The articles in Sunday’s paper (see my comments and links under the title “Sustainability on Lummi Island”) have got me thinking and remembering. Paben quotes University of California, Berkeley professor Michael Pollan: “Dwindling oil means the era of cheap and abundant food is ending, wrote food policy expert and University of California, Berkeley professor Michael Pollan to President-elect Barack Obama in The New York Times Magazine in October. It will no longer make financial sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and send it back to California to be eaten, he wrote.
“To some degree, what he’s calling for has been done before. Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II launched the Victory Garden movement, wherein residents planted home gardens to help feed the nation. By the end of the war, 20 million home gardens were producing 40 percent of the produce consumed in the country, Pollan wrote” (Paben, Jered. “Country leans toward life off grid.” Bellingham Herald, 4 Jan 2-2009, A1)
In a following article, Paben quotes a Lummi Island resident Laura Plaut, owner of Common Threads Farm, explaining why she became interested in farming with a lower case “F.” By the way, Common Threads Farm is completely off the grid, and relies 100 percent on solar energy – in the gray and wet western Washington. “Years ago, [Plaut] had an awakening, realizing she was highly educated but didn’t know how to feed herself. She wants her son, Riley DeWeese, 5, to grow up with those skills.
“’I like that my food travels about 20 feet from seed to the table,’ she said” (Paben, Jered. “Lummi Islanders grow in self-sustainability.” Bellingham Herald, 4 Jan 2-2009, A3).
Prior to our moving onto our sailboat, we lived in the small town of Garfield, WA. Our older neighbors down the lane from us cooperated in growing a garden. In fact, most people grew gardens. There were always plenty of vegetables to share with neighbors and friends. Enough zucchini, in fact, that it was generally only during zucchini season that people locked their cars, to keep out the zucchini – as they, themselves, had plenty at home. Gardening makes an enormous amount of sense for a land-based sustainable life-style. If memory serves, it was Wendell Berry who figured a 40 foot by 40 foot garden could feed a family of four without any waste, as the left-over gardening, went back into the garden in the form of compost, or what not.
But this also brings to mind another story that I think is worth keeping in the backs of our minds, especially during times of economic hardships. Some friends of mine got into the chicken and egg business back in the 1980s. Some folks at the WSU Extension were aware of this, and asked if they would be willing to work with a University student from Africa who was interested in learning about chickens. They were delighted to do so. The story finally came out, that as a child this African student had watched his fellow citizens leaving a major city in despair. When the colonial power pulled out of the now independent country, there was a period of turmoil, the result being that some of the infrastructure collapsed. Part of the infrastructure that collapsed was the food supply. These people walking down the road past our young friend, did not know how to feed themselves, or even how to get water out of the near by creek. Our friend promised his parents and extended family that as he was getting a college education, he would also become educated in keeping chickens. Knowing how to care for chickens would be the tool to allow himself to care for his family.
With roughly only two weeks of food in the United States food supply lines on any given day, this is really worth thinking through.
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