Responsibility

Enough abstract philosophizing for now. It’s finally time for seeds! 

Well, it’s still too early to do anything with seeds: if I planted out back at this point nothing would survive the frosts. Late February here is warm enough for my dog and me to bask in the afternoon sun, napping and reading respectively, but it’s still cold enough for nightly freezes and sudden flurries of morning snow. 

It’s never too early to obtain seeds, though. And last Saturday I had the perfect opportunity when the Albuquerque and Bernalillo County Public Library hosted their fourth annual public seed swap. For a few hours, the library basement welcomed anyone who wanted (me, please!) to browse table after table of seeds, tucked into everything from plastic baggies to paper lunch sacks to professionally printed packets. 

The energy among my fifty or so fellow participants was palpable, even frenetic—couples exclaiming over tomatillo varieties, a trio of elderly women twittering about which flowers  they’d be able to mix and match this year, hands reaching across each other from all directions to scoop up envelopes promising chiles or chives. 

When I first walked in and that energy seized me I was immediately eager to join the fray, but reading the labels, it hit me: this wasn't so much a sale at the thrift shop as it was adoption day at a shelter. 

That is, the items up for grabs were living beings. Whoever grabbed them was taking responsibility for their lives. 

And the lives of their offspring, and their offspring’s offspring, on and on ad infinitum. The purpose of seed libraries and seed swaps is to keep local heirloom varietals in cultivation year by year, because the year no one tends them and then works to save the next generation of seeds they produce is the year that strain of life goes extinct. 

With this sobering thought, I steadied my hand and my pace. Take only what you need, I reminded myself. Take only what you can commit to caring for fully, from seed to seed. 

Possibility

All these questions with which I’ve been wrestling here over the last couple weeks—questions of how humans can minimize their harm in the world, commit to the land around them, build communities with both people and the larger ecosystem, and develop sustainable food systems—these are what inspired me to break ground in my backyard.

I don’t want to turn a blind eye to my species’ destructive systems and just keep consuming whatever’s convenient regardless of the long-term consequences. I don’t want to float along passively in the industrialized economy, just another part of the problem. 

Instead I want to be part of the solution.

So what can I do?

Can I help change the world?

Changing whole systems seems impossible in my lifetime. The question of where to begin as just one person is daunting. But, faced with that lifelong challenge, and all the frustration and despair that seem inevitable along the way, I can start by empowering myself with this practical, positive step: learning how to grow my own food from scratch, in ways that are healthy for the soil and the local environment, and therefore for me and those around me.

This much I know is possible. And who knows where this first step can lead on the journey toward sustainability for all? I sense a whole world of possibility out there. 

Sustainability

How can we as a species come back from the brink of destructive over-consumption, and turn instead toward more sustainable systems, systems that allow us to obtain the resources we require as part of a balanced ecosystem that can continue to replenish itself (and therefore us) in perpetuity? 

How can we learn to live in harmony with the world that sustains us? 

That is the question. 

And the answers aren’t terribly mysterious or impossibly difficult: we can find them in the lives we humans led for thousands and thousands of years before industrialization threw us into overdrive and drew us away from the land and spiraled us out of all balance. To quote Roxanne Swentzell in her introduction to The Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook:

If our economy dried up tomorrow, if the stores closed, what could you make to eat with the resources you have now? This thought has always led me back to my ancestors, who were the true permaculturalists of this arid Southwest. They figured out how to live sustainably in this environment for thousands of years. I look to them for answers. (p xiv)

Harmony

Farmer and writer Wendell Berry says it so well, I’m just going to let him sum things up for me today. 

If our war against nature destroys the health of water and soil, and thus inevitably the health of agriculture and our own health, and can only lead to our economic ruin, then we need to try another possibility. And there is only one: If we cannot establish an enduring or even a humanly bearable economy by our attempt to defeat nature, then we will have to try living in harmony and cooperation with her.

By its adoption of the healthy ecosystem as the appropriate standard of agricultural performance, The Land Institute has rejected competition as the fundamental principle of economics, and therefore the applied sciences, and has replaced it with the principle of harmony. In doing so, it has placed its work within a lineage and tradition that predate both industrialism and modern science. The theme of a human and even an economic harmony with nature goes back hundreds of years in the literary record. Its age in the prehistoric cultures can only be conjectured, but we may confidently assume that it is ancient, probably as old as the human race. (Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food pp 177-178)

Survival

Humanity’s rampant destruction of ecosystems isn’t just ugly and toxic in the short term, it threatens the long-term viability of the human race. 

What happens the day that dust storms choke our overheated, drought-ridden cities? That entire watersheds dry up or are rendered undrinkable by leaching toxins or pipeline leaks? That blights wipe out hundreds of miles’ worth of a monoculture crop in a single season? As the saying goes, civilization is always only ever nine meals away from anarchy. 

Understanding, respecting, and conserving balance in the world’s ecosystems isn’t a question of setting aside a few gardens for pleasure and pristine parks in which to hike and camp.

It’s not even a question of acknowledging that other animals have as much of a right to life as we do and protecting their natural habitats alongside our urban sprawl. 

It’s recognizing that we humans are ourselves animals within the ecosystem. We are not a species apart, capable of engineering our way out of every crisis simply because we’re armed with a certain degree of scientific understanding. Our living bodies evolved from the natural world and remain deeply dependent on its delicate cycles. Oxygen, water, food: we cannot conjure these vital ingredients for all of humankind; they must come from the ecosystem.

Our survival depends on the health of the land. 

Imbalance

When we look at the realities of humanity’s rampant extraction and consumption of resources, we see that as a species within the global ecosystem, humanity is taking far more than it’s replenishing. 

Once all humans lived in direct relationship with the land and understood that our lives depended on its health. Now, our artificial isolation has allowed us to collectively forget that our species only survives as a member of delicate ecosystems. In our false senses of superiority and security, we’ve come to treat dirt as just so much empty ground to traverse and develop, assume water and food are just another economic product that will be available for purchase in perpetuity, and dismiss the byproducts of our lifestyles as if they can just be whisked away without consequence when we’re through with them. 

When this attitude shapes our decision-making as a species, we feel free to create urban seas of asphalt that bake in the sun and force rainwater into wasteful flash floods. We divert streams and reservoirs away from the environment into bottling plants and golf courses, and pollute water tables with toxic wastes from mining and fracking. We farm endless fields of monoculture crops soaked in pesticides and synthetic fertilizers that strip and poison once-rich topsoil.

In the words of Jane Goodall:

What are we doing to our planet? You know, the famous scientist, E. O. Wilson said that if every person on this planet attains the standard of living of the average European or American, we need three new planets. Today, they are saying four. But we don’t have them. We’ve got one.

And what’s happened? I mean, the question here is, here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that’s ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, capable of the kind of technology that is so well illustrated by these TED Conferences, and yet we’re destroying the only home we have. (TEDGlobal 2007)

We humans have developed the power to throw the planet into a state of such furious overproduction in a few select areas and complete depletion in others that age-old cycles careen wildly out of balance. At our current rates, we’re on track to consume and pollute until we’ve utterly ravaged the very ecosystems that sustain us. 

Balance

If we think of the economy as the human subset of the wider ecosystem, continuously extracting and exchanging resources on our behalf, then the question of whether our current systems can be sustained in the long term comes down to a simple equation: do they operate in balance with the natural world? 

As far as I can tell just by looking around in my day-to-day life, the human economy seems marvelously effective. After all, our elaborately engineered systems of production and distribution have thus far never failed to provide me with water and food. 

This predictability on the receiving end implies to the unquestioning consumer that our systems are working beautifully. 

But what’s happening behind the scenes—beyond the economy, in the ecosystem itself, at the actual source of our vital water and food? At no point am I as a typical consumer faced with the whole picture, or prompted to consider whether what I consume is being processed in sustainable ways. 

Dams, reservoirs, factory farms, feed lots—are these systems as endlessly efficient and stable as they seem? Or are they wreaking havoc out of sight and out of mind, extracting resources for us faster than the natural world can replenish them? 

In other words, as humanity blithely goes about its business growing the economy, are we maintaining balance with and within the ecosystem? 

Economics

Since humanity is just another animal species exchanging materials with the world around us, you might say our economy is a subset of the larger ecosystem. Per good old Merriam-Webster, “economic” means “of, relating to, or based on the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” Production, distribution, consumption—these terms might sound too dry to relate to damp soil, but essentially they’re synonyms for what moss and mice and all the world’s other wild species are doing outdoors. 

On the other hand, as a city-dweller in a “developed nation,” I can easily come to see the economy not as a part of the ecosystem but as a replacement for it. Unlike my ancestors, who hunted, gathered, herded, and farmed for their food, I no longer need to engage directly with “nature” to stay alive; it seems almost irrelevant to my survival.

Clean air blows into buildings continuously on ventilation systems.

Pure water flows freely from pipes and bottles.

Safe food is perpetually stocked in grocery stores and restaurants.

And frankly, it’s been great for me. I’m utterly dependent on the economy’s systems delivering these vital services, and can only hope they forever remain as reliable as they’ve been thus far in my life. 

...Will they? 

Ecosystems

What do we find when we pay attention to the natural world around us? That everything is interconnected. From minerals and microbes up through herbs and trees to coyotes and cows and humans, we’re all exchanging energy and matter in an ever-flowing dance timed to seasonal cycles and choreographed by eons of collective evolution. 

Air passes through plants as they photosynthesize and through animals as they breathe, filtering back and forth between its vital forms. 

Water trickles and pours across the landscape, hydrating organisms along its path, only to evaporate and blow back in as fresh rainfall. 

Nutrients in our food become living flesh, which in turn passes on so fungi and other decomposers can return it to the soil for plants to take up anew. 

The ecosystem serves as a renewable source of the basic ingredients of life. Remember our bodies’ blessed trinity: oxygen, water, food. There is no way for the human race to live without these, nor is there any way for the human race to obtain them outside these natural cycles. The land around us isn’t merely a scenic backdrop for society, it’s the wellspring of all our sustenance. 

Attention

The word “community” suggests coming together into a unified existence. We tend to understand this in terms of relationships between people within a society, but a truly comprehensive understanding of our existence would also include all the non-human elements with which we interact just by living: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil in which we grow our food, and the countless living creatures and cycles of energy that weave together in the world’s continuous dance of life, death, decay, and renewal.

Cultivating a healthy community, then, means forming relationships not only with our fellow humans but with the land around us. As Aldo Leopold writes in the 1948 foreword to his book A Sand County Almanac:

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. 

I believe this starts with simply paying attention to the land and all that’s happening within it. 

In the words of Wilma Mankiller, who served as principal chief for the Cherokee Nation from 1985 to 1995:

Not just indigenous people but all human beings evolved from people who understood their reciprocal relationship to their extended families and to all other living things. [...But many] have lived in an artificial world completely separate from the natural world for so long, they have little understanding of their place in the world and do not seem to understand that everything in the natural world is integral to the continuation of life on Earth. How many people living in high-rises and rushing about in cities even notice that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west? How can they dream if their bare feet never touch the earth and they never behold the miracle of the stars? (Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women p 146)