What if?

Fatguy on a little bike found this link from John Jeavons. If anyone owns the "How to grow..." you will find a lot rehashed, but it is interesting to see that there is new information (even though my copy is a fairly recent edition) so it just goes to show you how relentless the people involved in Biointensive have been researching. Kudos. And this article is from 95, so I'd love to see what new developments have been unearthed. A couple of points I'd like to dig out and chew on for a moment.


There is a human cost to the outsourcing and industrializing of our food sources.

What I saw in King Corn frightened me, the farmers were dependent, they went to a fertilizer dealer who made the decision for them what to spray, they planted a GM crop designed for two things, pesticide resistance and the ability to grow in cramped quarters. They showed none of the independence and know how that we traditionally associate with farm life. Onestraw really puts a fine edge on things, specialists, while useful cannot survive on their own. What does it say about the state of a nation when its farmers have stopped looking at the larger picture and have become specialists at one thing. Perhaps the saddest point in the movie was how powerless some of the farmers felt to stop the trend.

As with any level of industrialization, automation leads to lost jobs. Before I get the label of a Luddite let me say that there are some fields for which mechanization is called for, whether it is for reasons of heath or safety (mental or physical). But America is on the verge of outsourcing and automating itself out of existence. In an era of high unemployment and higher underemployment, in a time of high dissatisfaction with the jobs we do, should we not try to shift the focus of our labors back to becoming producers, back to a life where our toil creates a visible gain? What if we stopped chasing that carrot on a stick, forever a step in front of us, and stopped to realize there is plenty to sustain us if we stop and look around. In a world where we are all farmers to one extent or another we reclaim the dignity of our work. How much do we need to work for another if we remember what it is like to provide for ourselves? If we change the focus on our lives to seek the things that we truly need, we will rediscover what things truly make us happy. What if we stopped just working and started living as an artform.

In the age of information, of ideas, of the abstract, we will lose our balance unless we reconnect to the tangible, to the basics.

So now that we have had discussions here, here and here and shared our stories of why we changed, what made us look for a better life in the form of a simple life. And often we focus as a community on the change itself on using less today than yesterday, on growing more today than yesterday. Would anyone care to share how their life has been enriched by this change?