Garden Girl

Me:

Jeremy:

Mr. Garden Girl:

I’m waiting on my fruit trees to arrive (today or tomorrow depending on the whims of weather). And while I wait, I’m thinking about berry bushes to be. I love blackberries and I’m jazzed at the idea of making blackberry preserves.
I’m excited & happy that we are finally at a place where I can start the garden experiment just a little, but I’m also a bit nervous. It’s been a long time since I even helped out in a big garden & I’ve never started a big garden from scratch like I am here.
And we’ve gone deeply into debt to fund this incredibly modest little dream.
Yes, we’ve gone into debt to give up our car, get a home smaller than some peoples’ bathroom and rent- not buy- a small plot of land to grow just a smidgen of food.
So, I’m nervous.
Some would say I’m being reactionary.
They’d say that technology and market demand will address the issues of climate change & oil crunches far more efficiently & effectively than just individuals making some lifestyle changes.

Maybe.

Maybe we need all the help we can get: grass roots initiatives, individual action, technological breakthroughs and changes in policy on the local and national levels.

But, I’m doing it anyway, because this I can do.
It’s empowering to be doing something positive, to take some personal responsibility, to work toward a better more sustainable way of life, to be more of a creator & less of a consumer, to slow my life down and become more thoughtful about the impact of my actions.
This I can do.

(& thanks to http://www.foodshedplanet.com for giving me that one sentence answer to “why?”. If you plan to grow a victory garden this year, you may wish to add your name to the FoodShed Planet Victory Drive found at the link just above.)

(Where does your city rank & what are you doing to put pressure on your city officials to undertake green initiatives?)

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-02/americas-50-greenest-cities?page=1

I just watched one of the most disturbing things on TV that I’ve seen in a while. I recently discovered that one of my favorite NPR radio shows, This American Life, with Ira Glass has also become a TV show of the same name and with the same format. It’s a fascinating, well written show.

The episode I just watched has been out for a while (I download shows from iTunes since I won’t watch TV with commercials) and it has a segment shot in a hog farm. It wasn’t graphic but it did briefly highlight the problems in industrial livestock facilities that most of us in the slow foods movement are painfully aware of: the animals have such weakened immune systems that any person entering the facility must go through a full chemical decontamination process from head to toe. The animals have been bred to put on weight so quickly that at 6 months they are ready for slaughter. They live their lives in tiny little pens without access to fresh air, sunlight , grazing, the touch of their own kind or any other comfort than animals would naturally desire. These facilities are packed with so many animals that they are literally above vast lakes of excrement that end up making the residents of the areas near them sick and eventually this excrement finds its way to the ocean where it is still so toxic that it poisons the seas.

Now here’s the part that may surprise you. This isn’t what disturbed me about the episode. Oh, not to say that I am not disturbed by all that. Of course I am, but I’ve been disturbed by factory farms long before I saw this episode. I wasn’t even very disturbed by how disturbed the crew of This American Life was upon learning what conditions are like in these places. I expect most people in our culture to have very little idea of how food gets to their plate.

Here’s what disturbed me: while filming at a hog farm, the sound man for This American Life witnessed a sow giving birth. And you know what? Among all the other events he witnessed at the hog farm, among all the events I’ve described above, it was that event– the birth of some piglets–that caused him to become sick to his stomach. He threw up. & he couldn’t eat meat after that.

The one normal & life affirming thing that I saw in that entire segment is the thing that freaked him out.
Now that’s just odd to me, because the last time I checked that is how we all got here. We are all critters born of other critters.

I don’t want to pick on the man, because I really don’t know *why* he became so repulsed by witnessing such an universal event, but that fact that he said something about being grossed out at seeing those piglets “shooting out of a pig’s ass” (ass?!) leads me to think that he may be rather fundamentally psychologically disassociated from the very basics of biological functions in mammals. & I don’t think he is alone in that disassociation. In fact, I think it’s that dissociation that is a root cause of factory farms to begin with.

Now I’m not about to lecture anyone on “meat is murder.” Every animal is food for something. It’s true. Including us– no matter how much formaldehyde they fill you up with after you are dead, the microbes will eventually eat you. Whole darn planet is a cafeteria. Just the way it works.

So I am not going to say raising animals for slaughter is wrong. I’m not even going to suggest that we enter into a compact with a livestock animal that requires us to be kind and give that animal as decent a life as possible because we know that eventually we will take its life to feed our own. I’m not going to suggest that because no such compact can exist. I’m pretty sure if any animal knew it was going to be eaten it wouldn’t accede to such an agreement no matter how good a life we gave it.

No.

But I am going to say this: we should treat livestock humanely because to not do so diminishes our ability to empathize. When we do callous acts we must, of necessity, become more detached from our sense of right and wrong. We must became more detached from ourselves, lest we feel the hot uncomfortable wriggle of shame in our bellies that candid introspection would elicit. And becoming more detached we become more likely to lose more & more of our ethical bearings and empathy.

In a word- it’s harmful to *ourselves* when we treat animals as simply parts of an industrial machine.
And, I would further posit, it becomes easier for us as we become lost and numbed to treat each other as cogs in that same wheel over time.

Now, that I find disturbing.

A brief post on Lance’s new shop here-
http://www.carectomy.com/index.php/Bikes/Lances-New-Bike-Shop-For-Commuters

Lance is my hero.
I get so frustrated — the answer to our energy problems is not to rely on the dirty costly replacement fuels that will allow us to keep driving Suburbans to McMansions an hour and a half out of town. That is a terrible idea– esp. if the rest of the world adopts that paradigm (& it is: China is investing in liquid coal which is even worse for the planet than our “clean coal”, India will likely go nuke… all because their millions of newly monied working class folks want the American Dream).
& the American Dream seems to lead primarily to heart attacks & spiritual voids.
We can build livable & walkable bike & public transit friendly cities and towns with distributed energy & farming (gardening) built into the design.
There’s a video on decentralized energy that explains it briefly here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klooRS-Jjyo&eurl=http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/2/7/223620/3925

I’m already seeing the new victory garden movement get hip in some U.S. cities to the idea of urban distributed farming (everything from co-ops where different gardeners share produce with other garden co-op members to adopting the British allotment gardening idea, which are like our community gardens, but instead of sharing a whole garden, each community member has a small plot of their own.)

We can have towns energy efficient enough that we could live comfortably on clean renewables & people would drop their stress levels and have more leisure time & more beautiful & human friendly environments to spend that time in.

We’d be happier, healthier & we’d do it without having to figure out what to do about ever expanding energy needs– because we’d actually have less energy needs due to efficiency.

We already have the tech for this.
We need new infrastructure & city design & planning.
We need political will & public education, we need to make it attractive and easy for people to get out of their cars.

Austin energy’s Green Choice program allows residents of Austin to buy their power from green sources.

Subscribe to Green Choice energy here

Being 2 weeks away from moving into a new home has engendered some thoughts about need vs. convenience vs. want in my purchasing habits. In a way, I’m very much looking forward to having 600 sq. feet of living space divided by two people because I think it will keep my spouse and I very honest about prioritizing our material thing-age.

Regular readers of the amazing No Impact Man may already be aware of some interesting studies he’s cited indicating that, up to a degree, creature comforts beyond our needs ease our stress but having more things far beyond that point, in fact, decreases human happiness and *adds* stress to our lives (we have more responsibilities, more worries, more ego investment in our things and less time & energy for human contact).

So, voluntary simplicity is not just a good thing to do to reduce pollution and resource use, it’s also a good thing to do to increase one’s own well being and happiness.

I can’t emphasize enough how going greener hasn’t been a deprivation for my family– it’s actually made us more content, healthier & more joyful.

Still, moving does mean getting some things for the new abode and where *do without* won’t do, I’m looking for the most ethical buying choices I can make.

There’s a huge amount of waste in the big box store system.
There’s the waste of resources in the insane amount of packaging, shipping and overage and the waste of human potential in using labor purchased under unfair and often inhumane conditions.

(If you want to shock yourself, take a moment each time you throw out a piece of plastic this week and think about where it came from, how it was produced and where it will end up. Then multiply that times how much plastic you’ll go thru in your life. Now you know why I eschew shampoo and conditioner for natural bar soaps that come unwrapped and liquid deodorant for LUSH brand deodorants.)

So, I may have to go to Lowe’s for my new shower head, but I’m buying my house numbers from an artisan on Etsy .
Some other things I’ll be getting from my local Goodwill or Goodwill online.

Re- use is another way to walk a little lighter.

Buy an old thing