we are soooo connected

The interesting thing about nationalism, borders, walls and NIMBY thinking (not in my backyard) is that their resurgence is happening at the same time as worldwide events shake us up to the realization that in the end we’re all connected across national borders as inhabitants of one shared planet.

Heavy petroleum use for energy production, transportation and industrial agricultural practices, ongoing deforestation, industrialized meat production, and single-use plastic consumption all contribute to pollution and climate change in a major way, not just where they originate, but worldwide.  

While the coronavirus is for the time being mainly a health concern in its country of origin, Chinese manufacturing is slowing down because Chinese workers are staying home under quarantine, and that affects economies worldwide.  

The Ethiopian Nile Dam that is supposed to bring one of the poorest countries in the world some much needed economic relief, is at the same time threatening water supply, farming viability and livelihood for the one hundred million Egyptians living downstream.

Borders and walls are physical representations of a limiting belief system.   Until we expand our consciousness, we will build walls, transport our garbage and recyclables to other countries, exit climate agreements, and send refugees back.  Change begins with you and me.

the bigger connection

We’re coming to a time of year that more than any other time is about connecting, not only with family, friends, or community, but also on a bigger level to culture and Nature.  Thanksgiving is less about eating turkey and lots of pie, or watching football, or all the prep work and cleaning up after a crowd, although it’s an important cultural aspect and expression.  

Instead, it’s about being together and feeling connected to something bigger. Thanksgiving, as any harvest festival, is about our deep connection to the Earth because it provides us with everything we need to live.  Without good soil and a good harvest, we perish.  If we tend the soil sustainably, we thrive. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Hence, Thanksgiving is about thanking the Earth, our first and foremost nurturer, Mother of all Mothers.  It is about being grateful, not only for the people we celebrate with, but for our existence, for spirit, for that which made us and put us here.  Let’s keep this bigger picture in mind this coming week with the help from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World, which thanks all of Nature for making us possible.  

Thank you.

our antiquated mindset

It can all be so overwhelming – climate change with its scary apparitions in the form of runaway Amazon rainforest fires or melting polar ice caps, the state of our agriculture which has decimated the insect population (produce and fiber crops) and contributed hugely to greenhouse gases and earth’s warming (mainly industrial beef and pork farms, but also the poultry and dairy industries), the grip corporations have over our lives, and on and on.  

And then – we need to remember that we’re wired evolutionarily to react to danger and the negative – to escape that potential saber tooth tiger.  Such physical dangers are no longer there as we as a species have come to dominate life on earth.  Instead, the danger is our antiquated competitive mindset geared to warfare, violence, and attack mode.  Yet, as we have opened up to Eastern philosophies and meditation in the past few decades, we have learned that we can gain control over our mind. Just got to visit those gremlins up in the attic and become conscious and aware of them – and then an amazing shift can happen.

Times are changing and we have to evolve with them.  Our minds are still operating according to paleolithic patterns, while the world around has changed so much.  Because of our danger oriented thinking patterns we have a hard time appreciating the ease with which we live nowadays (i.e. running water, hot showers, warm homes and comfortable clothes, as well as abundant food), the privileges we have gained (i.e. education, freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion), the natural beauty that’s all around us, the endless opportunities we have in this new world (i.e. choice of vocation), the amazing foods from all over the world we can get at any supermarket, and so much more.

Let’s get with the times and try to shift, one mind at a time, to a modern mindset of cooperation, appreciation, wonderment, sustainability, mindfulness, and equality so we can all enjoy the tremendous gains we have made, and heal and appreciate our beautiful planet earth together.

too overwhelming?

Climate change can seem like such an overwhelming issue, and it’s easy to throw your arms up and believe that you can’t do anything about it.  It’s just so big.

Let’s begin then at the other end, with our relationship with nature.  Climate change is a result of our complete disconnection from the natural world.  But what, if not nature, is it that nourishes us and supports our life here on earth?  If our planet earth turned into a desert, into a swamp, into a flooded ocean, or the skies turned murky and gray with pollution, we would perish.  If, on the other hand, our soils are rich, the weather temperate and somewhat predictable, the air and our water are clean, then we can live a beautiful life.  And that has everything to do with each one of us.  With you!

Just refraining from throwing a paper cup out of the car window onto the road, just refraining from carelessly accepting a plastic straw and discarding it after one use, just refraining from idling your car while you bring out the trash or sit on the parking lot waiting for someone, just refraining from buying water in throw-away plastic bottles, just refraining from accepting another single use plastic bag  – makes a difference.  That tiny difference sends a signal that you care.  And maybe next time you’ll care a bit more, and then a bit more yet.  And that’s how you make a difference, and that’s how every movement begins.  When someone cares. 

We can all do something about working towards a more sacred relationship with nature, a relationship that honors and respects it. That’s where healing climate change begins.

nature's resilience

Nature’s resilience and ability to bounce back are awe inspiring.  Five years ago, when we built our current net-zero house, we guiltily took down some trees (we’ve replanted lots and lots since), we disrupted nature all around with heavy machinery and lots of construction noise, earth moving and construction work.  

 It’s taken some time for nature to jumpstart the regeneration effort, but it’s roaring now.  This year especially it struck me how many new trees are popping up everywhere, how fast they are growing, and how many animals are coming again through our property, either for brief visits or for moving in.  Bears, racoons, deer, groundhogs, garter and black racer snakes, lizards and salamanders, box turtles, foxes, squirrels and chipmunks, in addition to hawks, several types of woodpeckers, a whole host of birds, praying mantises, and butterflies are among the visible and apparent species.

Nature is powerful, intuitive, resilient, relentless, and sustainably so much smarter than us. It knows what to do. It is flexible. It is patient. It is very forgiving, until it’s not. Nature let’s us learn, and mess up, and make good again, as long as we respect it. What has nature taught you?

2019

odd produce

Sometimes, established cultural patterns no longer serve, maybe they never have.  Take food waste that stems from unusually shaped produce. Whoever determined that carrots had to be straight and shaped just so?  Not two legs, definitely not three or more legs, only one single root leg, although children delight in detecting animal and human forms in some of these odd shaped root vegetables. That Bell peppers shouldn't be gnarly?  That all apples in a bag had to be the same size? Or that potatoes should be nice and evenly round?  Odd shapes of course do not alter the taste or nutritional content one bit. 

According to the website Ugly Produce is Beautiful, in the US annually "about 6 billion pounds of producego largely unharvested or unsold for aesthetic reasons." That is insane!  What hubris. It's not new news that we don't have to produce more food to stave off world hunger, but that world hunger stems from distribution and waste problems.  Industrialization of the food distribution system made packaging of evenly shaped produce more convenient, although square watermelons did not make it into the mainstream, and supermarkets like the display quality of evenly shaped produce.

The art of living deeply entails inspecting and questioning cultural patterns so that you do something because it makes sense to you, not because everyone else does it - the lemming syndrome.  Through our CSA we get whatever produce is harvested, even or odd shaped, regular or irregular.  And awareness about so-called ugly produce is growing in all industrialized countries. I just signed up for deliveries of ugly organic produce at half price.  Delivered to my door.  Counters food waste. Couldn't be more convenient.

a new math

We are so used to this type of math:

                                    100 - 30 = 70

 But how about this instead?

                                    100 - 30 = 110

The first equation is how conventional agriculture works.  We grow and harvest crops, which deplete the soil of nutrients and minerals, the soil erodes (it literally flies away at alarming rates because the soil lies bare from fall to spring and the wind takes it away), we desperately throw chemical fertilizer and pesticides at it, the ecosystem degrades, insect and bird populations shrink, carbon goes up, we eek out another harvest until the input needs to be increased yet again.

Although there are wide differences in organic practices, the organic label or certification more or less only specifies a clean version of conventional agriculture in that the chemical fertilizers and pesticides are substituted with natural inputs (and no GMOs permitted).  Still, mostly purchased inputs, but not toxic, process is similar.  Soil and mineral content are certainly richer than compared to conventional agriculture, and organic practices maintain the soil, but they don’t by definition regenerate it. Sheldon Frith explains that the main difference between organic and regenerative agriculture is that organic is mainly chemically based, while regenerative is ecologically and biologically based.  

Regenerative agriculture is based on the premise that through a complete understanding of, and cooperation in sync with, the local ecosystem, we end up with something better than where we started.  Wow! Sounds unreal? Regenerative agriculture works without outside inputs and actually rebuilds the soil and ecosystem on an ongoing basis, and even though the crops extract minerals and nutrients from the soil, as time goes by the ecosystem becomes stronger and more complex, and the soil healthier. Regenerative agricultural systems are unique and local with no one-size-fits-all prescriptions.  Biodynamic agriculture and permaculture are such regenerative agricultural models and I have written about them previously.

Key features of regenerative agriculture are the rebuilding and retention of our depleted topsoil through no-till practices and growing perennial crops (I have previously written about these too), the reestablishment of grasslands, and carbon sequestration, among others. Healthier soil means more mineral and nutrient rich food for us, a healthier ecosystem all around, and packing some of that surplus carbon away into the soil.  

Don’t ditch your Prius yet, but this practice counters climate change! Win-win!  

an agricultural act

What you eat is of course closely linked to your health because your body transforms what you eat into energy, and the better the quality of the food (less pesticides and nutrient rich soil), the better your energy and your body's ability to repair its cells and self-heal.

But eating, as Wendell Berry, the great environmental activist and poet, said, is also an agricultural act.  As such it is just as closely linked to the health of our environment through the way we practice agriculture, as it is to your own health.  So what you eat has vast implications.  

You may think that on an individual level eating a conventional versus a sprayed pear may not make much of a difference.  But think about the implications of what 325 million people, the current US population, eat. It makes a difference if you grow your own pears, buy conventional (sprayed with pesticides and artificially fertilized) or organic pears (more natural ways to prevent pests and enrich the soil).  Last year the US produced 737,500 tons of pears.  Growing all of those pears is a huge agricultural act.  And even if less than 10% of those pears are not sprayed with poison, not subject to chemical fertilizer, it does make a difference.  And if the percentage of organic pears produced and purchased each years keeps growing, it makes the world a healthier place. And you are part of that difference.

so much more fabulous

It's alive!  Nature, I mean.  You may have known it all along, or perhaps you're stumped when I say that. The rock under your feet may seem inert and dead.  Crystals are pretty and that's just that.  The trees are doing their growing thing and that's nice because we love shade and timber.   Or you may be on a different path.  If you have animals you know that they have a soul, feelings, character, and you love your pet as if it were your child.   Perhaps you've experienced crystal healing, or you talk to your plants and nurture your garden.

For several hundred years scientists could not have ventured to say something about Nature's inherent intelligence without being discredited.  We deemed indigenous people, who always believed in Nature's sacredness and aliveness, beneath our scientifically oriented "enlightened" mind. 

But science is only true science if we ask all questions and leave the answers to our inquiries open instead of trying to prove what we want confirmed because it conveniently fits within our thinking.  Things shifted a bit with James Lovelock's Gaia Theory in the 1970s, but now the tides are really turning.  "We are transitioning into the reality where everything's alive," author Charles Eisenstein noted.   When your houseplants thrive because you talk to them, maybe it's not an accident that they look beautiful and lush.  When you harvest steadily, Nature picks up on it and produces more, summarizing the gist of Robin Wall Kimmerer's scientific research in her book Braiding Sweetgrass.  Trees are not only connected under the earth via the mycorrhizal mushroom network, something of a botanical nutrient and information internet, they also nurture, help, send information, cooperate, and protect each other, as  Smithsonian Magazine explains in an article about the work of tree researcher Peter Wohlleben.

Nature's intelligence imbues everything, is all pervasive, and we're part of it, not apart from it, as Fritjof Capra and the Francesco Varela/Humberto Maturana team have maintained for years.  Recognition of this intelligence that's all around us and in us, is us, leads to a greater respect for nature, a spirit of cooperation with it, awe for its beauty and perfection, and openness to learning from it and being inspired.  We thought we knew (almost) everything.  But the more we open our mind to Nature's miraculousness and intelligence, the more we discover that we still know so little, that there is so much more to discover, and that life becomes more fabulous the more we pursue this direction.

my personal junkyard

Not all blog posts are about pretty pictures.  My son said that my trunk looks like a junkyard, and he is right (and I cleaned it up for this picture).  

There are the egg cartons to return to the farmer where I buy my eggs.   Batteries to return for recycling to Best Buy.  Plastic flower pot to return to the nursery where I bought some perennials recently.  A whole big pile of reusable cloth bags, a wine carrier, and two cooler bags for my shopping trips.   Cardboard boxes and gently used packaging material to be dropped off at my local shipping center.   A plastic bag stuffed full with recyclable plastic bags to be dropped off in the supermarket plastic bag recycling bin.  Another bag with a few cans and beer bottles to be redeemed at the supermarket bottle center.

I am passionate about reducing my pile of true trash, true trash being the residual cast-off items that go to the landfill because they can't be recycled or reused.  I can't stand waste.  Everything that's put into the garbage increases our overfilled landfills, my personal carbon footprint, and requires more manufacturing - of egg cartons, plastic flower pots, plastic bags, and packaging material.  Take a look here at some reflection worthy recycling and trash facts; and here an earlier post on reducing your trash contribution.    Please mind your trash.