“Remember the week 6 note where Kristin mentioned Who can catch the most sunlight, and keep it?  Well she’s away this week and that means I’m here to take you into the deep end of the pond regarding that sentence.  Let me warn you in advance, the train of thinking I’ve been on the past few months may be a runaway train.  You might want to step off now before that train crashes.  Ready?

Here we are, eating carrots, popping popcorn, raising kids, raising ourselves, having one of the easiest and most wonderful lives available to hominids since there were hominids (4 million years ago, so I hear). Yet…  what if…   there is an unseen price to it?  What if all those social rights people who make us feel bad about hunger and cleft palates in Africa and all those god-awful scientists who keep telling us the earth is heating up are right?  What if our lives are reducing the quality of life for the other 7 billion people in the world and for our kids and our kids’ kids?  Possible?  Remotely possible?  Well %#$*!

Not that I and others haven’t had these thoughts before, but somehow now after almost a decade of “sustainable” horse farming I am seeing it all fresh again. And I’m getting awful fired up.  Fired up to help myself, my family, my friends and neighbors (near and far) create a life that is easy to conceive of, yet so difficult to achieve.  Sustainable.  Wendell Berry wrote about thinking and acting locally, and I think he’s got it.  Local means the consequences of production are internalized, visible just outside your doorstep. Global means the costs are externalized, and invisible.

In the billion year plan, none of it is a problem.  Geology and most likely biology will wend their way along for a good while, whether the quality of life for hominids improves or declines.  But I want it to get better for us.  Better for me.  Because being rich with good air and good food and good water and good shelter and good brains and good bodies and good family and good friends and good toys is amazing.  Out of control great.  But I want to have those things and not destroy our future, destroy the quality of life for other people. That is so worth fighting for…” [Continue reading Week 8: Farm Note by Mark | Kristin Kimball.]

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• The Dirty Life – A Barncast by The Wild Center (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)
• Sheep Invade Essex Farm (www.essexonlakechamplain.com)
• The Dirty Life, By Kristin Kimball (independent.co.uk)
• Essex Farm Focus