Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Interesting that we'd hear of Bookchin on this list, Mark. I read up on
social ecology, Bookchin and Arne Ness and others a few years back and
realized the route to sustainable living with the environment was not
through any "ism" at all. Living local and making peace with the land that
sustains us can't be regulated or instituted by government of any stripe,
left or right. The Soviets raped the land like everybody else, makes no
difference what your "ism". 

Thinking back several decades in this country, it seems most of the
population lived local and it didn't usually make much difference whether
the politicians in Washington were Whigs, Federalists, free silver, or
anything else. The federal government didn't have the reach it has today to
mess with every aspect of people's lives. I think they called it freedom or
self-reliance. Even as recently as the Depression of the 30's my
grandparents never had to let their kids go hungry though they had no cash
money. They gardened, canned, and kept a root cellar in Kansas on the edge
of the Dust Bowl. One third of the country was still rural then. Not so
today. We don't have that cushion against economic chaos; so much is
just-in-time inventory, consolidated corporations distributing food and
goods from all over the world to industries and malls. We're too dependent
on a system we have no control over, and too many live one paycheck from
homelessness. 

Getting connected to a piece of land somewhere, anywhere, can offer more
security and peace of mind than the prozac-addled, consumptive,
mass-entertained and lobotomized lemming society can ever know. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. 
--Henry David Thoreau 
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 5/2/2007 at 12:35 AM activism98201@verizon.net wrote:

>Although a bit off the path here, I'd recommend the following article on
>Murray Bookchin.
>
>http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/reader/intro.html
>
>Discussions about environment/food starts up about a third of the way into
>the article.
>
>Bookchin is purported to be the person who first coined the term/word
>environmentalism.  He later came to have a dark view of it and instead
>insisted upon a different view towards nature, settling on ecology
instead.
>
>
>-Mark Nagel
>Everett, WA