Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

Here's where the rubber meets the road. Agree? Disagree?

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Do We Have to Live Like Peasants to Be Truly Sustainable?
There has to be a happy medium between living as a poor peasant in an adobe 
hut and living in a McMansion while driving a Hummer. But how do we find it?
January 4, 2011  |
http://www.alternet.org/environment/149391/do_we_have_to_live_like_peasants_to_be_truly_sustainable/?page=entire


In the San Diego suburb where I live, I don't quite fit in. I drive a Prius, 
grow some of my own food and buy the rest at the farmers' market or the 
co-op, and I don't own a TV. I can my own jams, pickles and tomato sauce, 
make my own sauerkraut and yogurt, and collect what little rainfall we get in 
a rain barrel. I am a vegetarian. I have four pet chickens who provide eggs 
and fertilizer for my garden. If I could afford it, I would certainly install 
solar panels on my house. Some call me a hippie or a treehugger. But several 
recent trips to visit and live with families who are really sustainable have 
given me pause. Can I live a sustainable life without giving up all of my 
modern conveniences? Can any of us?

In Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapas, the students of the secondary school 
of Roberto Barrios live in a way that is much closer to true sustainability. 
(This school is run by the Zapatista rebels who proclaimed their autonomy 
from Mexico in 1994.) Each morning, a team of students wakes up at 4:30am to 
make breakfast from scratch: tortillas and beans from crops they grew 
themselves, plus sweetened herbal tea and store-bought pasta. The students 
cook over a fire built with firewood they chopped themselves. By 6:30am, the 
other students wake up, ready to start their day. They get dressed, eat 
breakfast, wash their dishes, and then start class at 7:30am. They are lucky 
to have running water, but they do not have hot water. Nor do they have flush 
toilets; instead, they have latrines with no seats. Fortunately, they have 
electricity, but they have few electronic appliances beyond light bulbs, and 
the electricity is not always reliable.

Midday, they break. Some students begin preparing the evening meal (more 
beans and tortillas, with rice instead of pasta), and others sweep their 
classroom. At 2pm, they migrate en masse to a river nearby, to swim, bathe 
and do their laundry. This is one of the few moments in their day when they 
inflict any harm on their environment, as their laundry detergent and bath 
products likely contain surfactants, preservatives and fragrances that are 
harmful to the environment. Along with a little bit of processed food and 
soda, their detergent is one of the few store-bought products in their lives. 
Here, there is no trash service, and anything that does not break down is 
destined to remain as a pollutant indefinitely. Signs all over Chiapas warn 
people not to litter, but really, there is nowhere for plastic to go. You can 
burn it, releasing pollutants into the atmosphere, but there's really no way 
to throw it "away."

The students live in dorms because they live too far away to commute home 
every day. The roads in this part of Mexico range from poor to non-existent 
(although the government has built many new roads since the Zapatista 
insurrection in 1994), and most, if not all, of the students come from 
families without cars. To go anywhere that is too far to walk, they must pay 
for a bus or hitchhike.

The students' way of life, while remarkable particularly because they are as 
young as 11 and so capable of taking care of themselves, is not terribly 
unusual in Latin America. Peasants all over live in homes they or previous 
generations built with wood or adobe and tin or thatched roofs, often with 
dirt floors. Furniture is often homemade, and sometimes one sees homes that 
are in disrepair. Adobe is environmentally friendly and a wonderful 
insulator, but there are downsides to having a biodegradable home.

Agriculture is often organic simply because peasants cannot afford 
store-bought seeds, fertilizer and pesticides. Attitudes in Latin America 
toward organic food production range; some feel their own saved seeds and 
traditional farming methods yield healthier, tastier and more natural food, 
whereas others think their traditional ways make them backwards and they can 
become modern by using store-bought inputs. What might look to an untrained 
eye as a field of weeds may actually be a field of drying corn amidst various 
wild edible and medicinal plants. Herbal medicine is often the norm, not 
because the peasants are into "alternative medicine," but because it is all 
they can afford or access. While I met young women who felt that herbal 
medicine is less risky than pharmaceuticals, I also came across a man dying 
of cancer who was terrified that he only had a three-day supply of morphine 
and could not afford more.

This way of life brings extreme joy as well as extreme hardship. No swimming 
pool in the U.S. can ever equal bathing in a river in the Mexican jungle 
amidst waterfalls and butterflies, with the sound of howler monkeys in the 
background. Nor is there any brand of beverage for sale that can equal the 
fresh-pressed sugarcane juice with a squeeze of lemon I drank in the Amazon. 
And I thought it was hilarious and delightful to find a Muscovy duck sitting 
on her eggs in the room where I stayed in Chiapas. But as a creature of 
21st-century America, committed to sustainability as I am, the prospect of 
living entirely like a peasant is not at all appealing. Along with waterfalls 
and sugarcane, there is also hard work, uncomfortable weather, and lack of 
potable water, modern bathroom facilities, and much more.

Now, there's a happy medium somewhere between living as a poor peasant in an 
adobe hut and living in a McMansion while driving a Hummer. But where is that 
happy medium? Is my "sustainable" life in the U.S. just an illusion? Am I 
merely a Whole Foods-shopping, yoga mat-toting, latte-drinking, Prius-driving 
yuppie? I want to be sustainable, but I also don't want to give up my car, 
laptop or the pharmaceuticals I take daily to prevent debilitating migraines. 
Is that possible?

To answer these questions, one must be careful not to conflate poverty with 
sustainability. That is, the peasant lifestyle is certainly sustainable, but 
it is also shaped by extreme poverty. How would an equally sustainable life 
look if one had the budget of a middle-class American? Currently the answer 
is a life that is more difficult than it need be because our society imposes 
many easily solved problems on those seeking sustainability. For example, in 
many places in the U.S. it's difficult to give up one's car and to rely on 
public transportation, biking and walking. And a robust rail system 
(including high-speed rail) could easily reduce Americans' reliance on air 
travel, which is perhaps the single most unsustainable way to travel. While 
we know that it's possible to build up our public transportation 
infrastructure and make more walkable and bikeable cities, we're a long way 
from achieving that where most Americans live. In other words, asking what's 
possible is not the same as asking what's possible now.

For anyone who takes sustainability seriously, the manmade roadblocks to 
sustainable living in the U.S. are quite clear. The treehugger in you might 
know a small home is more sustainable, but the smart investor in you knows 
that buying a small house (or one lacking "necessities" like air conditioning 
if you live in a hot climate) might make it harder to sell in the future. 
Conventional cleaning products, building supplies, furniture, paints, food, 
clothing, bath products, etc., might be unsustainable, but their sustainable 
counterparts might be unaffordable. And while you might be able to spring for 
small luxuries like a $5 bar of organic bath soap (or make your own), you 
can't do the same for big-ticket items such as solar panels or the new 
electric cars coming out.

One of the most famous examples of modern sustainable living is the Dervaes 
family and their urban homestead in Pasadena, CA. The family of four, Jules 
and his three grown children, Anais, Jordanne and Justin, grow over 6,000 
pounds of produce annually in their tenth of an acre garden (enough to 
provide for their own needs and sell to local consumers and restaurants). 
They make their own cleaning products, bath products, candles, and biodiesel, 
and they conserve energy and water using a number of methods, from 
line-drying clothes to using a pedal-powered grain mill. And while they use 
many "old" skills (like sewing and gardening), they don't give up their 
connection to 21st-century technology (like solar panels and the Internet).

While the list of hand-powered devices on the Dervaes' family Web site looks 
daunting, Jules feels it is worth it. He calls for a change in perspective, 
saying, "Doing things manually almost always is slower than employing 
machines. However, there are many factors to consider, including the hidden 
and long-term costs, quality and durability." And even as a leader in 
sustainability, he can point to places where he and his family are not 
perfect. For example, they buy the most basic models of electronic gadgets 
like cell phones and computers, using them when needed for business and 
outreach, and going as long as possible between upgrades. However, they 
cannot escape the trap of "planned obsolescence," in which cell phones and 
computers are made -- and priced -- to be replaced by newer models in a few 
years. Dervaes hopes to one day live in a community of like-minded people 
where these electronic technologies are not needed.

Sustainability, at its core, means living in a way that can continue into 
perpetuity, without exhausting natural resources like air, water, soil, and 
biodiversity. And it seems inevitable that living a truly sustainable life is 
not possible without giving up some conveniences, as the Dervaes family has 
done. And, if we had to, most of us probably would not mind expending some 
extra effort to go about our days -- putting on a sweater instead of flipping 
on the heat, or buying secondhand clothes instead of new. A friend who bikes 
several miles to work instead of driving tells me his bike rides are actually 
the highlights of his day!

But in the long term, we might also find we have to give up things we do not 
want to live without. What seems clear is that we need a societal effort to 
work toward sustainability together, via more available public transportation 
and bike trails, stricter regulation of the numerous toxic substances we 
interact with daily (pesticides, flame retardants, phthalates, and more), and 
policies to move us toward renewable sources of energy like solar and wind. 
We can also encourage companies to make products that are intended to be 
upgraded instead of discarded when newer technology is available. These 
efforts will make sustainable living easier for all of us.