Sustainability is a key word now that gas has broken the $ 4. 00 mark. As in, what are you going to give up now? The daily Starbucks visit ? The cat ? The SUV ? The visit to Urban Outfitters ? Natural gas alone has gone up 70% this year, making heating ones home really expensive, and the winter to come is already giving a bad vibe. Electric utilities moved to natural gas when it was cheap, and besides it was cleaner than coal. So even if you don't use propane to heat, your kilowatt rate is going up, up, up. Dow Chemical is now passing on a 20% increase in prices for their unsustainable chemical products. Consumer sentiment is now where it was in 1973, when Nixon lied and Vietnam raged. Yet Bush, even with his approval levels at Nixonian levels, can get away with ramming through retroactive immunity from criminal charges for the Telecom companies for violating American citizens private communications, here and abroad.

Feh ! What to do ? Buckminster Fuller would look at our present circumstance, and describe solutions for sustainability based on better design. One place to start is to literally go to ground .....


...." From the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the air we breathe, humanity depends upon the dirt beneath our feet. Gardeners understand this intuitively ; to them, the saying "cherish the soil" is gospel. But for the better part of society, dirt barely gets a sideways glance. To most, it's just part of the backgound, something so obvious it's ignored."

..." Despite humankind's long relationship with soil, the stuff itself remains a mystery. Even our language manages to maligns it. Somehow, ' dirt ' has aquired a bad reputation. And its been codified in some of our most colorful idioms, with people described as ' dirty rotten scoundrels ' , ' poor as dirt,' or 'dirtbags '.  The modern word dirt itself descends from the less than complimentary Old English word ' drit ', meaning ' excrement '. Instead of marveling at the mystery of soil, we have mocked it, by dredging and paving : desiccating and polluting; and working it to exhaustion.

Now our poor husbandry of this essential resource is catching up with us, in the form of disconcertingly rapid erosion and loss of farmland, widespread agricultural pollution, damage to fisheries, and alarming levels of pesticides and other chemicals building up in our bodies. The subject of soil is rarely billed as glamourous or sexy, but it should be. From its remarkable properties to its critical ecological importance, the dirt under our feet is a goldmine of scientific wonderment, and it's about time people got excited about soil. "


--- Tamsyn Jones, from " The New Village Green " ( New Society Publishers, 2007 )


The design of our society is unsustainable in a world of $ 200 a barrel oil.  We are up against it bad. Either we flail, lash out aggressively, and burn out or we seek a softer path, and a better design for sustaining life on Spaceship Earth. Developing a personal relationship with soil and backyard gardening is a great place to start.