consumption

The Agrarian

 Agrarian

  • It takes 1-3 Years to plant with the long term consequences in mind. Plant with space and needs in mind. The plants will start slow and eventually take hold. All the while we must nurture them to give them the best of all possible beginnings.
  • After 1-3 years and the continual planting and possible replanting, the introduction of poultry and other animals for pest control. This introduction has its issues and will never go as smoothly as we think. The animals introduced must be, as the plants must be, if not indigenous, then only what the plants and the land itself will allow.
  • From 5-7 years we must “chop and drop” roughage from the pruning that we will do. The introduction of trees for timber must be introduced but these must not affect the fruit trees bushes, and other perennials that we have worked so hard to keep alive.
  • This is what it takes to eat honestly.

These steps and these processes are necessary because we have not taken the time to follow in the footsteps of mother nature; we have taken shortcuts and continue to do so. But, we must remember that mother nature neither nurtures nor does she care; she simply does. She expects nothing but gives so much to those that will understand her.

We do not seem to understand mother nature any longer. We cannot “google” it, or find it on the ubiquitous internet. We must get our hands dirty, and fail. We must see the dirt under our fingernails and feel the cuts on our hands, the sweat on our brow. We must feel the bites of insects and the heat of the sun. Our cellphones must be put aside and the supermarkets must be forgotten. Technology is not a boon but a bane.

The comfort of our homes and the illusion of civilization must always be put into perspective of the natural reality in which we live. If we do not come to understand this, then we fail as individuals and as a race. Our mother will remind us of this either with our blessings or our pleas.

A good home brew helps!

Local Globalism

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Globalism is a word that I’ve never been comfortable with.  Like the new age term “holism” it seems to be an umbrella term for unproven methods and wishful thinking.  In the end, globalism becomes meaningless as well as dangerous because it can be defined and used as justification for anything and everything.  We cannot be individuals in such a context, but must give ourselves over to the whole, and we do so at our own peril.

 

For most of us, life comes in bits and pieces, but we are told that we live in global communities and are a part of a global economy.  Paradoxically, we have come to rely upon a global network to define us as individuals through paradigms such as Facebook, Twitter and a host of other virtual, global “communities”.  We act globally while believing that we are part of individual communities. We have come to understand the whole in the contexts in which we live, but the context in which we live is defined by the whole.  We cannot continue thinking locally while acting globally.  We must do the opposite: think globally and act locally.

 

Communities that are defined by global economies seem separate from one another, but are in fact a part of a holistic phenomenon; they have a global effect. The consequent of realizing that our actions as a community have direct consequences on the communities that surround us and eventually on those that only seem disconnected from our own will eventually force us to act locally.  Oddly enough, I do not believe that there is disconnect between the idea of a global community and individual support of our own communities. We must act on a local level for the sake of global health of the planet.

 

The irony of this of course is that the continued globalization of our individual communities is the very thing that keeps us from supporting those individual communities. There is an understanding between two people that barter, buy or support each other’s community, that eat food grown or raised locally, that is not only missing but is utterly destroyed when bartering and buying and eating on a global scale. Globalization of these traditionally local and often intimate acts has the detrimental consequence of disassociating us from the tools we use, the homes we live in, the economies we support, the food we eat and the communities that we are all a part of. The relationship between these things, the people who make them, and those who we buy them from is a necessary and important one that define who we are as individuals; it gives us purpose and meaning outside of simply pure consumption.

 

The cost of globalization has been studied and analyzed from many different angles, but I believe that one angle is oddly missing: does the globalization of our lives and the communities that we live in make us happier?  I would argue that globalization most certainly makes our lives easier, but happier? Perhaps the highest cost of thinking and acting globally has not been the quantity of our happiness (the ease of living life), but the quality of our happiness (living life).  The globalization of our communities continues to take a toll on our planet, our food and our communities but perhaps the greatest toll for humanity is the universal loss of understanding that there is a difference between the quantity of happiness that we have and the quality of happiness that we all desire as individuals.