Building Community

Redefining Normal

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The last couple of days I’ve been struggling with how to begin the Green Your Insides Challenge. And then it hit me that I needed to address this: the reason it is so difficult for anyone to green themselves, inside or out, is that society is constantly pushing us in the other direction. We have learned since we were wee tots that we are supposed to want more, want better, want now now now. And usually, we can have what we want… so we do.

Slow Food Nation gains momentum

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Over 50,000 people are expected at the Slow Food Nation celebration in San Francisco August 29-31. Restauranteer and food writer Alice Waters comments: “We want to lift a loud voice to change our food system. We need to change the ways we grow, distribute, and eat food, which needs to be good, clean, and fair. Things are at a crisis point with respect to health and the environment.”

Urbanites in the edible forest

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“Farmers should not go to university,” Jo said, “what is taught there is not sustainable. What good is it for a farmer to have an education if he is not taught how to be sustainable?” I glanced at Jo’s boy Than wondering how this boy would be educated. … Yet I understood what Jo was saying. Perhaps an education was just another form of runaway consumerism training students to increase their needs and consume more resources in order to “succeed”. What, indeed, was sustainable about it? What was progress for a Thai farmer if the use of modern agriculture meant endless debt and health problems from pesticide use?

The coming re-becoming

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Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don’t mean that we are a better people than any other society — these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts — but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle “time out” from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we’re sailing into now.