Part of my back garden. The cherry trees and kitchen garden feed me. The meadow feeds the birds and bees, of which there are precious few.
Right now folks are demonstrating, to bring attention to climate change, as if crazy weather and disappearing glaciers weren’t enough. But still, good for them.
I see a lot of greenwashing. I’m sure we all do. So I started thinking about what it would really mean to live while making little or no negative impact on the planet. I think it might be so different from the way we live now that it won’t happen.
I’m looking a what I do and have done. No kids: I guess extinction of the human species would solve things pretty quickly. It seems a little drastic, though. I have the heat exchanger, which heats water and the house. Solar panels are in the cards. The upfront costs of those are pretty high, though, beyond the reach of a lot of people. Plus if you are renting or live in an apartment building, it’s going to be tough to organize. I have been buying organic food and cleaning supplies, been careful about sourcing clothing and all. That’s expensive, too.
Lately I have been looking at doing more for myself. I knit anyway, just as a hobby. Due to the exquisite, artisan spun and dyed yarn I buy, that costs a bit as well. So what about other stuff?
I have gone back to sewing. Many people do; it’s a bit of a fad right now. I even picked up a book on mending as an art form. I haven’t asked where the fabric comes from. My kitchen garden, seen at the right in the photo, is growing. The permeable polythene cloth keeps the weeds down, but is it more planet-friendly than just looking for the « bio » stands at the local market? Maybe it is, if you count the soaker hoses, which also provide one of the few sources of water for the birds and bees. I’m reading guides for making soaps and salves and who knows what all. Julien is about to build bee hives for me: horizontal Langstroths, on the off chance that you were wondering. From what I can tell, the only people who actually do all these things all the time are people who make it their life’s work.
That doesn’t seem very practical or very likely. Railing at the government or faceless others doesn’t seem terribly effective, either. So, I don’t know. Are we really, most everybody on the planet, willing to go back to a kind of agrarian society? With wifi and maybe Amazon, but still. And if everybody did that, would there be space on the planet to manage it?
Somebody must know the answer to these questions. I sure don’t.
At Home in France 