Carbon Tabulating

Part of my decision to come out here was to see how hard or easy living with less impact would be. After all, the say that all you need is love...after you've got food, shelter and water of course.

Well, Kawartha Ecological Growers is the organisation I'm working for. We co-ordinate the produce of twenty different small family farms to be delivered daily to members in the city. Many of the farms we work with are Amish and well-versed at living self sufficiently. The Amish make a deliberate effort to live a slow and luddite lifestyle, forbidding use of electricity and fuel. The only phone the community uses is at their school house. Mark and Shannon take orders and communicate with them via handwritten notes or face-to-face communication. For refrigeration during summer months, they harvest huge blocks of ice from ponds they have dug during winter, then store it in an insulated trailer. Tractors and carriages are all horse-pulled. Their food and clothing is all self produced and their lifestyle is the definition of simple. If a community member is sick, everyone will donate to pay the hospital bills in cash since they do not use OHIP cards. They refuse to cash in government cheques and stockpile them as proof of staying independent of the government and "maintaining the importance of brotherhood."

Meanwhile, I've been trying to live on as little as I can, in a cabin with no running water or electricity. (Well not anymore, see footnote below). All my food is locally grown and travels an average of 15 food miles I would guess. Raw milk, yogurt and eggs have been consistently available since I came to the farm. My diet in those early weeks of April was a lot of non-perishable things like bread/pasta or stuff that would keep like potatoes, canned or frozen beans, tomatoes and zucchini from last year's harvest. Then as the season began, more variety was introduced like wild-harvested items (fiddleheads (pictured above) and nettle), leeks, as well as the early and frost tolerant lettuces, beets and rhubarb. Then came more variety like aspargus and strawberries. Now it's a feast of the harvest and also the canning and preserving for the winter months.

Abundant bounty of fresh corn and beans and peas and peppers and broccoli and melons and tomatoes and garlic and more. The occasional grass fed beef or free range chicken too. And I would say it was all produced in a manner that minimizes or eliminates use independent of fossil fuels and improves the soils. It has been a great season as most crops like wet, hot and sunny conditions.

Showers consist of well-water, rainwater or lakewater. Drinking water is store bought as are a few other items like cooking oil, bananas, dish soap, soya sauce, salt. I drive all over the place to deliver groceries to our members and to get to different farms for work and on weekends I go to Toronto for a vacation from the solitude of the simple life and revel in a frenzy of bright lights, noise and friends.

Sustainable living is a lifestyle designed for permanence. The difference between my lifestyle and the Amish lifestyle in some ways is a difference in degree and in some ways is fundamental. I can do my best to use little and produce what I can but I won't be able to shut out the rest of the world, the innovations in technology and the constant march of progress even in this dark and cosy cabin. I don't have the community to do so and I don't think it's realistic or progressive to hope to create a community that would eschew modernity. On a few levels there would be benefits to returning to only face-to-face interactions and leaving behind the distractions and comforts glowing from our digital displays. We could slow right down and be happy, happier even, but the brotherhood I know and have isn't about that and it won't ever be. You can't unring a bell.

So food, shelter and water matter but so does love. We all cry, laugh, lose loved ones and think that we're the only ones who have dealt with this before so don't forget that we're in it together, all of us in these modern times.

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I wrote most of this before I left for Hong Kong in early July. I came back one month later to find that I'd been kicked out of my cabin due to a dispute between my boss and the owner of the cabin which is unfortunate but doesn't surprise me. So I'm working mainly on Les' farm now, the coolest of the farms. Les is a 60 year old man who manages a few hundred acres on his own, has animals and a tractor and a wetland on his property. We use the tractor and machinery much more.