Sustainability: Huh?
Today’s cool topic of semi-obscurity: Sustainability. It’s like a catchy piece of jargon you hear your kids using, but you’re not really sure what it means. The sustainability movement is a reaction to the idea that many of our North American cultural and economic practices are geared to fail in a couple of generations, or even after a couple of decades. Non-sustainable practices are often billed as things like strip mining, Big Oil, deforestation, and urban sprawl. Oh, and let’s not forget the Exxon Valdez. Very non-sustainable for a lot of seagulls.
Okay, sure. In the city, it’s easy to think the world has been paved over and we’re all going to die, because the only food source is the local store, and if they run out, well–! But what about in the country? Well, here in the Canadian backwoods, it’s a little harder to see. I’m surrounded by fields of glowing golden (but stinky-smelling) canola, wooded pastures and trickling prairie streamlets.
Out here, it shows up within the soil. Non-sustainable land management is the jargonese for what’s going on. What happens is that the substitution of synthetic fertilizers for good old-fashioned horse plop leaves the soil nutritionally depleted. The fertilizers that go into the ground don’t build or sustain it the way rotted manure or vegetation would. (Source: Organic Farming by Nicolas Lampkin
Ergo, organics. It is not just about picketing the corporate chemical dynasties. While even my Master Gardener course materials say there’s no nutritional difference between organic and synthetically-fertilized foods, it goes beyond the single element of nutrition. Proponents of organic growing, such as Lampkin (pp. 16-17), point to studies on desertification as proof that over-farming and moving on to greener pastures does happen and is going to be our downfall in the end. “The Sahara is coming! The Sahara is coming! Quick, shovel cow doo-doo!”
Ah, esteemed politicians and dearly be-rabid lobbyists, I can see that in the greater picture, America is in no immediate danger. Canada, even less.
Anyway, more dirt on the dirt next week.
