Last Tree Standing

 As most of you know I have been busy this summer growing things close to home.   For me its a responsibility not a hobby.  I can't justify buying food with an environmental footprint that large when I have 3 months to grow some of my own.

My horizons have caring have been focused on the plants I have been tending and my lovely step-daughter and family with the future in mind.

 I was given a swift kick in the vacation mindset to blog, however, after watching Mitt Romney's Speech at the GOP2012 and reading an article by George Monbiot entitled The Day The World Went Mad.

I encourage you to read the both pieces which point to clear indicators of some known issues of how our collective ignorance, conflicting horizons of caring, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance play out when it comes to issues that affect us globally, like the melting of the polar ice caps.

Monbiot points out that on August 29th "a record Arctic ice melt had just been announced by the scientists studying the region. The 2012 figure has not only beaten the previous record, established in 2007. It has beaten it three weeks before the sea ice is likely to reach its minimum extent. It reveals that global climate breakdown is proceeding more rapidly than most climate scientists expected. But you could be forgiven for missing it, as it scarcely made the news at all."

He goes on to question why the British media focused on the proposed Heathrow runway and not this issue.   He was questioning why we would ignore this issue at our peril and asking us to consider our limitations in caring and thinking.  

I am coupling this with a small part of the Romney speech, although the whole speech was rife with examples of limited thinking. 

After listening to Romney belittle Obama's already weak climate change initiatives last night you start to get a sense of how hard this is for us as human beings to consider and the conflicts inherent in caring on a species and planet level.  

Romney:    "President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans.  And to heal the planet.  My promises to help you and your family."

This is the challenge of our time.

We need to figure out how to care through time and history, into the future and make our decisions based on those who will come after us not for ourselves and our narrow gain in a narrow lifespan of our own 60 - 80 years.   Typically, our species have not based our cultures (which, combined with our hard-wiring, are a key shaping force for how we think and see the world) on testing against real life, nor thinking through time to the future and certainly we wrestle with seeing "all men as equal".

We build stories in our cultures that orient our thinking to a certain level of expectation that rarely match up to what is most needed in reality.    This is the dangerous complexity of our collective thinking that has brought us to this place.   We can rethink ourselves.

WE need to be the giants whose shoulders those generations stand on.    And as our generation stands on a precipice never before experienced by our species we need unprecedented thinking to move us forward.  

We need the kind of thinking that draws on the lessons of that which has come before us.    We need only look around a wee bit to see that we, in a smaller tribal scale have experienced this situation and failed to act - think of Easter Island.   Against all possible reality they continued destroying trees to make sacrifices to the dead who would then provide everything they needed.  Even in the face of conflicting evidence, as they suffered environmental degredation and deforestation which lead to unstable agriculture,  their culture was so path dependent that they destroyed themselves and their ability to exist.    Does this sound like any humans you know?   The lessons are scaleable.  

What is the stumbling block?  I dare say it is not our technological abilities but our cultural limitations.   We have ways of thinking and being embedded in our cultures, I don’t care what culture you are talking about that make it difficult to transcend our thinking and caring to that larger frame.

Caring for our species & the planet means giving up many things that are comfortable & convenient, perhaps even necessary to maintain our current economic levels.   Our brains are hardwired for comfort and to justify the way we exist.   I must insert here we can be rewire ourselves, no room for fatalistic thinking here, sorry kids.   We do have to take the time to think through it and consider how we are hard wired

So here is a thought experiment.   Think about the idea of lessening your fossil fuel consumption, think about how you heat in your home.   For those of us in the North, becomes a very daunting idea to not use or have less heat in the winter, even no heat, right?

If you follow the thinking for a bit and you will encounter cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias that will tell you why you deserve to burn fossil fuels over another community without the same extremes.   The problem is we all see our situation as the most dire and necessary. (For more on this explore the book:  Mistakes Were Made but Not by Me)

Its a pretty straight forward caring conflict, my comfort vs global climate change.   Now, I'm not saying that my using a heater in winter is the sole cause, of course not.  But I am saying that our use, our path dependency, leads us to think a certain way about fossil fuels and how we need to use them.   

That leads us to feel a certain way about "our" natural resources that narrows our thinking down into arbitrary geophysical lines and historical time lines.   That leads us to "believe" in certain inalienable rights &  privileges. 

Then we may need to give up income for example and future income as well as Samantha Nutt points out in her book Damned Nations. Many retirement savings plans including CPP are funded by arms sales.  (Not blowing each other up IS part of the story of us doing better on this planet, as far as I can see, please let me know if you disagree)  By investing in bombs, guns, arms etc, as ALL CANADIANS are doing because of CPP, we are betting that and inadvertently hoping that people will use arms... which if you follow the thinking trail, means that we are betting on people killing each other.  

We are so path dependent that we are struggling with making wise decisions.    We are at a place where cultural provisionalism is no longer going to work for us, as a species.    We need to understand what the real world needs, not the one we have made up in our heads.

If we draw on a broader story of life and humanity we may be able to right our boat, but that will be uncomfortable and require disagreement.  Since we are so strongly driven by the need to belong (to our in-group, implying a need for out-group) and we are small troupe lazy primates, I suspect that in itself, not even the extreme demand for resources may cause more war & strife.

We do have the capacity to move forward.   We can see, in pockets of our humanity a striving for collective caring.   We can see people holding up their hands and saying stop, this is not right.     We now need the way to assess our thinking, assess our judgements through a global lens so that we can do our best to lessen the stress on our species and our planet.   And as much as I know that the world would be happier without us on it, I do still think, when I reflect on people in our generations, like Sophie Scholl, The Elders, Ray Anderson, Rachel Carson, Wangari Maathai - I know it is there, we are worth preserving.

The challenge of our time is collective conduct systems that draw on the best of what it means to be alive and human.   Conduct systems that override culture.

Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it can't.

How to Make Rhubarb Compote

Here is my simple and easy - and tasty recipe for Rhubarb Compote:

6 - 8 cups chopped rhubarb
1/4 cup orange blossom water
3/4 - 1 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 - 2 tsp lavender
rind of 3/4 of a navel orange

1) Grow Lavender the season before, collect & store  

2) Grow Rhubarb

3) Chop rhubarb

4) Mix all together

5) Boil the crap out of it. 

Enjoy over ice cream, which involves a cow - yours or one that is owned by someone else.  We won't even discuss the orange blossom water and the navel orange, definitely not local.

There are deeper thoughts brewing but they have been melted by the 31 degrees and sleep deprivation.    Will work on them when the Stampede guests all leave.   For now, some rhubarb porn

Look! Look What I Did!

"I got some radishes.   I did it.   This is what I made."  

These vain and incomplete thoughts run through my head every time there is a successful pull from the ground.

It is indicative of the kind of thinking that plagues us as human beings.   We desperately want a place in the ecosystem far more dominant than we deserve.   (remember blog post What Kind of Soil is Most Needed for Growing Humans?   That etymology of our name piece is important here)

The good news is this is not an unknown problem.  Knowing this is a problem that has been tracked by philosophers and sages over the generations allows us to begin the hard journey of reconstructing ourselves and our cultures.

When I break down what goes into my harvests by examining the causal architectures I must take into account much more than my labour, such that it was.

You see most of the seeds I used came from a seed catalogue.  Sent to me via Canada Post.   (A very complex system of information delivery)  The seeds I chose were collected by others with far more knowledge  on heritage varieties, isolating pollination practices, and harvesting viable seeds.  My labour included tilling the soil, planting seeds and on some days watering... and, of course, weeding.

I must also consider the soil;  the organisms, bacteria, insects, not to mention the nutrients created by the decomposition of plant, insect and animal life generations before.   I am confident I had little to do with that.

Then, I need to consider the wind carries pollen from one plant to another so that it may bloom, or cause the vibrations that shake the stamen and pistil on self pollinating plants, in order to encourage them to create fruit.   If not the wind, then the pollinators, like my friendly hardworking bees who help me out.  Yup, not my doing.

I must also consider the sun, that star at the center of our universe, the earth rotates on it's axis and due to many forces we get a growing season.  The sun is a key part to warming the ground, the soil, sprouting the seeds, giving the green leafs nutrients.   I am pretty sure I didn't make that happen, although I can safely say I leveraged the sun in some places with structures originally devised by people far more clever than I.

Okay, now I need to consider the rain that gives moisture to my plants, or even more remarkable the fact that I can water my plants when no rain arrives through the water supply the roots of which we can trace back to early Rome & aqueducts.     The fact that I have a hose and running water in my yard is a testament to the striving and learning of many before me.

Um... I okay, I walked to the garden, held the watering can and filled it, then emptied it.   And although  that is something it is certainly not the whole story, as a matter of fact it is a small part of the story and that is very liberating. 

This breakdown barely scratches the surface of what is going on, but it is an example of a way to consider the true effort of our existence & our true place in our primary community of life.  

When I focus on what I can get out of life, I forget that I am creating a future for those yet to come.

If I remember what I am building on, I can let go of the many petty problems that plague us as humans like ego, status drive, conspicuous consumption and move towards a place where my life has a purpose beyond my lifetime.

There is a quote a few good people have driven my attention to lately (thank you Anita & Elizabeth) which seems achingly appropriate for this conversation:

“You are a flower and a seed. 

You are part of a story which began with the first cell of life. 

That story will continue on after you…

You are a guardian of the seeds for the world to come. 

All that has gone before and all that is yet to come is within you. 

Through you passes humanity’s saving fire.  You are running in a relay. 

This is the moment you have been chosen to hold the torch.  You cannot refuse to run. 

Whatever you do is part of your page in the story of life.” 

~ Tolbert McCarrol~

Although I suspect this quote could be vastly misconstrued in areas, the piece that is important to focus on is that we are a part of the story, not the whole story.    We are part of the relay and we participate whether we are conscious of it or not.    We engage in consciously leaving this place a better place for life to come.

We can also choose to be asleep and unconscious.    In making that choice we are more likely to not consider all that goes into our daily actions, our path dependency and we are more likely to cause harm.  

Growing things, for me,  is a simple meditation on what most needs doing.   This exercise applies to all our actions, the daily actions of what and how I choose to spend my time, my money, what I pay attention to.    The larger questions of how we negotiate the space of "natural resources" & "human resources". 

If we can zoom in on the earths soil, we can learn to zoom out to life & humanity through time and space.   

Why Read? Nutrients for your Soil.

A colleague of mine on the journey shared this  photo.  

Admittedly it is pretty cute but more importantly it reminds us about what learning is for.

Reading is more than entertainment.    Reading is for learning.   Why would we want to learn?   In order to reduce our ignorance.

When I was reading this book I spent some time wondering how on earth someone making the decisions that Dr Nutt points to around aid and military intervention might see more of the story given how their thinking is oriented.

It is only through investigative journalism, truth telling, play writing, story telling, sage development, listening carefully and the capacity to negotiate confirmation bias that we can move forward

Books = nutrients... all soil needs nutrients

(Thank you Christine Martin, for this photo)

What kind of soil is most needed for growing humans?

I have already mentioned the concept of culture being the soil we grow out of. 

It is something I consider a lot in my life.

It is in our name.

The etymology of the world Human points us to three key areas: from O.Fr. humain, umain (adj.) "of or belonging to man"


We are a species - homo sapien sapien (which is another conversation about calling ourselves wise wise human - but that is for another day).   This means we ALL belong to the same species that is striving to keep our species alive.   Race and cultural divisions are subsets... we ALL belong to the community of man.

There is also an aspiration quality to our name:    from L. humanus "of man, human," also "humane, philanthropic, kind, gentle, polite; learned, refined, civilized," probably related to homo (gen. hominis) "man,".

I suspect that we all agree this is us, as a species trying to do better.  Likely we will not achieve this goal but we know have the capacity and this is something to pay attention to because it is so important to us that we made it part of our name.

Lastly the word human is also derived from humus "earth,"  notion of "earthly beings," as opposed to the gods.

We are of the earth.   Grounded in soil.    We are part of a larger community of all life on this earth.

And, to extend the metaphor a tiny bit further, if you will indulge me, we grow out of the soil we create on this earth - culture

It reminds me of the story many of us have heard:

“Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.”  When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, “The one I feed the most.”

We feed those dogs on individually and culturally on a steady diet derived not only from the sources of  perceived culture we draw on (TV, Internet sources, news sources, pop culture, theatre, art, books - some cultural & societal resources) but all sources of learning (there are three:  engagements with life, direct contact with others, and cultural & societal resources).

Institutions are a source of learning for us.   They are part of our soil.   Many people, including thinker Chris Hedges, are pointing to how polluted our soil is.

This sparked quite a debate yesterday.

It got me to thinking about what we are growing in this soil and how would we do it better and what must we consider as we do this.  

Not easy questions, not easy to answer but it brought me to a platitude that was making the rounds on the cultural thermometer of facebook:

"We talk so much about leaving a better planet to our kids, that we forget about leaving better kids to this planet. Educate your children - say NO to them every once in a while."

One of the things I vehemently dislike about platitudes is there is rarely enough thinking behind them to make them helpful.   They are often a trailhead but if one does or cannot think past the trailhead, one can end up in a lot of hot water.

The question is not whether or not, as we are raising kids to become adults that do better on this planet, we say no to them... of course we do.   As we must also say maybe, okay, yes and "what do you think about that?" or "why does that matter?"

The question is what dog are we feeding within them.    And who else is feeding that dog, and how are we going to do better.  

Here is a case example I want to share of kids growing into better adults that could care for the primary communities we live in life & humanity.  

 This photo is of Sophie & Hans Scholl who were part of the White Rose Movement during WW2.   If you don't know this story, I highly recommend you add the nutrients:  Sophie Scholl & The White Rose by Jud Newborn & Annette Dumbach.    This particular retelling is helpful in understanding what it takes to support the culture that grows better kids to leave to this planet.

Sophie & Hans Scholl were the sort of kids who grow up to be adults on this planet that cared enough to speak truth to power in a time when many other people were too afraid to speak up. Together with the White Rose movement they sparked a resistance inside Germany.
 
What kind of soil does it take to shape kids into people like this.

What did Hans and Sophie draw on?  Great art, philosophy, nature (source of learning 3 societal and cultural resources),  the strength and clear thinking of their parents, teachers, inspirational leaders in their community (source of learning 2: direct contact with others), and they themselves learned from their experiences (sources of learning 1:  life).   They watched and questioned if the actions of the Nazi party lined up with life & humanity.    When they recognized that it didn't they drew on learned experience to assess, with disciplined thinking, whether or not what was happening was wise or good action.   

When I think about growing things, I also consider growing our species.    How will I contribute to leaving better kids on this planet?   How will/can I assess if I am adding to the nutrients of the soil for others, am I giving nutrients back, creating a toxic environment?   

 We are all responsible for the soil from which the humans of today grow from - culture.

Beginner Tomatoes

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Like many growers I give away seedlings, often in an attempt to get people engaged in the joy and hard work of growing things.    I have been growing things for many years but the last three with the added sense of responsibility that this can link myself and others to a greater community (as mentioned in the post Why Grow Things)

This is a document I created for some elementary school aged growers who were starting their tomatoes.   This is created specifically with Calgary in mind and is by no means comprehensive.     I am sharing this here in hopes that others may add to it, correct me if I am off base or use it as a helpful tool

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Square Feet

I'm a sceptic - generally when I am approached with something that will revolutionize anything, I wait, watch and often see no difference except for the name or product one needs to buy

But this year, I listened to my sister in law and tried square foot gardening.

I see it primarily as an organizational tool.  And in that regard I can use all the help I can get.  

Here are my two beds.   I have a plot up the street in the community garden

and a plot in the back yard to feed the slugs 

(that will be another post in the future - slugs, in a desert) 

Let me know if you are square footing it and how that is going for you.

Why grow things?

 The other day someone told me that growing things (aka gardening) was my hobby.

I bristled.

This is no hobby.

This activity limits my daily engagements, my summer retreats away from my home and demands constant attention with little guarantee of success.

No person who has ever tried to grow food in Calgary, Alberta could call this a hobby.

So what is it then? 

Well, I suppose some might call it a philosophy.   I call it a responsibility.

We live in one of the most privileged places on the planet at this time and place in history.

With privilege comes responsibility

If I can live in this city and reap the benefits of that privilege then I am responsible for not over exploiting the resource.

I work towards this in many ways as a community developer:

I work to reduce ignorance and error in our community leaders and culture (the soil from which humans grow) in my volunteer engagements.

I work towards reducing waste and suffering in our local & broader communities by illuminating our collective ignorance through cultural artifacts (creating plays, stories, documentaries that we can draw on to consider more of the story)

I see community as the communities of interest and allegience as well as two primary communties that we all belong to - Life & Humanity.

Think about that for a minute - we are all human and we are all part of life on this planet.

So if I am living & working as a community developer in a privileged community that shaped the planet through it's exports of oil & gas then I have huge responsibilities to those communities.

That is why I stay in this city - a city with brutal winters and the shortest growing season in Alberta.   Because of the responsibility to do better into the future.

That is also why I am learning to grow my own food.

I, like you, live in a global economy.   I live in a city where fresh local food is scarce.   I have the economic where with all to afford trucked in produce in the fall, winter and early spring so that I can round out the local beef with some other nutrients. 

That is a path dependency that makes me very uneasy.    One day I woke up and said: that is not good enough for my soul.   I can't accept that and I must do what I can to do better.

Moving to a farm in BC is not an option because of my commitments to the broader community.   There are some of us trying to ensure that in this place on the planet we do better... we are squeeky wheels, policy influencers, general questioners and we can't leave because there is a need.


This blog is about the journey of joining the many gardeners, urban farmers, local growers around the world.

This is my commitment to you planet earth.   I will do my best to serve you