Tools

I have wondered what our world would be like if we CHOSE to build tools that only used human power to do the work they assisted us with.

No pollution and no need for a gym membership, or the vast
amount of entertainments that we currently use.
(picture taken from internet)

This seems like a reasonable choice.  We'd still mine and smelt ore.  We'd still manufacture things........
But,
Instead of a leaf blower we'd use a rake.

Instead of a car we'd use a bicycle, or maybe a horse.

Instead of a dryer we'd hang clothes in the sun, or by a wood stove.

In so many ways we might remove so many of the problems that we have created with machinery.

We might have less traffic fatalities due to high speed collisions, and we'd have less pollution from cars.  True we'd have do deal with horse shit if we used them for transportation, but that can be absorbed by the earth and even used as fertilizer, adding to the quality of the soil.

We'd need more people to do the work that is now done by machinery.  The jobs are traditionally less paying but then maybe the goods made would have to cost more to balance out the whole system.

Owners of farms have said that they can't afford to pay workers, but that is a construct of man.  If the food cost what it does in labor to grow it then the price at the market should reflect that.  What choice is there otherwise, not to eat.  Each laborer on the farm should be able to eat well if he, or she, is in fact doing the work it takes to grow the actual food.  Doesn't that just seem reasonable?

I'd rather here my neighbor's rake dragging across his leaf and stone than the whining motor of his leaf blower.

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.

Growth

Slogan about Gross National Happiness in Thimphu's School of Traditional Arts. Photo by Italian writer Mario Biondi, September 2010, taken without permission from Wikipedia.

It has been said that one can have "To much of a good thing".  We want our children to grow from little babies to adults.  We want to increase our knowledge and understanding of our world.  We go from making what we earn with an after school job to what we earn in our careers.  Growth can be perceived as good.  We also become Obese.  We become dependent on advancing technology.  We base our economies, personal and national, on concepts of infinite growth.  When a bubble grows to large it bursts.

Why do we hold it so high in our society, to grow with out a goal to be achieved by that growth?  Our nations economy is a very good, bad example of this concept.  Maybe it is that we have just lost sight of what should be the real goal, securing the tools needed to allow each citizen to create a good life.  Measures of GDP are simplistic and don't reflect the true quality of life for the majority of citizens or the geophysical entity that is our country.  What good is it to be the richest nation in the world but can't and don't feed your people from your own land, your own labor?  The largest military in the world is now needed to pacify other peoples instead of creating security from our ability to be self supporting.  That same enormous amount of resource that supports our military could, I suppose, support a network of small local agriculture, and business that could provide for all who are taxed for it, AND, create a system of support for other countries and people to find ways of doing the same, and probably have money left over to keep some kind of military going because the reality of life necessitates such.

Growth is good to achieve a goal,  and then it should give way to maintenance and reason, gratitude and peace.

Their is social pressure to have an ever increasing income, or at least, to make as much money as one can.  But to what ends?  I read that studies were done that pointed out that after people made ENOUGH money to provide the basics of a good life, that having MORE money did not really make their lives happier, or less stressful.  You can read many accounts of people who have won a lottery and then not have a life of ease and happiness that you'd expect to be the result.

I have heard it said, "I want it better for my kids than I had it."  I found this to be a idea that I easily agreed with at first, but now it seems a bit strange.  I guess defining "better" would have to be done first.  Most often in our society the definition is linked to a financial or material meaning.  I find that definition lacking.  How bad did those people have it that say this?  I can see the side of those coming from histories of severe repression or violence.  But those things can and do exist for people of all income classes.  If you have lived a decent lifestyle, especially in this country, and been able to raise a family, afford the basic needs of life, food, and shelter then you've had more than most of the human beings on the planet have.

I was not born into privilege.  The people living next door to me as a child had no electricity and bought their water from my family and filled up their pales with it each day.  I do not wish more for my children than to know the richness of life, love and health of mind and body.  All the rest is the experience that makes life interesting, an education that can only be got in living, and that is steeped in truth's that the university can not teach as well, if at all.

I wish my children to have lives as rich.  Growth, the idea that I would must give them more than what I grew up with doesn't allow for true gratitude for the life I have been able to experience.  It might say that I am dissatisfied with who I am, or embarrassed by my place in life, and that I wish them to have better.  this is not the case.  I want for them to have good lives, as I have had a good life.

For every challenge in my life that I can think of, I have survived and received something.


In exchange for growing up in a family that didn't have a lot of money I learned how to work and earn money when needed.  I learned that I didn't know I was poor until the world told me so, meaning, I did not want for food, shelter, love.  I learned that my identity comes from within, not from a corporate logo or a fashion trend.  I got time with my family instead of things to occupy my time.

I couldn't afford many things I wanted in my life.  This was formative in much of my path in life.  I never could have planned the richness and experience that I got from that circumstance.  Because of that path I met people I will always hold dear in my heart.  In the end, I still went on to achieve much of what I wanted , and have dreams remaining to inspire me on in the rest of my journey.  This is not, and will not be everybody's experience, but to some degree, I think we are all capable of making our lives truly wonderful.

I want to help my children in pursuit of their dreams and let them live out their lives as they choose to make them.  I have no dreams for my own for them other than being happy and capable of dealing with what comes in a way that will allow them to one day say, "It was a good life".

Not more, but enough.

When you look at the rest of the world you will see that nothing grows infinitely, that in fact, most systems and organisms, great and small, may gain and lose to some degree, but have a greater stability.  The ones that don't usually die out.

My first home was small, the second one is just about the same size, maybe smaller in usable space.  It is enough.  At one point my income swelled to what would be considered really good.  With that growth came an inverse amount of happiness and satisfaction with my life.  Now money is not what brings happiness or peace.  This is a growth that I desire.  I have read that in Bhutan, Gross Domestic Happiness is of greater importance than Gross Domestic Product.

Inertia, the end of an affair

It was my little sister who gave the "push".  I woke up this morning to find, not only her email, but a link to her blog.  Now we will have, not dueling, but co-operating blogs about our paths to a better living, home, family, community, country, world, or, at least, paths to some fun and adventure.  Today, will be one of my worst days of the year for energy consumption, as I have to travel into the city to light a event.  This means that I will be burning petrol to get to the job, and it means that tens of thousands of watts of electricity will burn all day and into the night because of what I design.  I am trying to design with less light but there is a limit to how little one can use to light the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world.  Working in the Arts & Entertainment industry has had it's part in the "push" as well.  When one see's, or is part of the wastefulness that takes place in that endeavor, it raises many questions about the benefit to soulful side of the human condition, when it costs so much to the physical side.  Can we really separate the two?  A few years ago I began to feel the need for change in the way I lived.  Now, still in the beginning of that hunt for a more reasonable way, I am so very far from where I began.  Now, I will share some of that strange trip and hopefully some of what is yet to come, what can be seen ahead from where I am now.  Thanks to my little sister, who's path is different but parallel.  It is an amazing age we live in that we can all write and share and possibly even converse, in a way, the globe over.