Reading the Newspaper

I am home with my parents. Today I swept and mopped the floors. As I finished another chapter in Stumbling Toward Justice (Chapter 7, The Beauty of Saying No - which I think Hoinacki re-uses in Dying Is Not Death) I looked down at the local newspaper from here in Vancouver. Needless to say, it covers the economic "hard times." This I was not surprised by. However I was surprised at my sense of great hope because of the headlines.

First there was "As recession deepens, home gardens grow." The article was lifted from the AP and comes from Long Beach California; but the numbers to the right of the headline indicate that 43 million households are growing their own produce this year. The article assumes that Americans are pinching pennies which is leading them to try their hand at growing their own food. They dub the new gardens "recession gardens." One woman testifies that a "sense of community" has been fostered in her neighborhood around a food co-op. A seed-seller says that gardening is no longer a "dirty word" because Americans are now willing to do the work of growing a garden.

In the "Clark County" section, a local writer reports on small farms and community-supported agriculture (CSA). The CSA farms in Clark County have grown to about 20, a big jump from the 3 or 4 a couple of years ago. The article discusses how families buy a share or half a share and receive locally grown produce. I discover that one of the farms featured in the article is in the Hockinson hills, mere miles from my house. These farms offer a way to have some connection with the food that nourishes our bodies, even if everybody in the family is thoroughly occupied with occupations.

If economic recession leads to penny pinching, which in turn leads to food-growing for more people, I am hopeful that we can learn to live better lives because of the difficulty we face. Perhaps Americans are not as obtuse as made out to be, I seem to recall a statistically substantiated reduction in gas consumption last summer when prices soared (or at least a curb in growth) . And with the economy in the dumps we're continuing to track with this trend (for oil info check out: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twip.asp).

To oversimplify, the poorly performing economy is helping us to distance ourselves from the wasteful and excessive behaviors we have grown accustomed to. I hope that the moderate, fortuitous and just behavior that this lack of extra cash is teaching us, if I may venture to call supporting local food and reducing waste - "just", can be a lesson, a habit, a virtue that we can carry with us past this "recession." Maybe we'll discover what it means to feed ourselves. Maybe we'll conserve fossil fuel or discover a way to avoid it. Perhaps we will find the other people in our community that make life possible and remember them, value them. We won't ever learn anything about scaling the individual problems that we face up to a "societal" sphere if we can't first understand what it means to live in a community. Maybe these people that live next to us can become our neighbors.

Blog

I wanted a place to share my writing and independent learning that I am doing with more than just my sponsor. So I thought that a blog might be appropriate because I think that people are free to look at if they have internet access and I can send the URL to all of the folks who might be interested in my work.

Today I started reading Stumbling Toward Justice: Stories of Place by Lee Hoinacki. I read the first chapter entitled "In Search of Patriotism." Some things that I liked about this chapter were the conscious approach to writing that Hoinacki uses, his informed but open perspective and the kind of intimate connection he creates by using autobiographical details and tone.