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Backyard garden is a practice run for future sustainability goals
Date published: 2/21/2008
A COUPLE OF MONTHS ago, I wrote a string of columns about the environment. I was totally freaking out, worried about global warming and peak oil and overpopulation and species extinction and the coming water shortages and plagues and genetically modified organisms you get the idea.
The world we live in scares me a little bit. But back in October or so, when I was just starting to realize how drastic our ecological predicament is, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do about it.
I had my mind made up at some point to join a hippie commune. But thanks to college, I was stuck doing nothing, living the same irresponsible lifestyle for the next two years or so.
However, recently I've begun taking more matters into my own hands. After my latest panic, about two weeks ago, I went online and bought some books on self-sufficiency and growing your own food. I threw myself into them--who knew gardening was so fascinating? And after getting the approval of Momma-san and Poppa-san, I am now cleared to begin work on a vegetable garden in our suburban backyard.
I'm treating it like my practice run--I want to learn the ways of the soil now, while it is not yet necessary for my survival to do so, and be able to move out into the country or an eco-village when I graduate and hit the ground running. On my next visit down to Fredericksburg, I will be tilling and digging up the land and adding fertilizer. We plan to grow sweet corn, squash, zucchini, beets and the occasional herb, but that's just for starters.
Thankfully, my household is one that is supportive of my environmental obsessions, so a small vegetable garden may not be the end of my getting-out-and-doing-something kick. But even if it is, I feel active and optimistic. Sure, the world is in rough shape, and the next 20 years may not look so good for the human race--but to be working on something, to feel some level of control, to be happily busy, is far superior to accepting grumpy defeatism. I'm having a very good time.
It's a shame I wasn't around in the 1960s. I would've liked that--it seems I'm becoming more and more of a hippie--maybe not as far as wearing tie-dyed shirts or doing lots of drugs, but in the sense of chasing down quasi-romantic, primitivist, counterculture dreams in a civilization that is not supportive of them.
In our distracted culture, where a person my age, after being shaken up by "An Inconvenient Truth" or news of the latest Bush controversy, can simply pop in a video game and forget all about it, it may be impossible to find some giant counterculture movement like the '60s. But even if sympathizers are few and far between, my baby steps toward self-sufficiency make me feel a bit like a flower child.
Joe Holmes is a student at George Mason University. Reach him at jholmes4@gmu.edu.
Date published: 2/21/2008
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