A few words about despair

Yes, sometimes I despair. Don't we all? Oil going up. Food prices going up. Foreclosures going up, with a mountain of credit card debt hanging over people. Crop failures all over the world due to unpredictable weather events.

I read a good article on Fake Plastic Fish blog this morning, worth sharing. . It's worth while
to read the very thoughtful comments on this article too.

I hope Rosa does not mind me quoting her comment. It has a lot to say to me, and hopefully to you too.

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"One thing about about this movement is that there is a place for everyone in it.

"If you're a homemaker, you can do the Riot 4 Austerity thing. If you're a commuter, you can bike or find transit or carpool options. If you are a researchy, internet-y person, you can have a blog and share that talent. If you like to be in-your-face with people, you can go sing with Reverend Billy (we did that a few years ago at the Mall of America, and it was a blast.) If you are secretly a mad scientist, you can build bike-powered things.

"Everything needs doing, so anything you love to do, you can do it as a way to change the world. Because it all needs doing, you can choose to do the parts that feed you and keep you going."
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That's why my DH and I started the 100-mile diet, and why I started the LoveLandLocal Food Buying Cooperative. This is the "part that feeds me", and the marvelous thing is that it feeds a lot of other people too. We have over 70 families in the cooperative now, ordering over a thousand dollars worth of organic food every month: produce from Colorado, and staples from the western U.S.

Without the food cooperative, April and May would have been too difficult for us on the 100-mile diet. Not that we would have starved, but two months without fresh vegetables is pretty hard to face. We couldn't get through a case of butter lettuce by ourselves, but with help from other members, together we can polish off two cases easily (that's 48 heads of lettuce). Ambrosia!

The Colorado vegetables are coming in. Many CSAs have started already. We can buy spinach, three kinds of lettuce, parsley, fresh herbs, snap peas (!) from our organic suppliers. And I'm finding radishes, and hothouse tomatoes, cukes and peppers at the Farmer's Markets. Our CSA starts next month.

I'm going to stop criticizing the Farmer's Markets. It is very time-consuming for produce farmers to wash up their stuff, drive it into town, and sit there for three hours not making very much money. And the non-produce stuff there IS really very good. Solutions for late-spring veggie lack include 1. bulk buying, 2. season extenders (so I can grow my own), 3. putting up more stuff when it's in season (which I also plan to do).

Or, 4. for the larger solution:
As a community, I'd like to see us foster a business with orchards and greenhouses like Jerome Osentowski's in the Carbondale area. His greenhouses pump hot air deep into the soil from the daytime sunshine, and reverse and pump it back out at night. The fans are solar-powered. Almost no supplemental heating is required, even on the hills above Basalt where he lives.