Thursday, October 31, 2013

October 2013: A Month that Highlights the Importance of Resilience

Whew! Still scarred by the ravages of Sandy, we also got to suffer through the spectacle of our beloved country facing the inability to pay basic bills without an increase in its credit limit.

A messenger from Nature!

What can we do to make our own lives more resilient when we live within a culture that fails to design infrastructure that cooperates with natural forces and also fails to manage wealth meaningfully for the long term?

Permaculturist Peter Bane recommends establishing a home based "garden farm". After all, real wealth on Earth basically originates with the capture of energy from the sun by living plants. (No land? Not an insurmountable problem in our city. Check out https://596acres.org/ for some ideas!) To borrow his words, if enough of us become proficient in the skills needed for garden farming, we will progress towards collectively creating "a new commonwealth that can vouchsafe dignity and freedom from want to all of us". http://www.amazon.com/The-Permaculture-Handbook-Farming-Country/dp/0865716668


Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates give a detailed description of their garden farm project in Holyoke MA:
http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Lot-One-Tenth-Making-Edible/dp/1603583998

How do we get started? Green New Yorkers Meetup regularly posts local opportunities to learn and practice basic wealth creating and wealth preserving skills such as home composting, growing food, caring for trees, preparing herbal remedies, preserving food, harvesting rainwater, repurposing salvage, conserving fossil fuel energy, home design, and much more! http://www.meetup.com/GreenNewYorkers/