Small things are the roots of vast and powerful ones

By Merry Cox

Whether or not you’re struggling for anything worthwhile, life is always a challenge. People have to choose what they are going to struggle for. Resilience is worth the struggle.

The future depends on a whole lot of little things.

When you do it piece by piece, a little at a time, it turns out that the big struggle for a resilient town isn’t really such a day-to-day struggle at all. Small things are the roots of vast and powerful ones.

It is easy to forget how important the “little stuff” is - easy to think that your little garden doesn’t matter very much. But we should also remember the exponential power of saying “no” and doing for ourselves. The corollary of the fact that every calorie of food takes 10 of fossil fuels is that every stir-fry or salad you eat from your garden saves 10 times the oil as the calories contained within it. The fact that almost every packaged ingredient uses 7 times as much energy to create that packaging means that your choice to buy bulk oatmeal just saved 7 times as much energy as the package contains.

In 1944, American Victory Gardens grew as much produce as did every vegetable farm in the country - fully half of all US produce came from home gardens. And while no one was self sufficient, together they created an enormous impact. Every bite of food you grow, every bite you preserve, every bit of waste you reduce is a contribution to a larger project - keeping everyone fed. Every bit of compost you add to your soil, every bit of organic matter, every tree you plant is a contributor to a larger project - storing some of our emissions in soil, so we can have a future.
Every seed you plant multiplies and produces a hundred, or a thousand more seeds for next year (not to mention the food). Every time you point out that you are storing food and preparing for a different future, even if people don’t get it, a seed is planted somewhere in the back of their minds, where they realize…people kind of like me think about this stuff. (We need a seed savers class and a seed exchange.)

Plant Something: A seed, a transplant, a tree, a bulb, some mushroom spores - could be in the earth or in a container, but the point is to green the world a little more, and plant useful plants everywhere you can.

Things to plant now: Peas, carrots, radishes, beets, onions, chard, kale, spinach, lemon balm, sage, thyme, French tarragon, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, pansies, Johnny jump ups, California poppies, regular poppies, yarrow, chamomile, butterfly weed…

Harvest Something: It could be something you planted, something growing wild or something you glean from someone else’s fields, but the idea is to try and make the best use of the food around you.

Preserve something: We have a long season where not too much is growing. That’s when preserved food steps in to fill the empty spots, so you can still eat locally and sustainably without relying on the industrial food system. You could be canning raspberry jam or hanging up bunches of wild thyme to dry. (We need to do a solar food dryer class, and a class about root cellaring.) You might be putting potatoes and carrots in a cold place, or braiding garlic to hang in your kitchen. Everything you do to make yourself food secure is one less thing you need to rely on corporations for. Saves money too.

Reduce Waste: We throw stuff away, but where is away? We cannot be independent from energy companies and supermarkets if we don’t make the best possible use of what we have. We waste more than 25% of the food we purchase. We waste even more packaging and energy. And every time we do that, we take fuel that future generations will need and throw it away. We warm the planet, fill up landfills and add pollution to our environment. Living sustainably means making sure that we keep waste to an absolute minimum - that we find ways to make sure that everything we possibly can gets used wisely and well. Try to buy things with less packaging, and make sure you are composting all our food waste, or feeding it to some creature - worms, chickens, etc.

Learn a New Skill: For a long time, we’ve been able to simply throw things away, not thinking about the ecological, economic and personal costs of this way of life, but no more. The ability to make our own, fix our own, build our own, mend our own, tend our own and grow our own may be essential as we face an economic, energy and climate crisis. Get a skill. Share a skill. Trade your skills for someone else's skills. So many of the things people used to know how to do for themselves have gotten lost over the years, as corporations have taken over the production of everything. It is time to relearn how to darn a sock, build a raised bed, make a quilt or fix your own clogged pipes; how to stretch a meal for 4 to feed 6, how recognize a medical emergency and how to sing on key. Anyone out there willing to offer a classes in knitting, basic electrical repair, weatherizing homes,etc?

Work on Community Food Security: None of us can be secure if our neighbors are going hungry, either morally or practically. So we work together on making our communities more secure - this could be as simple as talking to a neighbor, family member or co-worker about why we store food and how to get started. It might mean making donations of money or goods to local food pantries, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens, or helping out a neighbor in need directly. We could be supportive of our community garden, or help a friend start her garden, recruiting members for a new local CSA or Co-op. Donate food that you grow to Caring and Sharing. Help Tony Madone (207-2737) with his Farm To Table project. Give over your backyard to Eric Belsey’ Backyard CSA (207-0069).

Regenerate What Is Lost: We’ve stripped the earth, and stripped the social and communal structures of our lives that support us, and support our future. Thus, we can’t just do less damage - we have to do more repair. To give our society a future, each day we need to put a little back into the system, making it a little richer than before.

What does that mean? It means that we make sure we’re adding organic matter to our soil even as we’re growing vegetables. It means we don’t just plant a tree for each one we harvest - we plant an extra one as well. It means we let some areas of our yard grow native plants to make space for native pollinators. (See NY Times article on natives plants.) How about planting the strips of land between the sidewalks and the streets with native plants? It means we reach out and tend a little space that belongs to no one; protect land that is already wild. It means we try a little harder to enable a decent, humane and just future.

Small things are the roots of vast and powerful ones.