA goes after the Amish
corrected
1 April 2011, 4:53 pmRobert Karaffa:
Just returned from a (very photographic by the way)tour of South FL. There’s no way to tell this story; photos look like Kansas with more water and a few similar and different crops…and you can’t believe what that canal from the big lake dumps into the inlets on the East Coast. Just totally changes every characteristic of the water. A friend says “dynamite that thing shut.” Spray planes fly…Stuff…all kinds of stuff grows…bad history is buried…towns brag of corporate ownership on welcome signs. King Sugar. Fux news plays 19/7 in bars. You really feel like the whole sunny plain is waiting for disaster. Newcomers wonder if they want to stay. I tell them its gonna get hot…damn hot and if you are from PA or OH or MI you must know it won’t get cool at night and the heat will turn on in about a week and a half and not stop till early NOV. The jewel in the midst of this: Fisheating Creek…paradise with a few cows and tons of feral citris from the Spanish. This is the only free flowing creek into the lake. My son clicks off the names of invasive vs. native species as we walk…yeah..I’ll go back there.
1 April 2011, 9:52 pmRobert Karaffa:
Should have posted that under Big Ag…sorry
1 April 2011, 10:04 pmDeAnander:
A commmenter on an Oil Drum thread put it bluntly:
Too unsafe to tell the truth.
But certainly not “too cheap to meter”.
2 April 2011, 2:15 amDeAnander:
One more quote for the night… Reuters summarising the situation, defines some rather revealing insider jargon:
Oil Drum comment adds
Again, this is “safe” nuclear power? An industry where they *need* to come up with a jargon like “glow boys” to describe a work cadre like this?
“For a fistful of rubles…”
2 April 2011, 2:56 amMorocco Bama:
De, thanks for that link about Hasashi Tarukawa. His fate may ultimately be our fate. In particular, the sentiment of your comments match the sentiment of mine when the Japanese Nuclear Crisis began. On another blog, the blogger had created a thread with the title “Burning Down The House To Generate Heat.” Ironically, the title didn’t have anything to do with the unfolding Nuclear crisis in Japan, but instead how the current economic system destroys value. I thought that the title applied to the Nuclear crisis, as well, so I posted this:
“”The title of the thread is figurative, of course, but when one applies it to Japan’s impending Nuclear catastrophe, and Nuclear power in general, it is quite literal. Our species may well have been able to survive a natural event that physically destroys much of our human-made infrastructure, but when you take the implications of all the Nuclear Power stations in the world melting down concomitantly, there is simply no chance for survival, thus science enjoined to greed has secured the fate of our species, and of most living organisms on earth. Nuclear power was always an abomination….a genie that should never have been loosed from its bottle, but like the story of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden, humankind couldn’t contain itself, it had to eat of the one forbidden tree. I’m not religious, rather a strong agnostic, but that story is great metaphor for the advent of Civilization and its technological implications. Once humankind crossed over from hunter-gatherer to Civilization based on centralized and planned economies, we ate of the tree and our fate was sealed, because destructive outcomes could now be centralized, concentrated and highly leveraged to a much more substantial percentage of the entire population than was ever previously possible under a highly diversified, and geographically dispersed hunter-gatherer society.”"
I got this response, among others that were rather vitriolic, being called an eco-liberal who hated humanity.
“”I think you’re being much too morose Morocco. Any event that causes meltdowns to occur in a large percentage of the worlds nuclear reactors is probably an event that we wouldn’t have survived in any case, thus I don’t see that as an actual problem.
Also, yes, we’re in the unique position of being able to destroy ourselves, but that doesn’t mean that we will. Humans we’re just as likely to become extinct in the natural world even without technology and civilization (some population bottleneck theories say that we damn near disappeared at a few points), so I for one will take the risk of technology over natures vicissitudes.”"
I responded to this individual as follows:
“”I disagree, Suspenders. The system that now flourishes despises diversity and seeks homogeneity, on a grand reproducible scale, allowing for faulty decisions to affect every single individual, and life form on the planet. Diversity via decentralized societal structures stand a much greater probability of surviving such an event.
It’s not a matter of you, or I, taking or not taking anything. It’s here and it’s what we have, and it’s what we’re going to have, and it’s what will be the death of us. It doesn’t care what you, or I, think about it. It marches on, unassailed. You/I feed it, and it feeds you/I everyday, day in and day out, year after year, until we’re no more.
Oh, and nature’s vicissitudes will occur regardless of our technology, and also, partly, because of it. Technology doesn’t trump nature….it’s the other way around. In the case of the unfolding nuclear power crisis, technology ensures our fate when a catastrophic natural event unfolds….an event that didn’t have to be extinction level.
Of course, I’m sure the dime store centrist faux liberals would conjecture that such an existence would be likened to no existence at all, so why not end it all if you can’t have Williams-Sonoma, Starbucks, Volvo and Fiji bottled water.”"
2 April 2011, 9:12 amStan:
In most of the at least semi-reliable analyses of the Arab uprising, food prices were one of the Big Issues. Heading out right now, but I’ll be looking for links on this soon. Encourage others to do the same.
3 April 2011, 6:39 amMorocco Bama:
I’ll start off, Stan. Here’s a link where Paul Krugman contends that it is Global Warming that has caused the Middle East Uprisings.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/02/paul-krugman-blames-global-warming-for-middle-east-uprisings/21196/
This is the sort of thing I was afraid of when I watched the Establishment not only adopt, but co-opt and usurp the grassroots Environmentalist Movement and define it in their own terms and misdirect it with their faux concern and solutions that are intended to only benefit, once more, the Plutocratic Oligarchy.
The implication is that there’s nobody to blame but ourselves for the “Middle East Uprisings.” No, the CIA isn’t inculcating unrest in the Middle East in order to use a push n pull strategy for regime change in a number of resource strategic countries. No, it couldn’t be due to greedy Plutocratic Wall Street Investment Firms further concentrating their wealth, and the wealth of their fellow Plutocrats, by speculating on the price of everything….maybe even, one day soon, us….the Plebes. No, it’s this hard to pin down character known as Global Warming. See, Global Warming can’t be apprehended, tried and convicted of the thousand and one crimes for which it is apparently responsible…unlike certain persons and or organizations. It’s clever and ingenious, I’ll give them that.
I had this to say on another forum about the issue after the blogger had posted this video as a taunt to “Deniers.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cqBURjOdOG8
“”Am I supposed to be heartened by this video because it somehow shoots a spear into the heart of “Deniers?” I am not heartened by this, at all, and I’m not interested in scoring points against “Deniers.” I don’t recognize that term, and I try not to use it.
What’s disheartening about this video is exactly what I have been saying is happening with this whole Climate debate. ACC, or AGW, have usurped true Environmentalism and are now front and center. The former Environmentalists have forgotten the Environment, and now the Climate has become the Environment. Bullshit. The Climate is only part of the Ecology of this planet, albeit an important part, but it’s not the whole picture, and it’s not a clear picture, regardless of what the experts say.
Is this what we want? Do we want a militarized response to Climate Change? Because that’s what this video says, and that’s what we’re going to get. The gobs of money that were forwarded to Climate Study, making it the industry it now is, came from very wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions who have agendas of their own that may not have your best interests at heart, although they may want you believe they do whilst they pull the carpet out from under you.
The impact of human behavior on the environment that creates and sustains life, and let’s not forget Quality of Life, on this planet should be the focus. It’s why I respect you and your blog, because you are about the environment. Yes, the climate is a significant part of that, but that’s just it…it’s part of it, and we shouldn’t lose the fact that it’s our impact on the Environment that matters. Creating clean energy to facilitate further Capitalistic growth, meaning the further exploitation of non-fossil fuel resources like WATER….is NOT THE ANSWER. We know as intelligent beings that is a lie. We’re kidding ourselves. We must apologize to the Earth, and the Universe for our way of life, and we must radically change that way of life now. A militarized response to Climate Changes is not the answer…it’s insanity. The military is the largest polluter on the face of the earth, and it exists to protect the interests of other polluters. Militaries everywhere have to go if we want to have any chance of mitigating a complete apocalypse.
Also, it’s disheartening to see them show pictures of Katrina as proof of ACC. That’s blatant misdirection. Katrina was as destructive as it was because New Orleans was always vulnerable to a Hurricane because it’s at or below sea level and the levies were neglected for years, decades even.
What about all the people who are dying from pollution related deaths? It puts what happened during Katrina in perspective. Katrina is dwarfed by the systematic daily destruction of life, and quality of life, on this planet from needless, egregious pollution. I don’t want to address that issue from the trap backdoor of Climate Change. I want to address that through the front door of Environmentalism, and as a consequence, the Climate will resolve once we stop polluting.”"
3 April 2011, 9:36 amCurt:
Morocco,
3 April 2011, 12:52 pmWhen you say that even if we had lots of clean engery human economic appetites would not diminish and we would end up devouring other resources until we reached a crisis anyways. That makes sense to me.
I have been wanting to repeat something Charles says, I think it is Charles anyways. There is no such thing as an unplanned spontaneous ecomomy. Economic planning is inevitable. The only question is who is going to plan it. I see what you just wrote and what Charles says as being connected. Someone else wrote recently how incredibly complex
the world (modern economies?) is. So complex that that no one human can even understand how complex that it is.
There was this program on a few years ago called Flash Forward. A computer was being used to keep track of everyone’s peice of a picture in to the future. To me it makes a lot more sense to use a computer in that way that to use to try to decode every coded radio or email message that the Russians or the Iranians send out. I mean to use computers to see how everything connects with everything else. So when a widget is turned in Argenitina one can see how in a snap shot gadgets will react in Shangahi. Then of course the computers are going to have to be programed to account for gadgets being turned all over the world at the same time and how they all interact with each other. Of course that will take a really really big computer. Then the computer is going to have to be programed to show what will happen once a single small change is made to the whole system.
Then it will have to be able to predict a series of changes perhaps made simultaneously.
It sounds to me like an almost impossible task. It is not something that I can do. I can garden like my life depended on it. Yet I do not believe for a second that if I gardened and composted like my life depended on it it would change anything more than an ant chewing on the hoof of a cow.
Someone else has to do the computer thingy and then on top of that they have to be able to carry out the results. We do not even know what the results will be. Maybe the results will be garden and compost like your life depends on it there is nothing more that you while you are waiting to die.
Chris Schneider:
Curt
3 April 2011, 9:14 pmI feel that the sense of ineffectuality you express in terms of gardening and composting demonstrates the extent to which we have lost touch with our source. I appreciate the metaphor however. Ants make up the biggest percentage of life by weight in many regions of the world including the Amazon and it would be to everyones benefit were they to rise up and consume the cattle roaming there thus sequestering the biomass that is otherwise destined to become Big Macs. One doesnt need a computer to sense the interconnectedness of things. It is spiritual starvation that leads to such messianic faith whether it be in technology or the economy. Money isnt edible nor is plutonium. Feeding into something that cant feed you is the surest path to extinction.
Curt:
thank you Chris
4 April 2011, 8:33 amMorocco Bama:
Very good point, Chris. As an example, the increasing reliance on computers and electronic circuitry when combined with Nuclear Power in its current state renders us extremely vulnerable to a significant EMP event from a significant solar explosion. Think about all the back-up generators being rendered useless at the Nuclear Power Plants in the Northern Hemisphere because the electronics have been fried by a catastrophic EMP event. Imagine a substantial percentage of them melting down concomitantly as a result. An event we could have otherwise survived, will now be an extinction level event. Now think about the idiot who says he will take his chances with technology. We’ve been rolling the dice all these years but I’m afraid the Luck Jar is nearly empty and the Piper Is Calling. Curt, I’m not saying you are the idiot, I’m saying the person on that other forum who told me they would rather take their chances with technology.
http://www.futurescience.com/emp.html
4 April 2011, 8:47 amCurt:
Morocco,
4 April 2011, 4:06 pmI didnt think that you were calling me an idiot.
My comment had nutten to do with nuclear energy one way or the other. It was about economic planning in general. And more specifically those people who are misusing useful resources like super computers to do things that might serve the MIC but do not serve the nation. It is my understanding that the NSA has lots of super computers. It is really really to bad that the NSA seems to be an organization with no brains that understand what a supercomputer is for.
Cod Sole Sea Bass Tuna Salmon Herring Anchovies Oysters Shrimp Lobster Crabs
That type of name calling should not be prohibited in any office.
Stan:
Start watching the online news for reports about stagflation… a threat in the background for almost a decade now. They may or may not mention that the two biggest items on the inflation list – even as joblessness continues and threatens to spike again when the next Fed bubble pops – are fuel and food.
FULL
4 April 2011, 8:10 pmDeAnander:
The Edible Dynamic: food politics, food as politics, the politicising power of food, the politics of pleasure…
6 April 2011, 6:04 pmDeAnander:
I’m just going to comment — partly in sarcasm and partly with genuine exploratory intent — that contrasting with the Edible Dynamic is the Inedible Dynamic of the manufactured world. The Inedible is displacing the Edible. Moreover, the Unspeakable are definitely in full pursuit of it
footnote
You can’t eat your iPod
6 April 2011, 6:08 pmCharles:
Urban Roots Film Trailer
https://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_174885082551296&id=200082470031557#!/video/video.php?v=10150212273737848&oid=290457843694&comments
Urban Roots Film Trailer [HQ]
11 April 2011, 9:17 amby Urban Roots (videos)
3:21
Urban Roots is the next documentary from Tree Media. Produced by Leila Conners (The 11th Hour) and Mathew Schmid and directed by Mark MacInnis, the film follows the urban farming phenomenon in Detroit. Urban Roots is a timely, moving and inspiring film that speaks to a nation grappling with collapsed industrial towns and the need to forge a sustainable and prosperous future.
Stan:
Just posted this trailer on FB a few days ago. Excellent stuff!!! Thanks Charles.
11 April 2011, 1:33 pmJosiah:
I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this, since I live in Detroit and have heard of some of the folks in the trailer. Thanks for posting; it’s on the to-watch list.
11 April 2011, 6:14 pmCurt:
We are having beautiful spring weather here. I decided to enjoy it and go for a walk. I was walking through this beautiful little Dutch Village known as Rimburg.
I was noticing the small artistic details in the village. I thought, how wonderful it would be if all over the world people did not have to worry about staying alive for the next 48 hours but were able to spend lots of time figuring out to beautify their village or neighborhood. My thoughts drifted to bamboo and all of the things that could be done with it in a sustainable world. Then I remembered that I had read an article here at FS that pointed out somen other renewable resource that could be even more important than Bamboo. I could not and still can not remember what that resource is. I wondered was it Hemp? I thought, No, it was not hemp but hemp along with Bamboo could surely play a much more important role in creating a sustainable world society. At that very second a waiter who was serving Beer at a table of an outdoor cafe droped a glass full of beer on the sidewalk.
Do I really need to add any emphasis to this story? If you do not see the connection perhaps you are not really a feralscholar. .
.
22 April 2011, 10:40 amStan:
Here is Elinor Ostrom on “place,” etc.
More on Ostrom.
23 April 2011, 9:35 amCurt:
A quite interesting thing just happened. I had fallen in to a light sleep in front of the TV after lunch when suddenly I was awakened by the volumn on the TV going up.
10 May 2011, 8:09 amI heard the narrator say, all ground contains some level of uranium but the more the ground is fertalized the highter the uranium level is. This was on Phoniex TV between 2:30 and 3:00 pm. If it would be an exagguratiion to call such an event a miracle I think that at least the word incident would be appropriate. Now I should clarify that the few minutes of the program that I actually saw was specifically about phosphate fertalizers, not compost or manure. I heard the narrator say that this problem of uranium in commercial fertalzers was first noticed some time ago but they were now going to test several brands to see if the problem has gotten better or stayed the same. I turned off the TV though before I heard the results. I myself find info this pretty darned important. I do not think that it has ever been brought up here before. I do not have any idea though what people are saying behind my back unless I am in the same room with them and I can do a brain scan. So if you were already very aware of this you can not hold it against me for bringing it to your attention.
Curt:
Of course the question that can not be asked is why the German authorities did not report this information to me sooner. The obvious answer is because they thought that I already knew. Because they can not be say that in public it is best not to ask the question.
10 May 2011, 11:35 amStan:
This looks like a great film.
Definitely, watch the trailer.
11 June 2011, 7:53 amMichael Anderson:
http://slaveryfootprint.org/ipad.html
There’s more than just food here…it’s everything we own! But, the food and gadgets sections of the survey on the website are telling.
There are no considerations for home-grown food or buying second hand, but still…
9 January 2013, 8:42 amMichael Anderson:
The original Guardian article…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/04/lucy-mangan-how-many-slaves
9 January 2013, 3:56 pm