ELZEARD BOUFFIER:
The Man Who Planted Hope

By Jean Giono

For a human character to reveal truly exceptional qualities, one must have the good fortune to be able to observe its performance over many years. If this performance is devoid of all egoism, if its guiding motive is unparalleled generosity, if it is absolutely certain that there is no thought of recompense and that, in addition, it has its visible mark upon the earth, then there can be no mistake.

My parents came out to visit me yesterday.  As I took them around our property to show them all of the great projects we are working on to make our lives more sustainable and independent, it became more clear to me that my parents don't see any value in doing this.  For the past year, since I finished school, this is something that I've been workign towards and now that I have it - now that I'm out here hustling and working full-time on my dreams all my parents can talk about it that I need to get a job.  I need to go out and get a wage and some benefits.  They don't see the mushroom logs as food on the table, or the blueberry bushes as jellies in the future or the planted ginseng as an investment - all they can see is their son loafing around working on his silly projects without having any money or benefits.  

I've been thinking a lot about something that someone (Jay) said while commenting on my blog earlier last week.  I had been talking about my several new ventures growing food and other trees on our property up here in Washington.  Jay mentioned how important it would be to consider food for the coming future, due to food shortages that are coming up.  I hadn't really thought about this before, much.  I mean, I know I wanted to grow some food for added security for myself and my family - but I hadn't really considered anything imminent, like food shortages, providing impetus and value to this practice.

I've been thinking a lot lately about this world.  About how we choose to live in it, what we choose to accept and live with, where we draw the line: these things are important to me.

What I want to do is to live a life where I don't have to be indebted to anyone.  I don't want to have to  work my ass off just to eat and have the things I want to have (such as a dwelling and clothes).  But it seems that this is a requirement for living in this world.  You can try to walk away - but if you do you'll just be that crazy kooky guy that walked away into the woods at best.  At worst society will reach out its long arm and strangle you no matter where you try to escape to.  So, you make compromises - first one and then many, and eventually you are right back living exactly the same life you were trying to avoid in the first place.

Crabbing season has started again; much to my great joy.  Tonight I ate three crabs, mostly all by myself - although some of the choicest pieces went to Kelsie, who actually enjoyed the meat a lot; which is a lot more than she expected to.

Yeah, so tonight I was sitting here thinking about going off into the wilderness.  I know, having a community IS something that I want – but I’d also like to know, for future reference, if I have the survival ability that most nine year olds in past cultures once had; this would be something valuable to me, because whatever else happened I could always go back to this if whatever I was trying didn’t work out.

Its weird, thinking about the things that you think now and how they got to be that way.  I mean even in your own head, the road to getting here is long and takes many twists and turns.  There are switchbacks, whose purpose you don’t understand at all until after traveling them for so long, never seeing any real gains you break the ridgetop and see the valley below you and realize what they were for, and what it really was worth to you.

From:  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

http://members.aol.com/leanan7/preta.htm

Black Gold of the Amazon

Fertile, charred soil created by pre-Columbian peoples sustained surprisingly large settlements in the rain forest. Secrets of that ancient "dark earth" could help solve the Amazon's ecological problems today

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanId=sa013&articleId=BC67A20E-E7F2-99...

May 31, 2007

Slide Show: Bringing Back Europe's Prehistoric Beasts North America is fine for rewilding but Europe may be a better candidate thanks to close living relatives of its extinct megafauna By Jens-Christian Svenning

The Pleistocene was the heyday of megafauna, a span of geologic time when big mammals like mammoths, saber-toothed cats, woolly rhinos and giant ground sloths roamed the continents. The epoch lasted over one million years during which glaciers plowed the planet's surface, stretching and retracting across vast expanses. Near the beginning of the end of the Pleistocene some 50,000 years ago, much of the megafauna disappeared in synchrony with the spread of modern humans. This loss left the Holocene, the current geologic epoch (which began about 11,000 years ago) with a much impoverished megafauna. Species such as the American mastodon, dire wolf and giant deer are long gone, but some species, or at least their close relatives, have persisted into the present, giving scientists hope that Pleistocene-like megafauna and their ecosystems can be re-created.