letters to friends

Xxxx,

......It is too bad you don't have the farming/gardening bug, but I don't have it either.  I'd rather be sailing.  I'd rather be traveling and seeing things like the high latitudes, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand.  I'd rather be in my Vanagon traveling to Patagonia or back out west to hang out with the families.

I don't garden because it is a bug I caught, or even an obsession, like sailing and boats are for me.  I do it because I think it is the right thing to do, a responsible way to live and eat and think.

  Most all other living things, actually all other living things, spend their time and energy trying to get food, shelter and sex.  All you have to do is look around to see it.
     Look at a plant, any plant, or a bird, or a raccoon, or a fly or a mouse, or a fish.  Not much time spent watching YouTube for these beings, nor do they spend their time writing emails. Because of the lack of time spent doing these things, and all the other things that only humans do, they don't have the infrastructure needed to support these activities, or the industry that creates them, or the resource exploitation required to supply the raw materials to manufacture them.  They don't build fires to melt ore, or even, to keep themselves warm.  They don't unleash fossil particulates that have been sequestered for thousands of millennia, into the atmosphere while creating fuel to get them from one place to the other.  They aren't so stationary and concentrated in there living situation so as to piss and shit themselves into disease.

I don't garden because it is the only thing I want to be doing.  I do it because no matter what else I change in my life to be reasonable about what I take from the planet, and how I live on it, food is still the one thing, the first thing, I must get and how I get it matters.  

Everything I eat has to be hunted, gathered, or grown or raised.  Most of the food that is in the grocery store is grown or raised, processed and prepared, packaged and transported in ways that are very harmful to all of us.

When I say that  this food is harmful to all of us, I mean all of us, the entire living planet, plants and animals included.  It seems almost impossible that with so many species of living things on the planet, just one of them, humans, could live in a way that is so out of alignment with the system we find ourselves in, that we could threaten most of the living things currently in it, including ourselves.  Yet, this is where we find ourselves.

When we bother to think about how that one little box of cereal came into being, all of the farm land, tractors, pesticides, fertilizers,packaging and transportation used to get it to your table, we should loose our appetite.  If you put some milk on it and think about the way dairy cows live, what they are injected with, subjected to, and the amount of shit they produce, in concentration, then you might just skip your breakfast.

It doesn't have to be this way.  That's why I garden.  That's why I keep a few chickens at home, on my .8 acres of sloped rocky soil that I call home.  All of our waste, stays on site, except for the little bits of plastic and metal that, try as I do, seem to make it to our home and to be way too much.  Most of that is recycled.
     A good portion of the energy we need to live comes from our property too.  The goal is to either get more energy from here and/or, use less.

The positive thing about your 17 acres of land and not gardening, is that you have 17 acres of land that is not being leased to energy companies or logging companies or being razed to create more houses or factories for humans.  That land evolved, over a very long time, to work for the living things that inhabit it and the rest of the planet and continues to.  It is a bit of a preserve in that way.  It is actually working in opposition to all the destructive ways humans are living.  Trees, soil, water, animal life are all existing in a manner that promotes life rather than degrades or destroys it.

You don't have to have the gardening bug to dig up a few feet of earth outside your kitchen door and plant a few beans or carrots or squash.  All you need is to have a bigger view life, and an honest assessment of what each penny you spend supports, where each calorie you burn comes from.  Not only does growing a few vegetables give you a bit of food to eat that has not had to use petroleum to get to your table or be petro-chemically fertilized, but it also puts you right up close to the other living things that have to share this planet with us.  It promotes the nurturing and compassionate side in us.

  

There are great lessons to learn when you put a seed in the ground and water it, and watch it grow.  You have to put it in the right spot for sun and drainage, give it the right environment.  You may have to watch a beetle or a fly or worm or groundhog threaten it and then decide what to do about that.  Do you kill or hurt the thing that wants to feed on your tomato or bean, or do you let it get it's food, just the way you are trying to get your food?  Those "pests" didn't force the cucumber plant to grow here, you did.  They are just hunting and gathering from what is available, the way that their kind and all other kinds, except humans, have always done.  It is then that you will have to decide what kind of person you are willing to be.  

Most of us decide, even though we our lives are short, that our lives, and more importantly, our lifestyles, trump all other lives.  Not just the ones in front of us now, but even those we don't see, don't know, will never know and that will come after us.  If it were just thinking about our own personal lives, instead of our lifestyles, being the most important thing to us, we might act differently.  Then when that groundhog or deer come into your garden to eat your tomato, you'd probably just kill the animal and eat it.  But instead we poison the ground with pesticides that kill other living things that we don't even eat and that don't come chasing after us.  We want it all for ourselves and we want it the way we want it and we don't share well.  

But just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it.

     I know that my garden doesn't feed me completely.  I don't get all of my energy needs from here at my home.  I use things that are made of plastic and other materials that come at high costs to others and the environment, like this computer.  But I am trying to use less and I am aware of what I do use.  

     Every bean that comes from my garden, or even a bean I buy from a local and ethical farmer, is one less that is shipped from far away, in trucks and trains and boats that pollute the air.  It seems to me that if we all made efforts to reduce the harmful tolls we take on the planet, then we all might still be able to enjoy the real and good and meaningful benefits of innovation and technology, without the huge negative affect we have had on the planet over the past century and without threat to the entire system.  

     All it would take is each of us trying to live a reasonable life, walk a Reasonable path.

Peace,

R

P.S. 

I know that reason is subjective, but, the negative affects upon all life, from the way humans live, is not.  We are in a time that is a bit scary.  People in powerful positions hide behind superstition and ignorance in order to sustain and justify their lifestyle.  Some of these people are highly educated and because of that and their money, many align with them.  The polarization that is growing in the world might be largely economic but it has foundations in a philosophy about life and humanity that is short-sighted, simple minded, egotistical, and destructive.  It threatens another dark age in the midst of a technologically advanced society.  So much power, but without the wisdom to use it well.