Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Liz <liz@allslash.org>]

At 12:08 PM 12/27/2007, you wrote:

> That's a great quote, Liz:
> >"Work" is what you have to do
> >to make enough money to "live," as though life were some external
> >activity that takes place when you aren't working.
>
> Also I recall the old saying, a man works from dawn to dusk but a woman's
> work is never done. Our past was hardly an ideal society, and I refuse to
> fall into the nostalgia thing. And tools are great things.

No, I don't want to be romanticizing the past either. I live as much 
in the old ways as I can, so I know first hand that it is just plain 
harder to do many things. Harder and more time-consuming and 
sometimes no fun at all. But it means participating in life first 
hand. We've talked about people not knowing where their food comes 
from. Another thing most people have no idea of is the amount of work 
(mechanical or human) required to sustain them--not the amount of 
energy required to perform that work, though that's important too, 
but the work itself. They have no idea how much work their appliances 
do, because they never lived without them. No idea how much actual 
work their vehicles perform, because they never walk anywhere. No 
idea how much work is required to provide their clothing or their 
food or their water. If you asked most people to express the amount 
of work in equivalent hours of labor, they couldn't tell you. They 
have no personal concept of what is required to keep them alive. In 
our past, the only people who could live like that were kings and 
emperors and the most wealthy of the richest class. Even they 
probably had a better idea of how much manual labor was required to 
pamper and coddle them than the ordinary person does today. We live 
at a remove from the actual labor required to sustain us, and because 
of that, we don't value it and we don't know what it costs.

> This development, in Turner's
> description of the frontier, "begins with the Indian and the hunter; it
> goes on with the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the
> trader... the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by
> the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farm
> communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and
> finally the manufacturing organization with the city and the factory
> system." "

Yep, a lot of myths embodied in that description, starting with the 
underlying assumption that "savages" had no civilization.

Liz in SW VA
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com