06 April 2002 - 16:50

It's a bright sunny Saturday here in South Florida. Today Wheel and I took a handful of quarters, a watch, some canvas bags and reading books and took the bus to the Granary natural foods store. We loaded up our bags with as much organic food as we could carry, carefully reading all the labels. I paid for it with a credit card that gives a percentage to the Ocean Conservancy (formerly the Center for Marine Conservation). We made sure to leave the store just in time to catch the return bus. So now the two of us have food again and I'll be feeling Greener Than Thou for the rest of the day.

I've been an environmentalist for as long as I can remember. My dad was an environmental research chemist for a long while, and both of my parents love camping, hiking, canoing, birdwatching and gardening. I grew up on a six acre spread on top of a hill in rural Missouri. We recycled everything that could be recycled despite the fact that we were too far out for any sort of recycling pick up program and had to haul it ourselves, 45 minutes to a recycling center. My parents grew a lot of food, relatively speaking.

I can remember having many different things in the garden at various times. Strawberries, sour cherries, apples, grapes, blueberries, raspberries; watermellons, cantelopes, pumpkins, sweet corn, sugar snap peas, string beans, asparagus, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatos, lettuce, sweet potatos, buckwheat, squash, onions, peanuts, garlic, radishes, cucumbers, mushrooms (from a kit), and a wide variety of herbs (thyme, sage, rosemarry, catnip, many more). I'm sure there was more. Wild blackberries grew plentifully in the woods.

I'll take a completely random shot in the dark and say 15% of our food came from the garden. We froze, canned, and dried food for the winter. We made our own pickles and catsup and only rarely ever bought either. My brother and I raised chickens and ate their eggs; my parents raised chickens and turkeys and ate them, and eventually the family started getting beehives and harvesting honey. I must emphasize that all of this was done simply as a hobby, for our own pleasure. The beekeeping has become now become a business for my parents.

That was the environment in which my ethics developed. In the current fires of idealistic youth I'm a bit more of an extremist than my parents, but ultimately, the apple didn't fall far from the tree. The next biggest influence was surely my peer group of unschooled teenagers/ Not Back to School Campers.

Extremist, I say? Certainly not in the eco-terrorism sense. And in my current lifestyle I'm pretty middle-of-the-road. On the other hand, my dream house is one that Wheel and I design and mostly build ourselves, out of natural and recycled materials. I want to fill and furnish it with things I've made--curtains, table clothes, rugs, pillows, blankets, potholders--anything fiber related I think I can handle, from spinning organically grown cotton fluff through staining/dying, weaving, knitting, crocheting, sewing, etc. Woodworking is more of an unknown, but we're hoping to tackle a lot of the furniture too. If I have access to a wheel and kiln I really think I can manage bowls, cups, and vases.

Then there will be gardens. Lots of gardens. Not to mention a wide variety of non-human critters and human children. We've actually started compiling detailed notes on varied aspects of our living arrangements' design, and slowly begun doing relevant research. It will probably be 5 - 10 years before any of that work becomes timely, because I'm committed to graduate school, and we'll need to do some traveling and money-earning before we can afford to start settling down. Obviously once we do, we don't want to move. Nonetheless, it's the biggest challenge to my commitment to dolphins in terms of dedication and sheer time/money/energy required. I've always anticipated some tension there between two essentially full-time jobs.

None the less, I remain young and naively optimistic.

I also remain facing the prospect of spending a while longer in Babylon before I get a chance to make a physical sanctuary. For me this means compromise and continual reassesment. It also means spending money on stuff that I can't get for myself--I can't really grow much of my own food while I'm living in a dorm, so yeah, I'm going to keep buying local and organic. It's a little pricier, but I really am convinced that I can't afford not to. Besides, rice and water now comprise a substantial portion of my diet--I didn't care for either three years ago, but both have become very satisfying. Convenient.

On the other hand, after three years at college, walking into a quick-stop or gas station store still makes me feel like an outsider. Big ones especially scare me, and I wander around kind of dazed. There's some stuff people just shouldn't adapt to.

I guess I don't really have a point to this entry. But I'm really looking forward to dinner tonight.