LT Saloon

I have just begun to read “Welcome to Utopia” by Karen Valby. Valby calls it “a moving elegy for a proud American way of life”. In reading that, I die a little. Valby writes,“but what I didn’t presume to understand about Utopia was what was going on in the minds of those who chose to stay, the people whose deepest desire was to make a home for themselves down the street from where their parents lived and their grandparents were buried. Roots are rare these days. So many of us have lost connection to the ground.”

Wallace Stegner said that we Americans divide into two groups, boomers and stickers. The boomers are always thinking that something is better somewhere else, that whatever they have or whatever they are is no good. That’s what commercials have taught us. We can never be sure that our detergent, car, job is best. So what? Does it serve our purpose? Clean well enough? Pay the bills? If we’d just stop worrying about status, we’d have time to connect with people and activities and places that really matter. Someone I know has made a career of entertaining children. He doesn’t make a lot of money at it. He doesn’t have a fancy tour bus. No groupies. But he has spent his life doing something he loves, and doing it well. And by the grace of God he has a life partner who cherishes him for who he is, not what he earns.

I have a friend who has moved to a new job in a new city. She recently confided to me that she is lonely. Lonely for real friendship. Someone to connect to. Though she is active in several groups, the connection ends when the meeting does. She has few people with whom to go to a movie , or discuss a book or idea. I feel this myself. Though I am involved with a group of folks who are passionately involved in protecting the environment, we always seem to be rushing off to the next thing.

Yet as farmers we always seemed to have time to stop the tractor a few minutes when we passed the neighbor in their yard, meet the letter or paper carrier at the mailbox, or chat at the feed mill or grocery. Because we knew each other, sickness or death brought hand made and hand delivered casseroles, cakes and offers of help. Without a plethora of restaurants to tempt us, dish to pass events were exciting opportunities to show off our best dishes and to enjoy a variety of offerings from the community. An inexpensive but filling and fulfilling evening out, sharing news and gossip.

In today’s society marriage has little allure except for the big party and the fancy dress. The idea of marriage to place, would most likely bring puzzled stares from most youth. And yet how can we hope to have a sustainable world if our homes, friends, jobs, lives are disposable?Cash them in and move to the next best thing.

We can’t both treat the world as temporary, and preserve it for the future.

Huh, good idea. A creek walk is being planned that will allow residents a pleasant place to walk along the creek, and serve as a demonstration of different methods of water catchment and diversion. The idea is to catch water runoff from roofs, roads and parking lots so that it can more slowly be absorbed into the ground, and filter into the aquifers. Come to find out that when people have access to their streams and rivers – they care about them more. It seems this particular creek has been walled in, to the extent that, many residents didn’t even know where it was.

Of course this made Ana think about the rural areas she loves.

One of the measures of the “backwardness” of an area is the “amount of unpaved roads” that exist. When Ana first moved to CNY there were many sections of unpaved roads. The only real problem with them was that you should drive slower on them. In the winter they were better because they didn’t ice as badly. Turns out they also don’t have the runoff problems of paved roads. Same could be said of my dirt driveway – and you know – I’m not sure why everyone wants to pave their driveway – and then have to maintain that with applications of oil and sealant. (petro dollars)
Syracuse is working with different types of pavement that allow for water to filter through rather than runoff to the side of the street into the sewers. Hmmmm. Seems like the folks who did Ithaca’s streets in bricks a hundred years ago, knew what they were doing. Unfortunately the engineers have not figured out how to make the underlayment work for the heavier vehicles on the road today.

Another old/new idea is a cistern.

There was a day when every house had a cistern in the cellar, that caught roof runoff, or at least a rain barrel. This water was used for laundry and scrubbing floors and even baths. Someone shared how in many places the use of cached water has become illegal. I’m not sure why that came about. I know gray-water systems are illegal in some places too. Yet reusing water for say – flushing toilets – is a great method of conservation.
Syracuse is planting trees which help to make use of the water going into the ground, as well as clean the air, provide aethestic beauty, and help to keep the city naturally cooler. There are well placed and planned gardens which make use of runoff water, slowing the flow and allowing for natural absorption into the soil.
Green roofs which prolong the life of the roof, can provide places for urban farming, help with cooling and heating costs, are beautiful, and prevent runoff. When asked about the structural strength needed for the added weight, it was pointed out, that often the old buildings were suitable, while newer construction had been built to “tighter standards” and thus could not support the added weight. Huh – old fashioned buildings were stronger?

Yeah – they also had windows that would open and close which reduces need for air conditioning (but I digress).

There is a lot of good work going on in Syracuse and other cities. It turns out that rain is not just a nuisance, it’s a neccesary part of our water system, and when you let people be in touch with the natural systems such as streams and creeks, they are more likely to respect that.

Country folk could have told them. We probably did. Turns out we knew what we were talking about.

Weight loss counselors have told us that in order to limit our food intake, to be satisfied with less, and thus healthier (in both purse and waistline), we should eat deliberately. Set the table, turn off the TV, set our forks down between bites. I was just reminded of an admonishment to not bring a book to the table. Dinner was a time of sharing our day with one another. Even breakfast was a time of planning the day ahead. Would we need so many communication devices if we just sat down together and listened?

These communal acts of life, have become solitary and thus less fulfilling. If you have ever grown a garden, even one tomato plant, perhaps even just a Chia Pet, you know that there is satisfaction in it. To harvest a garden, or even to bring home deliberately chosen produce, and create a meal, is satisfying in so many more ways than throwing a plastic tray in the microwave. To share that creation with family and friends increases the pleasure.

I am reminded here of how the cats would place themselves on the bench next to my husband and I at meal time. With the kids grown and away, the pets became an integral part of our meal time. Ignoring them for too long brought a paw to the knee or a nose rub to the elbow, and a feeling of appreciation.

Food and sex are part and parcel of the continuation of life. Good nutrition means a life healthy enough and long enough to reproduce. Sex is a communal act, but in our chaotic Western lifestyle, has lost the communion aspect. Like everything else it has been turned into a concern about how much, how long, how often. It has become an opportunity to sell us a product, and that product is too often the sex itself.

Pornography is rampant and becoming more and more violent. My thought on this is that since we are only experiencing the sex act in porn with two of our senses, sight and sound, it requires more and more stimulation to acheive the same affect. Since the people on screen are only there to stimulate us, we accept the violence done to them. Then perversely we accept that violence as normal.

Like eating, sex should involve all of our senses. A long term couple knows each others smell and feel and sound and taste. Even our intellectual interaction is part of the mix. I suppose this might be part of knowing our clan, just as different types of the same beetle recognize each other by their mating ritual.

Our fast food sex is nowhere near as satiating as true communal sex. We may have sex thrown in our face 24/7, it may be more available either for hire or with casual acquaintences, or machines or blow up babes, but it is not as satisfying. Our fixation with oral sex may be a reflection of our hunger for more satisfying relationship.

How does this apply to agrarianism? I think our disconnection from the natural ebb and flow of life is reflected in our attitude toward food, possessions and sex. The constant barrage of advertising telling us we aren’t good enough, what we have isn’t good enough, and what we’re getting isn’t good enough, has separated us from the land, each other and even ourselves. We are constantly trying to make ourselves into what Madison Avenue and Hollywood sell us as good. But like trying to please tyrannical parent we will never be good enough for them.

For every unit of food we consume, using the conventional agricultural methods employed in the U.S., six times that amount of topsoil is lost. Since, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the average person eats a ton of food each year, that works out to 12,000 pounds (5,443 kilograms) of topsoil.

http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/69/dirt/

20th century or what is now called “conventional” agriculture is very wasteful of soil, as well as water and nutrients. I remember being puzzled at seeing the seedbed of farm fields laying so much lower than the edges of the field. This didn’t make sense to me. As a gardener I felt the productive land should be higher. After all manure was added to the soil. Crop residues were plowed in. In a well tended home garden the soil becomes deeper and better as composted material is mulched around plants and then turned into the soil.

I thought it must be a trick of the eye. Certainly there could be compression as larger tractors and bigger equipment was used to accomplish normal tasks in less time. What I didn’t realize was how much normal farm practice had changed during my lifetime.

Before the World Wars brought us the petrochemical era, cultivation and use of the land for growing crops was more beneficial, both to the consumer and to the soil. As we have depleted our soils, our produce has also become depleted of vitamins and minerals.

When livestock were bedded with straw and ate a diet richer in dry matter, the manure returned and plowed into the soil, returned nutrients as well as substance to the fields. Before the mono-cultures of corn and soybeans became entrenched, rotation of crops meant that most fields had a crop growing the whole year. This protected the soil from run off. Though we didn’t know it at the time it also helped with Carbon sequestration and hindered global warming by reflecting rather than absorbing heat from the sun. Before we separated livestock and crops onto separate farms and increasingly into separate areas of the country, nutrients were returned to the soils from whence they came. Crop rotation allowed one type of plant to return nutrients to the soil that had been depleted by a different crop.

And as the population is more and more removed from their food sources, their waste stock is not returned to the soil either. Nearly one-fourth of municipal waste is thought to be from food scraps and lawn waste. Another source of nutrient depletion that instead of being returned to the field is going to waste in landfills and we are substituting harmful petrochemicals.

Have you had the opportunity to watch a compost pile? Or perhaps to repeatedly walk a forest trail and watch a tree decompose? In my yard we had a huge old tree stump. It must have been three foot in diameter. Around the base of it I had a garden. The soil there was so wonderful as the tree stump shed bits and peices of itself and they were chewed up and excreted by a plethora of bugs and worms. The soil would flow through your hands and smelled so wonderful. Not to mention the stump provided many afternoons of interesting exploration with my grandchildren.

Our lives and practices should reflect that natural cycle. What we take with one hand we should return with the other. The problem with measuring value with money, is that it limits us and others from continuing to prosper. Perhaps we should put all those greenbacks into the compost piles instead of Goldman Sachs. A soil bank is actually a much better investment.

Thank you to NYS Assembly Speaker Sheldon SIlver for speaking out on behalf of the rest of the residents of NYS….

“While I am pleased that the Department of Environmental Conservation has added an additional level of scrutiny to permit applications for drilling in the New York City and Syracuse watersheds, I strongly believe New York State should take no further action towards the approval of permits in any drinking water sensitive area anywhere in New York State until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency completes its study of hydrofracking and companies are required to fully disclose all chemicals used in the drilling process. There is nothing more important than the safety of our water supply and protecting the health and welfare of our citizens. We simply cannot move forward until we have all the facts. “

http://assembly.state.ny.us/Press/20100423/

Respectfully Mr. Silver, Is there anywhere in NYS that is not a

“drinking water sensitive area”?

I’m kind of sensitive about my well and my town’s well, and the lakes which provide drinking water for many small towns in NYS.

I think John Quigley, the recently confirmed secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said it well when he accused the PA Legislature of: “using gas revenues from state forests as a “crack cocaine fix” to balance the state budget”.

Looking only at revenues from gas drilling without taking into account all of the costs to the public and the environment will lead us down a road paved with Fool’s Gold ending at a massive Brownfield Site and the bill for cleaning it up.

The Faces of Frackland

http://pafaces.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/an-a1-industrial-zone/