Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

"Those of us who are working on sustainability issues have even more reasons 
to plant and hoe. We must teach our neighbours the survival skills they will 
need as fossil fuels dribble away; we must set an example, and help create 
the gardening networks that will provide food for our communities during the 
hard times ahead."


(Re)discovering (s)oil
Richard Heinberg 01/10/2008
http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=1973

It’s hard to learn much or do much about sustainability without getting your 
hands dirty.

True, global problems of resource depletion and climate change entail some 
high-level thinking. We need to understand some important numbers: 350 parts 
per million of CO² (the atmospheric target necessary to avert catastrophic 
climate change); 5 per cent production decline rate in existing oilfields 
(what must be overcome each year to forestall the inevitable peak of global 
oil output). We need skills in analysis and persuasion.

Inevitably, all of this requires much time spent in front of computer 
screens. However, while we attend to these technologies and abstractions, we 
are much more likely to succeed in our ultimate goal of building sustainable 
culture if we are also grounded in the most basic of activities – obtaining 
food directly from the Earth.

Reading has taught me a lot. Gardening has taught me as much or more. Often, 
these lessons tend to be ones that sound trite when put in words: stay 
humble; don’t demand too much too fast; notice the interconnections; go slow, 
but always pay attention and be prepared for rapid-onset opportunities and 
problems. When you garden, however, you don’t simply learn these lessons 
verbally and mentally, you learn them with your whole body.

Leaving food production entirely to others is the essence of full-time 
division of labour, the origin and vulnerable taproot of civilisation. Only 
in agricultural civilisations has a rigid class system arisen in which the 
most important decisions are made by people who don’t need to spend any of 
their time directly contemplating our human dependence on nature.

Instead, the managers, accountants, soldiers and religious functionaries of 
state societies tend to enclose themselves ever more completely in the 
language-based social matrix that is the source of their power. They pay ever 
more attention to words, money and technology; ever less to weather, birds 
and insects. And this, ultimately, is why civilisations collapse: the people 
in charge simply don’t notice that the ecological basis of their society is 
being undermined.

Sound familiar?

There are lots of good reasons to garden these days – given that food prices 
are soaring and the nutritional quality of supermarket food diminishes by the 
year. Those of us who are working on sustainability issues have even more 
reasons to plant and hoe. We must teach our neighbours the survival skills 
they will need as fossil fuels dribble away; we must set an example, and help 
create the gardening networks that will provide food for our communities 
during the hard times ahead.

Perhaps the best of all reasons to garden, though, is simply our need to stay 
sane. Yes, the garden is a refuge from a world that often seems to be flying 
apart – turn off the television and pick up a trowel; you’ll feel better – 
but more importantly, if we garden we are more likely to be psychologically 
balanced people capable of making sane choices. And the world needs people 
like that at the moment.

Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author 
of Peak Everything