A little on the ethics of gardening

We're just relaxing today after one hell of a Saturday. We had a huge plant sale yesterday down in Waynesville. The day started at around 3:30 a.m., and, aside from the car ride there, I didn't sit down again until around 5 p.m.; then my head didn't hit the pillow until around 11 or 12 last night. Yeah, it was busy. We sold lots of beautiful plants though, which will find cozy homes in the gardens of lots of folks. We hear from the media and see firsthand that gardening is on the increase this year. Which is great.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

That quote is from Aldo Leopold, one of the great forefathers of environmental ethics and ecology. A Sand County Almanac is his masterwork, wherein he philosphically and beautifully documents a year of living on a small farm he reclaimed in south-central Wisconsin. Key to Leopold's work is his Land Ethic, which, in a nutshell, says humans need to face the undeniable fact that we are part of the natural world, not separate from it and, therefore, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

The book was written in the 40s. Leopold was worried then about Americans' tendency to focus so much on being "productive," rule-following, patriotic citizen-consumers, leaving the bulk of important decisions to "others," notably the government. In other words, Leopold felt that without direct, individual obligation--an ethical relationship--to the preservation of the land and everything on it, we could lose all that sustained our lives and made them worth living. An obligation without personal commitment and conscience is often an unfulfilled obligation.

Could it be that 60 years after A Sand County Almanac was first published folks might be embracing the land ethic?

Yesterday I sold plants to people who have never gardened before. And I hope I sold them good, strong plants and gave them some useful tips. Because it might be that their livelihood--or at least their comfort--depends on our plants providing their family with some sustenance. Some people spent $50 on little vegetable and herb plants. That's 20+ plants. For their home garden. All these folks--and apparently they're out in record numbers all across the country--have decided to take a little bit more responsibility for their own existence, closing the door just a bit on the destruction caused by mechanized petrochemical agribusiness and government subsidies. They know (or will see soon) that viability springs from the soil, from other plants, from animals, from the sun, and from other people.

I don't know if people are doing this out of necessity, if they're being pragmatic, or if it's the start of a new era in this country. We'll see. But no matter the motivation, this year's gardeners/farmers (the two words can be interchanged in my opinion) will gain or solidify valuable skills for the necessity of the near future. 'Cause I don't think it will be long before people need to grow at least some of their own food. Same as it almost ever was.

From The French Broad, by Wilma Dykeman:

It would be difficult to find a dozen people who have a family history in the French Broad country who don't count at least one farmer, and more likely several, among their ancestors. Even professional men by vocation were also farmers by necessity until recently, and savings were often deposited in lands rather than in banks.
[...]
In the rugged Tennessee county of Sevier, bordered by the Smoky Mountains and sliced by the Little Pigeon River, there were 1,071 heads of families listed in a census of 1850. Of these, all but 89 were designated farmers, with the exception of one or two candid souls who admittedly "did nothing." Of this eight percent of nonfarmers, blacksmiths (14), millers (11), and Baptist minsters (9) led the list. Half-a-dozen carpenters and wagon makers, five merchants, three each of physicians, tanners, shoemakers and horse traders, a brace of lawyers, coopers, Methodist ministers, hammermen and saddlers, and a single hatter, miner, wheelwright, navigator and cabinetmaker just about complete a fairly clear picture of the pre-Civil War life of that and many a neighboring county.

And I'd venture to guess it was like that in most of America a century-and-a-half ago. When I read those numbers, I was shocked, and proud of our ancestors; almost everyone was a small farmer, and many non-farmers provided people with the products and services they required to live a decent life. It's been like this on most of the planet for most of human history. People knew what it meant to work and survive. Most everyone possessed skills that mattered. And, in many cases, that direct, knowing dependence on the biotic community for one's livelihood automatically led to an ethical obligation to care for the land. That obligation slowly eroded; but maybe we've reached the valley.

Mainstream media and politicians at the federal level will probably not admit it until the very end, but the American lifestyle haphazardly erected during the past century or so is just about over. I don't know if I'd go as far as Jim Kunstler, who says that the demise of our deeply embedded irresponsible stuff-based culture will lead to a "national psychotic breakdown" or that "the current mood of public paralysis will dissolve in a blur of blood and spittle sometime between Memorial Day and July Fourth," but I like the way he tries to lay it all out bare on the floor. Sometime in the near future, life in America is gonna be very different. People are gonna have to relearn nearly lost skills. Thankfully some folks have preserved old knowledge and have worked to adapt them into usable, modern, ethically based skills.

Gardening is the best first step in our recovery--a real stimulus. I admire all those folks who came out yesterday to start their gardens for the season.

scavenging and growing

The last couple days have been dry, warm, and sunny. Which means that our backlog of way-too-big greenhouse plants could get transplanted into the fields. Chard, choi, brocolli, lettuce, potatoes (seeded), kohlrabi, and cabbage all escaped their plastic prisons. It was a good feeling to get 'em all out. Here's a shot of the lettuces and some of the brassicas right before they got trucked out to the field.

How about the greenhouse cukes? Click to see the detail. Those tentacles are beautiful and strong. And notice the fruit in the first pic. Hopefully we defeated the soil disease problem.

The arugula and other greens we direct-seeded into the greenhouse our first day here? They're coming along, and some should be ready for next week's tailgate market.

Here's potatoes being planted. The implement is called a dragsetter. Two folks sit on the thing and drop potato pieces while one person pulls it with the tractor. A shoe digs a trench, and those wheels you see pack in dirt over the dropped potato. I was the driver. It was my first time doing potatoes like this. It was fast and easy. This dirt is plowed and disked, but there was really no need to till it up.

Then we found these yesterday admidst a stand of poplars on the ridge (thanks Molly!).

That's four yellows and three greys. They were all solitary; that fact combined with the mounds of deer shit and disturbed leaves make us think the deer are devouring all the morels. But it's just a theory. Oh, and we found that turtle shell that the morels are laying against. Not a bounty of morels, but it was so satisfying to finally find them ourselves and cook 'em up in some butter and eat 'em. They were yummy.

Also came across this spike morel that was too dried out to harvest or eat. Ugly mutha, right?

Beautiful tulip we saw during our foragings.

First market of the season is tomorrow, so we'll probably be heading down to Asheville to check it out. Then we get to tour a farm down in Saluda Saturday evening as part of our apprenticeship learning experience. And then we get a roommate on Sunday (the third apprentice). So, it's gonna be a busy weekend.

Most of the photos in this post were taken by Meagan. All the credit for the pretty pics should go to her. Plus she contributes about half of all the other photos on the blog.

Economy: It's hard work

You've been hearing it all over the place, probably every single day for the last several months: the economy sucks. Everyone says it. And it sure looks like it, with people losing their jobs left and right.

I know a little bit about this. I've been looking for work on and off for the past several months, and I can tell you that the available employment situation in central Wisconsin has worsened considerably--and it wasn't even that great to begin with. In the middle of '08 I would say there were plenty of jobs available, albeit not-so-desirable jobs, but still, plenty of jobs. Now, well, it's slim out there. Back then, a non-specific job search on the local daily newspaper classifieds yielded about 15-20 new job postings a day. Now you get that many new job postings every five days or so.

Still, in 08, wife and I combined made more money than we ever did as a couple. But we still struggled to make it at the end of the year. I don't exactly know why. For one, we probably spent more in general (that tends to happen when you make more money). For another, food and fuel costs were way up (though, we were less impacted by food prices because of our involvement with local agriculture). Regarding fuel: since we've lived in this apartment (it's been over four years now) we've managed to, on average, cut our electricity usage year to year. Electricity runs everything in our apartment (heat, stove, hot water, etc.). And yet, our electricity bills have continued to rise, this past December being the highest bill ever. Granted, it was cold, so heat was being generated at a high rate. But still, what kind of encouragement is that? People learn to use less, people cut back, but costs continue to rise. What's that? It's a dysfunctional economy.

That's right, the economy isn't bad, it's fundamentally dysfunctional.

I understand there are holes in my examples above. I do admit that we probably spent more in general. But ask my wife, she thinks I'm pretty extreme about avoiding purchases, so my idea of increased spending is probably a bit overstated. And I do admit that the winter has been cold. But if you look at the raw numbers provided on our little electric bill you can see that we've done a pretty damn good job of cutting our kWh usage in relation to heating/cooling degree days.

I think it has gotten to the point where if you live most of your existence in the mainstream American economy, you have few options to control your own livelihood--unless, of course, you desire money, pursue it, and are good at attaining it (the shortcomings of money coveting is a topic for a different post). For the rest of us who hold different values, our only opportunity for making a living, in my opinion, is to reject the dominant economic paradigm.

(What I'm about to say, I'm fully aware, is not anything new. It's all been said before. But now's the time for us to really consider viable alternatives to an economy that's been broken for so long. Perhaps this is the first time in several decades where a critical mass of people is willing to really question the way things are run and how it affects their daily lives. I'm just a messenger trying to straddle the divide.)


So, if I want to cut costs, take gentle steps on the Earth, and live a more satisfying life, I need to either change the deeply entrenched economic system (which many people much smarter than me have been trying to do for so many years now, to nearly no avail) or a bunch of us need to opt out and make our own economy (which is already happening successfully in small patches throughout the world). Whichever path one chooses to take to an alternative economy, it's gonna involve a rededication to good old human labor.


In the alternative economy I'm directly responsible for my heat, for example. If I'm using wood, the biggest "cost" is personal labor, which involves me and my neighbors actively managing a forest, cutting down some trees (or clearing dead timbers), hauling wood, and maintaining a heating system. But (here's a major key) it's not a cost in the traditional sense, with the proper mindset, because my labor is enjoyable. I get to be physically and mentally active (it keeps me healthy in more ways than one), in many cases I get to be outside (which I think is a built-in human desire), and the cash money I need to spend on such an activity is minimal. No doubt, physical labor and active, meaningful problem solving aren't always a "good time," but far worse is paying the utility provider, who you have absolutely no sway with. (And really, we pay money to go to college or work out at the gym, when a good majority of both meaningful education and physical wellness can be provided through truly productive personal labor.) If I'm providing my own utilities, on the other hand, I guide the entire process: I make the decisions that affect me--not some faceless, sprawling company who doesn't have a meaningful relationship with me or have my interests at heart.


Two things about this economy. Despite the way I describe it, it's not an "I" economy; it requires people consciously working together. Imagine that. It requires community. In that sense, it is much more like the way we have lived for the majority of our time on this planet. The other thing: using wood for heat is only a convenient example; this economy is a modern and forward-looking one that can utilize (when it comes to the example of energy use) things like solar forced-hot-air, earth-rammed construction, passive solar, and, really, anything you can think of that is not energy intensive.

So, I have a real stimulus package for you: we should learn to do things and make the majority of our decisions on a small-scale local level. But let's not be ridiculous about this. You don't have to be some jack of all trades, some complete do-it-yourselfer. It's the 21st century, and we've learned a lot, invented a lot of useful things. Specialization makes sense, but only if we have a general understanding and awareness of the system that makes it possible for us to live a good life. We need to make the system accountable to what we value. Then the possibilities expand.


But we can't be afraid to do a little bit of hard work.

Buying local: Frank's Hardware

Who frequents an independent hardware store? It's probably rare in these days of Lowes, Menards, and Home Depot. But, I'll tell you, I'll take Frank's Hardware over any of them, any day of the week.

I went to Frank's today because I needed to do something that I knew I couldn't do at any one of the big places. See, I needed a particular tool. I needed to find a socket that fit my engine oil drain plug. I've done my own oil before with borrowed tools, but my absentmindedness stopped me from noting what size wrench/socket I used to do the job. All I knew was that my own tool set didn't contain the right tools. So, I figured I either must pinpoint what size socket I needed or just buy a whole set of sockets that were larger than what my current tool set contains. Anyway, finances being how they are, I decided on the former. And I knew that there was only one place that could help me.

So I went to Frank's, the local, independently owned hardware store in Stevens Point, which still survives despite the long presence of several national retailers who offer better prices than they do. But they survive for a reason. And I'm about to tell you why.

Not a minute after I walked into the store, an employee came up to me and asked me if I needed help (this is standard at Frank's). And it wasn't just some random person hired off the street; this guy had some knowledge (also standard at Frank's). I explained my situation and he immediately had some suggestions for me (again, standard). And then he handed me a bunch of different sized sockets and told me I was free to go out to the parking lot and check to see if they matched what I was looking for. After two trials I found the exact thing I was looking for, a 19mm socket. $2.40 later (as opposed to $18 plus for a set of larger metric sockets), I was all set, going home with exactly what I needed--nothing more.

I know this sounds like some sort of advertisement, but make no mistake, time and time again I've found that a local establishment, run by local people, with local connections, is almost always better than the alternative. These folks have a vested interest in their community, whether they be hardware, agriculture, or food service. I hope we start to realize that these are the people that keep not only our communities going, but also our economy.

Cross-quarter day and roots

Yesterday was a cross-quarter day--the midpoint between the solstice and the equinox. For many traditional cultures, the day was important: it marked the approximate beginning of spring. While it certainly doesn't feel like spring out there, I can understand where these people were coming from. After a hard winter, it's nice to anticipate warmer weather knocking on the door. And in some places it is here. Even in Wisconsin we had a thaw day recently, with more to come this weekend.

Now, in the U.S., Feb. 2 is officially Groundhog Day. I don't know about the groundhog. I'm just glad Hallmark doesn't own the day and we don't give each other crappy cards for no reason. For others past and present the day is/was called Imbolc, Candlemas, Oimelc, Lupercalia, Feast of Nut, etc. It was an important day because time and place meant a lot to the livelihood of the people who celebrated it. Now it's mostly just a silly day.

But I sort of celebrated the day by reflecting and taking stock. It made me think about the food we stored this year. The midway point between the astronomical seasons seems to be a good point to reflect on such a thing. It is also a rough midpoint between last harvest and next harvest.

It was our second year of storing crops in earnest. This year was by far the most food we've stored, with something like 100 lbs at the start of the storage season. Our method of storage is pretty crude: we have a tiny apartment that doesn't offer much variation in temperature or humidity from room to room, so we're pretty limited as to what we can offer our veggies.

Potatoes live in an Empty Beer Box in the Living Room Closet™, which is adjacent to the outside wall of the apartment and thus is the coldest space. Winter squash lives in a paper grocery bag underneath the kitchen table. Onions and garlic live on the bottom shelves in a lower cabinet in the kitchen. Carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, cabbage, celeriac, radishes, beets, and turnips live in various places in the fridge (mostly the crisper, but the crisper can't hold them all at the beginning of the storage season). We've got peppers of all kinds sliced up in the freezer and dehydrated tomatoes in a bag in the cabinet. Some carrot-habanero sauce in a jar in the fridge. And we've been long done with our frozen salsa and tomato sauce.

Storage has gone amazing this year, considering the less-than-ideal conditions of our apartment (we do keep it relatively cool though, for many reasons).

Potatoes (especially the russets) are just now starting to shrivel a bit and the sprouts are starting to get out of hand (because they want to be planted soon!). The yellow-fleshed varieties seem to be holding up the best. Luckily I just reupped my stash of locally grown yellow potatoes, which have up till now been stored in ideal conditions (it was a fringe benefit from a good job).

Squash is doing exceptional, aside from the two red kuris we lost to rot about a week ago (if you've ever tasted them, it is a real loss). The acorns, which are still good and solid, have turned all orange!

Garlic and onions are as good as new, and we have a lot of them left, which is awesome.

Everything in the fridge is still doing well aside from a few cabbage, parsnip, daikon, and celeriac casualities at various points throughout the winter.

The tomatoes are perfect.

And we have a few peppers left in the freezer.

So there it is. Lots of real food left to bring us through the next couple months, which I'm so grateful for. It took a lot of hard but ultimately satisfying work to grow, care for, harvest, and store them. Next summer/fall we'll see about doing more dehydrating and canning.

On the farm, day 4 -- Beetlejuice

Friday was a fairly easy day on the farm. We did a little cleanup from the previous days' harvest and set up boxes for the upcoming week. Then we hoed around the eggplant, which have beautiful little blueish flowers sprouting, and squished potato beetles that were doing their best to keep all the eggplant to themselves. It was quite unpleasant to squish adult potato beetles with my fingers (compared with the juveniles, who weren't crunchy), but such is the trade off: instead of spraying his crops with all sorts of pseudo-safe pesticide, farmer Mark employs a time-tested, more direct approach to crop protection. Either way, the bugs die; having to crush the beetles with my own hands has helped me realize that the production of almost all food involves some sort of death. I never thought about it so concretely when I bought my food in the grocery store or at the farmers market.

Oh yeah, we also rolled up some ground cover before working on the eggplant. I'm not sure what the purpose of the cover was; perhaps it was some form of insulation. I try to ask Mark questions, but I also try not to be a burden out there. Plus, we're usually really busy. Anyway, after the eggplant we moved some sprinklers around and laid some t-tape in the broccoli beds. T-tape is used to drip-irrigate the crops; it has tiny holes in it, which allows the water to slowly make its way into the soil. I believe Mark said he is testing out the sprinklers for the first time this year. He finds the t-tape more efficient, but doesn't like the fact that he has to trash it when he's done using it on a particular row of crops.

This week's sustenance: lettuce, mixed greens, salad turnips, garlic scapes, scallions, snow peas, snap peas (sweet like candy!), and swiss chard.

On the farm -- Days 2 and 3

It's Monday and I'm still in pain. Friday was a killer day on the farm. Not only was it something like 90 degrees without a cloud in the sky, but we spent most of our time doing squats while weeding and transplanting. We also went back on Saturday in lieu of this coming Friday. My quads are very upset with me, and so are a number of other leg muscles I never knew existed.

Friday

So, we weeded more garlic crops. It's a good thing, too, because the weeds were so thick in some areas that the particular plants in the vicinity were obviously stunted. And, remember those nitrogen-fixing flowers we removed last time? Turns out that they were part of the thickness problem in some areas, and we were asked to pick 'em this time so that they don't keep reseeding and become serious weeds themselves.

Then we moved onto transplanting a couple varieties of french crisp head lettuce. It's Farmer Mark's favorite kind of lettuce. They were seeded earlier in the season, and at about 2-4 inches tall they were ready to go in the earth. Mark prepared the bed of soil with his biodiesel-fueled tractor; then we rolled this nifty homemade-looking barrel-like contraption over the area to put divots in the soil that would serve as home base for each plant. I couldn't even tell you how many transplants we did (my thighs say, "lots"), but it was a great experience actually putting our food in the earth by hand. The process consisted of taking the seedling--which was rooted in a "plug" of soil--putting it in the divot, gathering the surrounding soil with our hands to cover the plug, and pushing the plant into the soil so that it would make good contact with the earth. Each plant was thus in its own crater of earth, where any water would readily collect and efficiently hydrate the lettuce (this system of planting is especially important, I assume, with all the hot, dry days we've been having recently in central Wisconsin). Running my hands through the warm, nutrient-rich soil was a peaceful, warming endeavor. I naturally feel connected to the earth, but this was a new type of connection for me; despite dripping with sweat and being inundated by the sun's powerful rays, I felt as if I were sitting lakeside amidst a cool breeze, underneath a thick canopy of trees.

Our remaining time was spent watering the transplants and hoeing. We took home radishes, turnips, some sort of green leaf lettuce, swiss chard, salad mix, and strawberries.

Saturday

I was already hurting Saturday morning, but it was back to the farm for another three hours. It rained moderately, so we spent almost all of our time rehabbing a long-overgrown greenhouse. Let me tell you, it was like a rain forest of wild plants and remnant oregano in there. And some of those plants had deep roots. And it was so humid. And I'm such a cry baby. But I did end up soaked in my own sweat from head to toe; so, so much for staying dry in the greenhouse.

A couple interesting encounters: we ran into some either thistle or nettle that fucking killed. Grabbing this plant is like grabbing onto thousands of tiny needles that stay in your hand for most of the rest of the day. Also, while digging out the oregano we encountered little bugs that would toss little particles of stuff at us. I don't know if it was a a defense mechanism, but I've never seen anything like it.

Anyway, after about 2.5 hours or so, we succeeded in turning the "weed" rain forest into earth that is almost ready for crops (the soil is well-compacted from being trampled for so long). It was quite a transformation. Wish I had my camera.

We've subsequently used our crops in several salads and sandwiches. It was my first-ever taste of swiss chard, which is so yummy I can't recommend it enough. It has a very earthy, crispy, hearty flavor unlike any other leafy green I've had, and apparently it is much more nutritious than spinach even. It works good raw (especially when its young, but if not, just remove the stems for cooking at a later time), sauteed (I cooked it with fresh garlic, olive oil, and onions), and steamed.

Today, I'm trying for the second day to recover from the farm work (I could barely walk straight yesterday). I thought my legs were strong, but I guess I fooled myself. Tonight I'm making stir-fry with turnips, radishes, turnip greens, chard, onions and tofu, all over a brown-rice/wild-rice mix. Not sure what the sauce is gonna be yet.

On the farm -- Day 1

It was an eventful weekend for Meagan and me. Friday morning was our first day ever working at a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm. For those who aren't familiar, CSAs dot rural America and are a much better way to attain most of your food for much of the year. CSAs work in two primary ways.

One way is for you to find your closest CSA and buy a share for the year. At our CSA, Sunny Sky Farm in Amherst Junction, Wisconsin, a share costs $420 for the regular season, which gives you a weekly average of 10 pounds of delicious, local, pesticide/herbicide-free, land-preserving, picked-yesterday food that will feed a family of four on a mixed diet for a week. Sunny Sky has convenient pickup spots in each of the 5 most populous cities in central Wisconsin. You get resupplied every Thursday/Friday from June through November, and you have the option of buying a storage share of hearty vegetables at the end of the year that you can preserve, so you can extend your consumption of local goodness for several more weeks.

The other way: you actually work for your share. At Sunny Sky Farm, we each put in approximately three hours of work in exchange for a full share. Being only two, we plan on shifting to a more vegetable-based diet in order to best take advantage of our earnings. Right now, the shares are on the lighter side, as it is early in the season, but later on, the boxes are supposed to get quite heavy; so we'll have plenty to share.

Your mileage may vary at other CSAs.

So, on Friday we earned our food by taking the tops off of radishes, hoeing between salad crops, preparing a greenhouse for planting, and weeding the garlic crop. The work was harder than we thought it would be, especially the weeding part, which was hours of bending and squatting and pulling. But besides overlooking a couple boxes of radishes and weeding what we thought were weeds (a.k.a. wildflowers) but were actually nitrogen-fixing crop covers, it was a decent start to the season. Having been raised in a megalopolis, we're gonna fuck up a few times, I'm sure (Farmer Mark is very understanding and nice). But we're learning how to raise the food that we and other community members eat to live. There are not many other things I'd rather do right now than learn how to tend my own food--to know what goes into it and what piece of land it comes from.

Our reward for working was a peaceful Friday morning in the country, a gigantic bag of spinach, a head of romaine (I think) lettuce, a bag of salad mix, a large quantity of Rhubarb that leaves me at a loss, a bunch of radishes, and a decent quantity of turnips. The selection of crops will change as the season progresses. The spinach was so delicious that we ate it all this weekend (sandwiches, wraps, salad, on pizza, in tomato sauce, and in a dish with mashed turnips, tofu, garam masala, turmeric, garlic, ginger, ghee, and onions) . Everything else is excellent too--except, I'm not sure about the rhubarb, which, as I said, perplexes me. Meagan says we'll make cobbler with it, and everyone else says "Rhubarb pie, duh!" but I still just sit there and shake my head wondering what I really can do with rhubarb. We'll make it work though.

Besides feeling the rather unexplainable joy of helping my sustenance grow straight out of the ground, I feel good knowing that most of my food takes minimal machine energy to produce and transport and that it is a sustainable operation. What better model could there be? You contribute either a fraction of your time or a fraction of your paycheck, and in return you get the most delicious, well taken care of, produced-nearly-in-your-backyard crops, as well as a connection to your community and the land.

Industrial agriculture, with all its pesticides, herbicides, disease, destruction, cruelty, GMOs, and pollution, is a failed model. As more people become aware of the CSA option, and as CSAs of all different kinds start to connect with each other across their localities, I'm sure we'll see a long overdue revolution in agriculture that actually serves to alleviate hunger and environmental damage thanks to the way CSAs bring commonsense, efficient, generations-tested yet fully modern methods of basic living to our refrigerators.

Time for some salad.

Our forests

I've always been a lover of forests--well, at least since I can remember. I remember being taken up to Wisconsin when I was a kid, on vacations to escape the weird sprawl of Suburbia, Chicago. Of course, my parents had no real problems with suburbia: they had lived there forever, aside from a few short departures. So, when I say escape, I mean that leaving suburbia was to become an escape for me. I remember being awed at the forested landscape, at the smells of the pines, at the wild prairie flowers. What was an escape eventually became sustenance. I would learn to focus most of my vocational efforts on saving up enough money to take frequent trips into "natural" areas.

Now I live in Wisconsin, a heavily forested state, relatively. The first county I lived in here was Adams. It is one of the poorest counties in the state, sparsely populated and filled with lots of interesting forest lands. The county I live in now, Portage, has a university and several decent-sized towns. It is less forested than Adams, but it still has lots of natural beauty. Stevens Point is quite an amazing city from several different angles, but I'm gonna focus on the forests here.

Though Stevens Point is the largest city in Portage County, with about 25,000 people, you'd be hard pressed to find a more forested city of its size. And I'm talking about forest in the city proper. Not only do we have a wonderful nature preserve attached to the college and a sprawling Green Circle Trail, with 30 miles or so of beautiful trails that meander next to rivers and through pine stands, but we also have acres of private forestland hidden away in various corners of the city that are open to exploration (not sure if its legal, per se, but the lack of those "no trespassing" signs tells me I'm allowed). According to the WI Dept. of Natural Resources, urban areas in Portage County average about 35% tree canopy cover, whereas the state average for urban areas is 32%. Pretty impressive, in my opinion. I can't even tell you how much I love the Green Circle Trail; I use it to ride my bike to work--it accounts for about half my ride.

But there's a troubling trend in Portage County: We're literally losing our forests. Back in 1984, long before I got here, 34% of the county's land was forested. Same percentage in 1996. But, in 2004 only 30% of the land was forested. That's a loss of nearly 24,000 acres of forestland in only eight years. Numbers aren't available for 2007, but I can only imagine the downward trend continues. At the same time, though, most of the counties surrounding Portage have steady or increasing levels of forestland, and Wisconsin as a whole is showing an upward trend.

I'm not sure what the deal is here. I suspect that the recent influx of national chain stores has something to do with it. Where there was nothing but land just a few short years ago, there now exists Walmart, Best Buy, Lowe's, Kohl's, McDonalds, some buffet chain, a couple regional restaurants, Starbucks, US Cellular, MC Sports, Cousin's Subs, Petsmart, and Michael's craft store. Hmm... I'm probably forgetting a couple. But, damn, that's a lot of stores--and that's all in one area. Don't even get me started on the rest of the city.

Portage County is definitely growing, and businesses are pouring in. But it's the same old business model that is the product of a failed, unsustainable era of city and land planning. Most of these chains don't know what local means. So, as they set up shop on the outskirts of our city, take up our land and resources and suck up our money, most of the wealth is diverted to some corporate headquarters where it will no doubt be invested in another duplicate building somewhere else in some small city that is ripe for plundering.

I don't know. I see a lot of subdivisions and same-old neighborhoods going up around here, especially in the neighboring towns of Plover, Hull and Whiting. In fact, it seems to me that these towns are some kind of weirdo upcoming suburbs of Stevens Point. It's kind of a sick thought. As once-forested lots are bought up by developers, trees are just mowed down to make room for cookie-cutter houses. I just don't understand that model of development. I do, however, understand that population is growing and people need to put up houses. But can't we lessen our footprint? Haven't we learned something?

Whether one wants to admit it or not, all evidence points to the fact that the earth needs its forests. Truly healthy forests are places of biodiversity, places of sustenance and renewal. We rely on the life processes that are protected and nourished by our forests. Yet, when business comes along, we forget that. One only needs to look at the recent decline of the honey bee--just the latest in a line of collapsing life processes--to realize that when we harshly encroach on the natural order without any forethought, we risk causing serious problems with major repercussions. Ah, the "hidden" costs. When will we start factoring those into the equation?

Back in college, my environmental ethics professor, a Leopold scholar, had an elegant theory of wilderness usurpation. It went something like this:

Draw a square on a piece of paper; this square represents our wilderness. Now, shade half of it; this is the part of the land we agree to turn over for development. Now, shade a quarter of what's left; this is the part of the land we compromise on and turn over for more "needed" development. Now, shade an eigth of what's left; once again, compromise has brought us to give up our land for more "needed" development. And so on, until not much of the land is left to its own devices. Those who refuse to compromise what's left of the land (because they know better) are smeared politically and marginalized as radicals; though, in reality, they are the true conservatives when it comes to this issue.

While certain parts of the country may not be operating under this exact model (as is evidenced by the actual increase in forestland in Wisconsin), many places are struggling to hold on to what's left of their wilderness. And it's literally a struggle, because some people still can't see how the land is important on so many levels.

Fortunately, Wisconsin has a rich tradition of conservation and preservation. We fostered movement giants like Muir and Leopold. I have faith that Wisconsin will go in the right direction, even if my county falters a bit. And I know that other parts of the country have their inspiration as well.

Seeing as how I got my environmental ethics degree under the tutelage of the aforementioned Leopold scholar, I carry a lot of Leopold's Land Ethic with me. His thoughts just rang true with what I already knew. And if there's anything Leopold expressed that we need to remember today, it's this: humans are merely plain members of the land community. Our days of domination are effectively over, and the sooner we come to terms with this situation, the better we'll be in the long run.

We're a populous species, and we will likely require more space on this planet. But I think we can live in harmony with the land. For me, the forests are not supposed to be separate from us; I think, with commonsense development, we can safely take our places in the heart of the community, just as we have most of our history on this planet.