Finding Sustainability In Rural America
August 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Where did you first hear about sustainability? Did a friend tell you what it meant to live a sustainable life? Did you read about it first?
I learned from my family and my home state, Vermont.
Are You a Yankee?
I recently heard someone on NPR describing being a Yankee. If you ask a European what a Yankee is, they’ll say an American. An American will say a New Englander. A New Englander will say a Vermonter. And a Vermonter will say a farmer.
Yankees grow up self-reliant. Vermont farmers learned a long time ago to take care of what takes care of them – the soil. Unlike the Western U.S., Vermont doesn’t have virtually unlimited land. You only have so much land, and you have to make it work for generations.
While growing up, I remember watching my mother create balls of soap by melting down soap remains with those small soaps my father brought home from hotels. Granted, for most of my childhood, my mother’s only job was being a mother, so she had more time to devote to sustainability.
The Answer Is in Our Past
Some of us barely have time to handle the necessities of life, let alone spend time mending, cooking, clipping coupons, shopping for bargains, gardening, cleaning…. In our quest to achieve (some might argue, survive), we have lost some of the simple acts of sustainability many of our parents performed. We look to the media, the market place and the future to direct our behaviors. Maybe we should start looking to our past.
In traditional societies, the elders, the connection to the ancestors and traditional way, are honored. When a man or a woman has a problem they can’t solve, they consult their advisors – the elders. In the current Western world, we believe our sole salvation lies in the future and data. If I had more knowledge, I could solve this problem.
Self-Reliance
Obviously, I believe in technology’s ability to assist us; after all, I created this blog. There is great potential with what we are collective creating. Yet, there is something missing. We need more than knowledge and technology. We need the wisdom of our past so we don’t repeat a history we wouldn’t want.
People like my mother, who grew in rural towns in the Depression, understood what it meant to rely on the land—and each other—as resources. Traditional “self-reliance” is being repackaged as “sustainability”. Self-reliance sounds like “I don’t need anyone”; sustainability is about working together.
Sustaining Together
While I was living in Phoenix, my mother got me a subscription to Vermont Life. Every month included an article about a community coming together. Every month I would read the article in tears. Just writing this brings back the tears.
A family’s barn would burn down. That weekend the entire town would show up to rebuild the family’s barn. It was a party. Much like the Amish, Vermonters took care of each other. They took care of themselves.
I remember years ago reading an article about a town that created a halfway house for state prisoners. The community felt it was a good investment to support and train the men who were their soon-to-be-neighbors. My tears were flowing reading about how a local resident developed a new relationship with one of these men. The resident saw goodness in the man. He took great pride in supporting the development of that goodness.
My hope is that we can slow down enough to experience simpler pleasures. As we slow down, we utilize the resources of our past and our community to deepen our collective sustainability. Are you slowing down to sustain a deeper life? Let us know your challenges and your successes with living a sustainable lifestyle.
Zeer - Social network for food
July 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
Zeer is a social networking site focused on food with a database of over 100,000 food items searchable by UPC codes. You learn the “Nutrition Facts” as well as the ingredients of a product. You can also read or generate reviews on a product. The site will allow you to generate a shopping list for your mobile phone and store shopping lists on the site.
It was inevitablethat someone would bring social networking to grocery shopping. Now we just need someone to do it for us.
Off the Wall Green
July 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment
You may have heard of living roof – roofs that are grow everything from
native grasses to gardens. Now walls are getting their chance to grow not
graffiti, but an array of eatable plants. In Los Angeles, this summer a
Rochester, N.Y. company, Green Living
Technologies is making walls that you can eat. Just like with living roofs,
you get the same benefits of insulations to decreasing urban runoff from
rain.
When Not to Go Organic
July 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Greenopolis give us a simple list what foods are the safest when not organic. If we are on a budget, this guide can help.
Enjoy Eating – Lose Weight
June 6, 2008 | 3 Comments
How many times have you grabbed some junk food when you were stressed out? Or, maybe you were rushing to an appointment or struggling to meet a tight deadline.
We all know eating when under stress isn’t good for us. It’s as if we are mindless when we reach for that bag of potato chips, yet we do it. Why? We do it physiologically because stress is a survival response that causes us to crave quick energy food. We do it habitually because we’ve grown up in a culture that models this type of behavior and the media seduces us into believing it’s the thing to do. When we do diet, 97% of us gain it all back within five years. In The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie, Craig Pepin-Donat state, the “diet industry is amazing — it’s really a $40 billion rip-off.”
The United States is a country of diets; and most are diets of deprivation. They vary in what we don’t allow ourselves. However, there is a new approach emerging that shifts the model from not being concerned about the experience of eating and just concerned about its effects – to an approach based on the experience of eating. Think of the possibilities – you can lose weight as you enjoy your food more. Although it sounds too good to be true, it is being proven. Recently the WSJ ran an article on a Duke and Indiana State University study showing the efficacy of mindfulness eating.
After all we have invested in panic eating, it’s difficult to believe that if we are mindful and enjoy our food more, we lose weight. Focusing on the experience of eating allows our minds and bodies to slow down; thereby causing our body to go into a parasympathetic response verses the sympathetic response (fight or flight) of mindless eating.
When I had an integrative medicine clinic in Scottsdale, I was also a partner in a business that taught Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Stress Reduction Program. The business didn’t make much money, but we did help many. Near the end of the eight-week course, we would teach mindfulness eating. It was always interesting to hear the comments of how common food tasted different. Only anecdotally did I know eating with awareness would create weight lost. It’s great that a publication like the WSJ is telling us that awareness may give us what diets often can’t – maintained weight loss and enjoying eating.
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