The garden I began so tentitively early in the year has been unfolding across the back yard, it just takes my breath away. I have been combining permaculture, biodynamic, and organic principles, in part because I am naturally obsessive, and in part because I want every advantage: I figure that each of these methods has some truth to it, and if I combine them I'm bound to get some harvest from the effort.
Even though I have gardened for much of my adult life, I have always done so with a more experienced gardener. As I stumble along I am finding great satisfaction in watching the garden's progress, and my own growing competence. I also have a growing recognition of the myriad interconnecting wheels of sustainability.
Although this blog takes it's name, in large measure, from the notion of the shift to bikes as a revolutionary --and nessisary-- move toward sustainability, the vision for the blog has always about the broad and often ephemeral elements of living a sustainable life. Appropriate transportation remains an essential piece, that becomes more important with every passing day, but it is not the only piece, and it will not, by itself, create the paradim shift we need.
Intimately intwined with the issues surrounding appropriate transpertation are the the issues related to the issues of "food miles", multi-national agri-bussiness, and localization.
These, intern, intwine with social justice issues, and envronmental justice. Like the gears and wheels of a bike they work together to create the complex systems that required for sustainability.
The current multi-national corperate conglomerate system of delivering "consumer goods" robs us of so much more than clean air or finite fuel. It deprives us of knowledge about where and how of food is grown and products made, it deprives us of relationships with the people who grow and create the things we buy, it removes us from the systems that make up and support our lives, and make us dependdent on an inhuman network of interconnected corperations that are not accountable to us or the greater good.
None of this is "new" news, but what has been lacking, I thing, is a way to adress it, a meaningful, do-able response to a system that feels all powerful and overwellming. How does one 'walk away from Omelas' when it feels that the Omelas has taken over the planet? One step at a time, but not with one step alone
1 comment:
I read your blog with respect and envy. I'd like to be doing more gardening. I have the land, and a bit of time ( maybe not enough). But no experience. I'll have to keep up with your posts and see what I can learn.
I think it's great that you don't have a car, if you can live that way, you are awesome.
Permaculture, now that's a word I like to hear.
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