The Ark

For the past month, Scott Russel Sanders A Conservationist Manifesto had become a mantel piece on my nightstand.  I figured this mellifluous and trying prose to be excellent bedtime reading.  My reservations for not cracking open this manifesto until recently included me always wanting to sleep when I get in my bed and me forecasting his philosophies to be lacking pragmatism.

In part one Sander’s weaves this conservationist themed tale through local stories like the tree hippies who want to preserve the Brown’s Woods from development and the redefinition of common words like commons.  He makes the case for building arks not to protect us from the flooding rapture of God, although he notes the rising sea level due to global warming as an indirect benefit of building an ark, but as this quote from p.14 best defines an ark as, “any human structure, invention, or collaboration that preserves the wisdom necessary for meeting our needs without despoiling the planet.”  As ark-builders we need to preserve the natural earth, life, and knowledge in its many natural forms while consuming less. 

This ark concept really resonates with my passion for permaculture.  Permaculture is a way of raising plants and animals in a self-sustaining environment that fosters symbiotic relationships between all plants and animals involved.  For instance, an example of permaculture on a farm could be cows grazing on a prairie where they can trample their cow pies (fertilizer) into the earth to create a rich soil humus that sustains a verdant mixed salad of grasses.  The symbiosis continues with the chickens who follow the cows and pick out all of the bugs and insects out of the cows manure while clawing the fertilizer deeper into the earth.  An egg carton would lead you to believe chickens are vegetarians with their claims of 100% vegetarian fed but really there are foragers whose favorite food is bugs.  Eggs from pastured chickens with access to bugs have deep orange yolks loaded with beta-carotene (the vitamin A in carrots that makes them orange) while conventional eggs and even organic eggs have pale, lifelessly yellow yolks.  I could go on about this cycle and biodynamic farming forever but the main point is that man, with proper knowledge, can design organic systems in accordance with nature in a way that enhances biodiversity. 

Here are the three girls hanging out, eating bugs in the backyard:

The swelling flood Sanders warns of could take the forms of global food shortages, an energy crisis, or war.  In any case the solution is localism.  Eating local, buying local, and consuming less are his resolutions.  If a crisis were come to root, I feel that my arc would be decent.   This past summer at home I tended a garden of spinach, lettuces, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and many herbs.   For the first time we hosted three chickens in our backyard who would lay about 3 eggs every morning.  I dried my clothes in the sun when I could and kept a lively compost.  At school I shop exclusively at Bloomingfoods and am also a farmshare holder at Maple Valley Farm located northwest of Bloomington.  Although these are effective ways to subvert our global economy that ails the planet, they are not easy, convenient, nor affordable which are the criteria for Americans to implement meaningful change.    

As much as I am ostensibly entrenched in the localism dogma as the panacea to the “American way of life”, I am still conflicted.  In Sanders characteristically beautiful way with words, the American way of life is, “an infantile dream of endless consumption, novelty, and endless play.”  Even though I am more environmentally conscious and in tune than most Americans, I would be lying if I said I didn’t dream often of flying in my private jet across the English Channel while eating caviar and looking at my reflection.  The Scott Russell Sanders objective is to change the American narrative of excessive consumption and private wealth to that of simplicity, conservation, and community.  For this ambitious indoctrination to work, I would be a good place to start.  But private planes and good food are pretty cool too.