Eating with the Seasons

Finding Local Food in San Francisco

My book club just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors. The book is about her family's journey into local foods - either grown by them or grown in their region. They live in Virginia, where they have seasons, so the book is a month by month tour of what happens on a farm. Some sections made me downright homesick. Others were inspirational. The story is peppered with bits about the industrial food system, that in turn evoked anger, sadness, desperation and hope. One major take-a-way for me was how important it is to support local, organic farmers, and eat what the seasons bring. I new this before, and now I understand the theory and practice behind it more concretely. Here's a quick list of reasons to eat local.

Over the course of reading the book, I began exploring more local food options for us, specifically what we can get in grain and meat. Along the way, I found many other wonderful CSAs (community supported agriculture). Here are some of my findings.

Let's toast to protein!
Meat CSAs in the Bay Area This is the best guide that I found for pasture finished meat CSAs.
Frazier lane organics has organic beef and pork that can be ordered.
Places to buy Hertiage Turkeys in San Francisco Bay Area
Mary's Turkeys is actually close to SF, relatively. I'll get one of her turkeys for Thanksgiving this year. She also raises ducks and chickens.
Wise Food Ways has another listing of local meats.

Grains
It was a bit harder to find local grains. Eatwell Farm sells wheat berries at local farmer's markets and you can use their mill to make flour.

Windborne Farm is in far north California, which isn't exactly local (closer than Nebraska though), and they have a CSA that has a delivery in Berkeley. She offers a wide variety of dried beans, legumes and grains. Many of the varieties are not commonly available to the consumer; a majority of them will be grown out from a few seeds saved by grass-roots seed banks. The grain shares are delivered to your drop site monthly, not weekly. To sign up for the grain shares, contact Jennifer Green at: (530) 468-4340, 4932 Scott River Rd, Fort Jones, CA 96032. I've signed up.

Produce
Vegetables and fruit CSAs are definitely the easiest to come by here. In fact, there are so many of them sometimes it's hard to choose. I've been a member of Eating with the Seasons for about five years now. They have the best strawberries ever! Besides the veggies and produce, I can also get eggs, chicken (occasionally), local olive oil, and fair trade coffee. Plus, they deliver to work.

Om Organics has the most comprehensive list of CSAs I've seen.
Live Power Community Farm delivers to the Presidio. They have a lot of partnerships with other farms, and you can also sign up for meat, grain, fruit, and rice.
Eat Well Farm has deliveries in San Francisco and the East Bay, but many drop off locations have a waiting list.
Full Belly Farm has a lot of Berkeley deliveries.
Terra Firma Farm
Farm Fresh to You has home deliveries.
The Berkeley Ecology Center has a pretty good list of CSAs too.
Wise Food Ways has another list of local CSAs.

So, what is permaculture anyway?

I took an urban gardening class today through the Solar Living Institute based on permaculture concepts. It was very interesting and inspiring. After a day of information intake, I'm usually overwhelmed, but today I'm not. I'm excited about all that there is to learn, and thrilled to notice that I have a solid foundation.

So, what is permaculture anyway? It's a holistic approach to working with nature that integrates consideration of the earth, consideration of people and being fair socially, economically and to future generations. This is very similar to the Blue Movement, but is more concrete in how it can be applied. Unlike many other fields, permaculture has a set of guiding principles that helps you think about the project at hand.

One major principle is efficiency, which manifests in many ways, including:
-No til gardening by heavy mulching and composting
-Plant selection for your climate, which for us is drought tolerant for less watering
-Planting edible perennials so that each year your garden feeds you more with less work

Basically, putting a little thought and effort into the planning and creation of your garden so that only a little maintenance is required.

Another concept is creating ecosystems in your garden. This is done by planting many different plants together that get along - tall and short, shade and light, plants that repel each other pest's, plants that pull up nutrients from the deep soil for other plants to use. This ties into efficiency.

There's a lot more to this, and there are lots of resources to learn more. That was one of the great things about the class. The teacher cited many, many books, websites and organizations that are available in the bay area. It makes me really glad to be here now.

Here's a list of the resources from my notes.

BOOKS
Gaia's Garden
Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer
The Soil Food Web
The Earth Moved
Ann LoveJoy's Organic Garden Design School
Food Not Lawns
Guerrilla Gardening
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands
Author Ruth Stout
Cornacopia
Golden Gate Gardening - a great book for gardening in San Francisco (Ynnej, can I have it back now?)

ORGANIZATIONS
Back Yard Orchard Culture
Village Harvest
GreenCollarJobs.com
Alemany Farm is the largest urban farm. It happens to be about a mile from my house.
Ploughshares Nursery in Alameda
StopWaste.org
Urban Permaculture Guild
Solar Living Institute


Other resources I've found:
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
Valley of Heart's Delight run by a good friend of ours Susan Stansbury. They focus on reconnecting to local, seasonal, organic food on the Peninsula.
Urban Sprouts is an organization in San Francisco that brings gardens to schools, classrooms and plates.
Hidden Villa is a beautiful organic farm in Los Altos on the peninsula. They have a CSA program and a summer camp for urban youth and a hostel in the winter.
The Global Warming Diet written by a good friend of ours and a fabulous chef!
Ecology Center - does many, many cool projects, including farmers markets, an eco-house and demonstration garden in Berkeley
Slow Food Nation is a week long slow food extravaganza here in SF - all the information, food, and parties you could ever want. It's hosted by the US Chapter of Slow Food International. Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.
Three Stone Hearth is a worker-owned cooperative, offering
nutrient dense foods to homes and families around the San Francisco Bay Area. You subscribe, they make healthy food, you pick the food you want from the menu for the week, you pick up or they deliver (which costs more of course). Yum!
Food Declaration - Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture which will call for healthy food, farms, and communities will be read aloud in a ceremony at Slow Food Nation on August 28th, in the Rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall. Roots of Change will be working with Slow Food and other NGOs for the next nine months to collect hundreds of thousands more signatures using face-to-face meetings and the World Wide Web. These signatures will be delivered, along with a set of policy recommendations to policy makers in Washington in the Fall of 2009.
RSF Social Finance provides socially responsible investors, donors, for-benefit organizations, and social enterprises innovative investing, lending, and philanthropic services to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability.
UpStream21 puts financial resources into small, successful, eco-friendly, privately owned companies, such as small farms and timber companies
The American Food System - A Commonwealth Club panel
Local Harvest helps you find farmers markets in your area no matter where you are in the US.

And because I could do this all night, here's one last place where you can go to find all kinds of organizations of all varieties - WiserEarth with WISER standing for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, is the first online database of all issues and organizations doing good work and it can be edited by the community.

Some Tips and Ideas from the class:
Duck eat slugs
Call local tree trimmers and ask for their wood chips. They're often happy to give them to you for mulch because otherwise they often have to pay to dispose of them.
Consider turning your swimming pool into a swimming pond. There's a company doing this in LA.
Remineralize your soil with rock dust.
Comfrey and Nettle are nutrient rich plants.
Mushrooms clean water and can act as natural filtration systems and give you yummy food!
Throw seed balls into vacant lots to encourage plants.
Prune the top 1/3 of your fruiting trees in the summer, after the tree is done bearing fruit, for fruit trees that have grown too tall to harvest by hand.
Try nasturium leaf pesto.
Make a potato column.
Mine the group genius.



Whew.
Ok. I'm a little overwhelmed now. Still excited, but maybe just a little tired.
When I feel like there's so much to learn and do that I don't know where to start, I remember that I'll start where I'm at with what I have and who I'm with.
That makes it doable.

Please let me know your favorite gardening and permaculture resources.

I'm going to pick the raw food recipes I'm going to make tomorrow. More on that later...

What's your PSP?

Blue.
Sky.
Water.
Wal-mart...

A few years ago, Adam Werbach (see previous post) began working with Wal-Mart. Some said that Wal-mart had coaxed him over to the dark side of the force. But who better to help one of the largest companies in the world become more sustainable than a die-hard environmentalist? Yes, Wal-mart has made a commitment to sustainability. They set out three goals:
Produce zero waste
Be powered by renewable energy
Sell only green products

This is huge.

HUGE!

When Wal-mart says jump, suppliers JUMP. So, for one of the largest retailers in the world to begin greening its operations has an enormous positive impact. It creates markets for sustainable projects and green businesses that otherwise wouldn't think about it. Did you know that Wal-mart is the largest retailer of regional, organic produce? Think about that.

But making their products more green was only one step. They realized that it was also important to bring sustainability into the awareness and action of their employees and then their customers. To do this they implemented a Personal Sustainability Project.

From Adam's Commonwealth Club speech on April 10, 2008:

At the heart of the project was a simple voluntary commitment that we called a PSP, or a personal sustainability practice.

What are the qualities of a PSP? It:

Sustains the planet,
Makes you happy,
Affects the community,
Repeatable,
Takes visible action

Examples: Bike to work. Park in the spot that's farthest from where you're going. Change your lights bulbs to CFLs. Care for a park....The behavioral idea behind PSP is a simple one we call nano-practices. Nano-practices are the thousands of tiny things you do each day that make up your lifestyle. How you tie your shoes, the type of shoes you wear, your choice of socks, how you fold your socks, and whether you wear your shoes indoors. Instead of trying to change the big things about someone's identity -- whether they're a Democrat or Republican, for example -- we start by finding daily or recurring practices that can express his or her values. A personal sustainability practice, at its most basic level, is something that's a repeated action that's good for you, your community, and the planet.

My first PSP is to eat only fair trade, organic chocolate. I've been doing this pretty well for a few months now, which is great for a recovering candy addict.

My current PSP is to bike or walk one time a week when I would drive. My bike is pumped up and ready to go. I've been to the store once on it. Luckily, this is challenging because I don't drive much to begin with.

What's your PSP?

BLUE

AKA The Evolution of an Environmentalist - Part 3 continued from "The Evolution of an Environmentalist - Part 2"

To understand what the BLUE movement is, we need to understand what it grows out of - dead environmentalism. Environmentalism is dead because it's approach is outdated, uninspiring and not up to scale for the challenge we face today - global climate change. Traditionally, environmentalism has isolated a problem, such as air pollution, created a technical solution, such as emissions standards for vehicles, and worked to get it turned into law. This doesn't work very well when the challenge, climate change, is the result of our entire way of life. Plus, environmentalism has said "No, No, No" and "Don't, Don't, Don't" for everything from shopping to driving to eating, basically living in our culture. This doesn't inspire and, instead, sets up a seemingly unattainable standard, leading us to give up before we start.

Ok. So what is the BLUE movement?

From Adam Werbach's speech "The Birth of Blue" at the Commonwealth Club on 12 April 2008:

As vast and common as the ocean, BLUE is a platform for sustainability that goes beyond the deep, beautiful green of environmentalism. Green puts the planet at the center of the dialogue. BLUE puts people at the center.... Green is the beating heart of the emerging BLUE movement. Green represents the simple and inarguable wisdom of ecology: that all things are connected. BLUE brings together a broader set of human concerns, from practice to price, from nature to society. BLUE integrates all four streams of sustainability: social, cultural, economic and environmental. BLUE puts the way we treat ourselves and each other at the center of our focus....

There are three desired outcomes for the BLUE movement. First, to measurably improve the quality of life of people who join. Second, to engage as many people as possible in the effort, and third, to increase the effectiveness of their activism. The primary tactic is getting one billion people to create their own personal sustainability practices.

Remember, when I wrote that I didn't get into environmentalism for the environment, but for the people? This is what I was talking about.

So, what does "being blue" actually mean? What does some one who's "BLUE" do?
Since, it's my computer curfew, the answer to that question will have to come another night.
Next up, PSP and the big box...

The evolution of an "Environmentalist" - Part 2

Continued from Part 1...

So, as I declared my major in Environmental Economics, I became a Consumer Activist, even though I had no more money than every other starving college student. What this meant was that I started shopping at Wild Oats/Whole Foods Markets, buying organic food, cooking less meat, and thinking long and hard about purchases of new items. The idea is that when we buy products that we believe in, that are good for the environment and society, even though they may be more expensive, we'll create a demand for those products, and eventually the supply will increase, the price will go down and more people will be able to afford the healthier items. AKA voting with my dollars, putting my money where my mouth is. I was out to save the world with shopping.

After college, I moved to California, got a job in fundraising, then as an office manager, then fundraising again and now as an executive assistant. You can read about these experiences in a previous post.

During the 2004 presidential election, I realized, along with many other people, that more than just environmentalists had a problem with communicating their issues in a way that could be heard. All liberals and liberal issues tended to have this trouble. I read Don't think of an Elephant by George Lakoff and went to the Spiritual Activism conference in Berkeley. I began to see that a more integrated, thoughtful and inclusive approach to all of our issues was needed.

Around this time, the controversial essay Death of Environmentalism by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus was released. Shortly thereafter, Adam Werbach gave his speech Is Environmentalism Dead? at the Commonwealth Club. He concluded it was and I agreed, so I didn't pay it much attention.

I'm paying attention now.

Next up...The Birth of Blue...

The evolution of an "Environmentalist" - Part 1

Am I an environmentalist?
Originally, no.

I came to "environmentalism" through a belief in the value and worth of human beings. The logic is thus:

*I like humans. I like living.
*Humans need water, air, food, shelter to live.
*Humans are destroying the very things on which their future existence depends - nature.
*So, protect nature to protect the future existence of humans.

Growing up on a farm, I had a closer relationship with the water, air and dirt that made our food than many people, which is probably why I came to this seriousness as young as I did.

In junior high, I started turning off the water facet anytime it absolutely wasn't necessary, like when brushing my teeth, and seeing how short I could possibly make my shower to conserve as much water as possible. In high school, I joined the environmental club, became president of the club, and helped implement a school wide recycling program and planted a tree in the courtyard, so we wouldn't have to get a cut one every year for christmas.

At the age of 15, I decided that I wanted to save the world. Since I liked the trees and nature and saw their importance to human survival, I adopted the label "environmentalist" and the movement "environmentalism" because it was the closest fit out there.

Since then, my understanding of environmentalism has evolved. It is no longer just the protecting of trees. (Ironically, I work for an organization that does precisely just that.) Early in college, I got tired of being considered the "enemy" by my family, namely grandparents, still on the farm. To them, environmentalism was a dirty word, and I'd succomded to the dark side of the force as a city-slicker who just wanted to take away all of their land from them. Being the enemy upset me, in large part, because I got a large part of my love for nature from them.

So, I set out to build bridges. I recognized that many environmentalists and environmentalism did a very poor job at communicating with and understanding people who weren't already card-carrying tree-huggers. This was not a good strategy for a movement that needed as many supporters as possible to affect the scale of change that was necessary to make the earth a place still inhabitable for current and future generations.

Around that time (I'm still in my first or second year at university) I came across and read The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken. What he wrote made so much sense to me. Basically, that business, consumers, economics and money could be used as a force for positive change for the environment. Because of this I minored in microeconomics, to give me a solid understanding of markets, supply and demand, cost-benefit ratios, and externalities. Combined with my major of Environmental Policy (of course), I called my course of study Environmental Economics, as there was no such major. The idea was that I could translate between environmentalists and businesses so that they could see the benefits to the bottom line and the environment of working together and accounting for the externalities of doing business.

At this time, I was also integrating the idea of the consumer activist...

-end of part 1-

It's now past my computer curfew, so you'll have to wait a few days for the next installment.

Garberville

I just got back from a visit near home yesterday. I got to hear some old-timers stories, eat some home-made baked goods, and gossip with some ladies.

In reality, Mark and I just got back yesterday from a site visit to Southern Humboldt County so that I could figure out logistics for the Annual Meeting in September. Much progress was made there, but that's not what this is about.

Occasionally, I am lucky enough to get to take a trip up North for work. Last year, I made it up to Crescent City, 7 hours north of SF and almost in Oregon, a few times. I love it up there. The big trees have a lot to do with that. But, also, there's the people. Every time I go up there, I hear stories ala Grandpa from some old-timer local, usually an ex-logger, and am usually mistaken for someone's relative, not a city slicker, but someone who used to teach at the school or someone's friend's niece. Really. This happens every time.

I take it as a compliment.

A little about Humboldt and Del Norte counties. Driving, you don't get to Humboldt County until you're about 4 hours north of San Francisco. You don't reach Del Norte County until at least 6.5 hours north of SF. It's country.

In Humboldt County, the Eureka-Arcata area is the major town, the largest urban area between Portland and San Francisco. It has a small airport and a population of about 60,000. Humboldt State University in Arcata has about 7,500 students. For many years, logging was the major industry. Today, the hospital is the biggest employer. The Garberville-Redway towns have a population of about 2,000. The surrounding hills have thousands more people. The area used to be large ranches, which have been divided up into 30, 40, 80 acre parcels with a family on each. The Garberville area has a rich pioneering history, complete with river rats, ridge runners, moonshine stills, logging, farming, ranching and all of the tensions and trials that go with settling an area. This area has also been a beacon for hippies and people who want to live a more "alternative" life. So the locals are an intriguing mix. Just north of Garberville starts Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the first redwoods park, which contains the stand of redwoods that inspired the founding of Save-the-Redwoods League 90 years ago. Today, the redwoods provide a lot of tourism and service industry jobs. There are several very nice restaurants and lots of places to stay and camp. Humboldt County is also home to Pacific Lumber, Headwaters Forest, and all the lands that are contested in the PL bankruptcy.

In Del Norte County, the major town is Crescent City. The town and surrounding area has a population of about 15,000. The major employer used to be the timber industry and is now the prison. My favorite chicken fried steak in California is in a diner here. There are lots of chain restaurants and a few nice restaurants. The "hippie" population isn't as prevalent here, so it's a bit more country. There are lots of gorgeous redwood parks up here.

I'm from the country, a small town of 35,000 in mid-Missouri. Before we moved to town when I was in grade school, we lived on a farm, complete with chickens, goats, cats, sheep and a sheep dog. My dad helped my Grandpa farm soybeans, corn, and feed for cattle. My days were filled with making mud-pies, playing in the creek, reading books in my treehouse, fishing with Grandpa, baking with Grandma, picking corn and watermelons for the farmer's market, and trying to steal the eggs from the rooster. I was a true tomboy. But we moved to town before I learned to hunt. That always has made me a little sad.

I went to university in a big city. I moved to California and have lived the last eight years in one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the nation. I'm still more comfortable barefoot up in a tree than I am at a fancy restaurant with three forks for my dinner or in Santa Cruz eating a tofu scramble. I can eat in a fancy restaurant without embarrassing myself (too much=) and I can do hippie handicrafts with the best of them. I've learned to do these things, but what comes naturally and what I feel most comfortable doing is making a pork chop gravy and listening to Dave's stories about the '64 flood.

So, when I go up North, I'm at ease, because it's country. It's the same folks as my family, making a living off the land. They don't set out to rape the land, they just want to use the resources they have to do as well as they can for their family. It's when big corporations got involved, in both farming and timber, that things got nasty. With this perspective, I can hear their stories and they can tell them to me. And it's like being at the kitchen table with Grandpa.

That's why the visit was like being home.

Green Festival

Mark and I went to the Green Festival today. I hadn't been for the two years. It's a pretty intense event - so many people, and things, and information. It can get a bit overwhelming. Plus, the hippie quotient is pretty high. I'm better at co-existing at sometimes than others. If I'm not feeling good about how I'm living, the sight of a long-haired, tie-dyed, vegan hippie, triggers even more self-loathing and guilt. It brings up all of the coulda, shoulda, woulda's. I could've joined a commune. I should be a vegatarian. I would've been a good farmer. You get the idea. But, today, it's ok. I've even been actually looking forward to going to the green festival for several weeks now. Specifically, I was looking forward to being reminded that I have many good choices in the market place (most of the festival space is taken up by "green" vendors) and to seeing two of my favorite authors speak.

Mark dropped me off just in time for me to catch Paul Hawken speak. (He parked the car three blocks away and walked back in the rain.) Paul Hawken wrote The Ecology of Commerce which was a hugely influential book my freshman year of college. His book basically inspired me to create my major in Environmental Economics. The idea is that the marketplace doesn't have to be at odds with the environment. It can be used as a positive force. I can choose to use my money in ways that don't harm the earth - organic, reused, donations - and that if we each do that, it will make a huge difference. And it has. The number of sustainable choices we have has grown tremendously! His talk today was based on his new book Blessed Unrest, about the massive movement of social justice and environmental non-governmental organizations in the world. It's way bigger than the Catholic church. Definetly a source of hope. We're not as well organized as the church, but we're just getting started.

The other speaker I was excited to hear was Lynn Twist, author of The Soul of Money. This was a hugely influential book for me in 2002, when I started fundraising at CGF. It's a little harder to summarize her talk. The idea is that we're trapped by money, something we created. Scarcity is a myth and there's enough to go around. I highly recommend reading her book. I got a lot out of it.

Other things from the festival:
Shelter Books - cool books on building sustainable housing
Presidio MBA - a master's degree in sustainable business
Honest Kids - yummy beverages, disposable containers, but organic
Seeds of Change - certified, organic chocolate - and they gave me two bars!
San Francisco Green Map - a map of school gardens, green schools, special trees, and labyrinths, among other things
Living Crafts - great new magazine that features craft projects that I actually want to make, many are kid-friendly
Renegade Lunch Lady - from the Organic Valley vendors, who make excellent chocolate milk, I got a little booklet about Chef Ann and her work in school cafeterias
The Pachamama Alliance - a group that Lynn Twist helped start, that works to protect the Amazonian Rain Forest by partnering with the local peoples. I really like their idea of the new moon program. I'll probably incorporate something like that into my goddess gatherings. (and I have a problem with hippies?)
Green Clean - they don't have a website, but they're our cleaners (Yes, we have cleaners. It's worth it. Trust me.) and they do an excellent job without all of the chemicals
And the best for last...
Save a Snowman - I LOVE THIS!

The punchline - After a day being green, nothing sounded better for dinner than some good Soul Food. So, I took Mark to Hard Knox Cafe where I had some of the best EVAH fried chicken. So good.

Viva la Moutholucion!

Tonight for dinner, I made butternut squash coconut curry soup, lentil and rice pilaf with leeks, and organic spinach salad. All of the veggies were from Eating with the Seasons.

By working directly with local farmers and producers, Eating With The Seasons offers a convenient way to get fresh, local and organic produce at a reasonable price. They deliver to our office and, after their taking a winter break, today was the first delivery since mid-December.

I can't believe how much I missed it! I've gotten so spoiled by it. Even when I did go grocery shopping this last month, I couldn't bring myself to buy veggies or fruit -- too many choices, what's in season?, not enough time to cook (traveling), it wasn't local, not organic, just not as good. I think I bought four bananas. So, I'm glad it's on again. I was getting really frustrated with the lack of fresh foods in my diet. Eating out is good, but eating with the seasons is better.

Then, tonight in my email was a note from our friend Morgan. He shot a new short for Freerange Studios, producers of the Store Wars. It is awesome!

Please take four minutes to watch The Mouth Revolution. It's related to this post, I swear. And it's funny.

Worth a 1,000 words

This picture tells about a million stories. I hardly know where to begin. I'll just try and tell part of one.

I guess I'll start with the dead bobcat. Grandpa shot it last week with his cross-bow. It's properly tagged. It's frozen and hanging by the screen door on the back porch, which considering that the average high temperature in the last week has been 31 degrees, is just as effective as the freezer.

There are bobcats around because there are rabbits around. There are rabbits around because the river bottoms that my Grandpa used to farm were bought by the MO Dept. of Conservation for, well, conservation after the 1993 flood. The 1993 flood was a five hundred-year flood, because it only happens about that often. It was big. It broke huge holes in the levees and damaged a lot of good farmland. It brought in the "asian" carp, aka the jumping fish, and "Conservation".

Conservation let the Marion Bottoms grow up into woods, an area that the river can go into anytime it needs to. With the growth of woods, there has been a proliferation of mushrooms, rabbits, bobcats, mountain lions, otters, deer, coyote and, finally, bears. The wealth of game has brought hunters, who go into the bottoms, and get frustrated by the thick undergrowth of the young forest. They're out in the country and they see all of the surrounding area, which is great for hunting, but it's on private land, so they trespass. They shoot from the road. They're not safe or polite.

So, back to the bobcat on the back porch. Well, bobcats aren't endangered anymore, so they're fair game. Grandpa was out in his blind last week with his cross-bow hunting wild turkeys. He shot twice and missed, which is unusual. He's been hunting all of his life and has deadly accuracy. But he's old. His shoulders don't really work anymore. He can't lift them high, so maybe aiming isn't as easy as it once was. One arrow, though, when he went to retrieve it, had leg feathers from the turkey on it. So, he was close.

He may not have gotten a turkey, but the bobcat came right across his path. He wasn't sure he'd gotten it, but the trail of blood led him and his loyal dog, Lady, to where it had been killed. This, at first thought, can easily seem revolting. I always have a gut jerk reaction when I see a beautiful creature that has died. But I know that my Grandfather does not kill indiscriminately. I know he values the health and life on and of land much more than I can realize in my own life. If he kills something, he has a reason. I have to trust that and listen to his stories to see what that might be. For most game, it's easy. We eat it. But bobcats we don't eat, so I'm still learning about this.

I know enough to not ask directly what that reason might be. When I ask, I'm interpreted as attacking because I'm a city-dwelling environmentalist, which can be a dirty word out here. I'm in with the city-slickers who think they know better than someone who's been living from the land for 70 years. It doesn't work well when we go in and tell them what to do, even if we may have a better way, or at least something that may improve the situation. And oftentimes our understanding, from the desks in town, is a simplified or partial understanding of nature's fragile balance, and can genuinely, if unintentionally, mess things up. We have to close our text books, shut our mouths, and listen to the people who are stewards.

This lesson has been a long time in learning for me. I just hope that I can be around enough to earn their trust and learn their stories. I often have to swallow a big humility pill and bite my tongue hard, but I'm sure it will be worth it. People who love the land as much as my Grandparents do have a lot to teach, if I'm willing and present to learn. Maybe then, I can make my contribution to it.

Adventures in Southern Suburbia

Jolene and Pat and Dad bought a big, new house in Braselton, GA. They have a yard, but no large trees. They've had several trees planted, that will hopefully make it through the three feet of red Georgia clay. It's about 45 miles NE of Atllanta proper and one to three hours of driving, depending on traffic.

A half mile in one direction and we get to a new shopping center (no coffee shop). A half mile in the other direction and we're in a lightly wooded area with fields (previously pasture) heading down to a small river. Yet another half mile in a third direction and you're on the highway.



They were the second family to buy a home in this subdivision - The Falls of Braselton. (There is a small falls down in the small river.) Many of the houses are still under construction or not yet built. This is an environment that I probably would never have otherwise found myself in. I admit that my first reaction was, "They live here?" I'd been working for the past for years for an organization whose mission is to prevent sprawling development like this in the SF Bay Area. So, I admit my prejudice.

My second reaction is to see if I can come to understand why they live here.

The closer into Atlanta one gets, the more money it takes to buy smaller houses in shabbier neighborhoods. They lead a quiet life of working, cooking, eating, working out, walking their chow-mix dog Skanky, and watching movies and TV. A night out is usually just a half hour drive to the $1.99 movie theatre in Duluth. (Yesterday, we went to see Ice Princess. Because it was a matinee, it was only 99 cents for each of us.) They don't go out to eat much (maybe once a month), because they're being careful about what they eat (and it's cheaper). Dan manages parts of three hospitals, which are all off the highway that's a half mile away. Jolene and Pat both have part-time jobs that are nearby. They have a lot of comfortable space to live in. I can see why they've made this choice, but I don't think that it would work for me.