Abundant food or parched earth? Where is our empathy? Where is our compassion?

Over the last few weeks I have written about the essay by Ervin Laszlo on “The World’s Health Problem: an Integral Diagnosis” in A New Renaissance – Transforming Science, Spirit and Society. Laszlo concludes: “the world is (1) socially, economically and ecologically unsustainable, (2) saddled with irrational behaviours and (3) governed by obsolete beliefs and aspirations.”

I have covered the four obsolete beliefs in previous recent blogs: that we think the planet is inexhaustible, that we believe that “nature is a mechanism,” that life is a struggle where only the fittest survive, and that Adam Smith's free market will distribute the benefits of economic activity.

Now I want to move on to Laszlo's list of Irrational Behaviors.

Number One: "Millions are suffering from overeating and obesity and a thousand million go hungry."

We have an obesity epidemic in the developed western world. Indeed obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the USA. An estimated 65% of U.S. adults, aged 20 years and older, and 15% of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. Around 34% of adults are obese. That amounts to c. 59 million people! The figures elsewhere are not much better. In 2006 24% of the adult English population were obese, and in children up to 15 years of age the figure was 16%. And both figures are increasing. We can all see it all around us.

The truth is that we have forgotten how to live simply and sustainably with totally unselfish regard for those around us. We have lost the ability to generously share, to ensure that everyone in the same household has had their fill before going ourselves for second helpings.

We have abundant food. Others have only cracked parched earth.

Where is our empathy? Where is our compassion?

We need to find more and better ways to adapt to sustainable living in a world where we can be sure that our good fortune is shared, where everyone has their basic human needs met, where hunger becomes history.

Mice and Strawberries

These are my strawberries!

They have been left in neat piles all around my allotment, between the rows of potatoes and broccoli, near the marrow plants, in fact just about anywhere within a reasonable mouse travelling distance of the strawberry plants.

At least I assume that the guilty party is a mouse or a family of mice - probably breeding happily in my nice warm compost heap. But why are they hoarding these strawberries in piles all around the place? What bit of the strawberry are they eating in particular? Why so many? Why are they hoarding? Why do they pick mostly unripe fruit? Or do they eat the ripe ones whole and think the others will ripen in storage?! A bit like the supermarket fruit?!




Please can any one throw any light on
this phenomenon?











And is there any way I can protect my fruit without resorting to killing the mice, which I just cannot do? Perhaps next year I shall strew holly twigs between the rows of fruit. I have successfully used that technique to protect seedlings in my greenhouse in the spring.

Nature with Spring in its step

Sometime during the last few days both my two small ponds have filled with huge dollops of frogspawn. Is this earlier than usual?

Although we have had a week of lovely spring like days on and off, the penalty we pay for clear skies at this time of year is cold nights, even frosts in places. Is nature being fooled? The blue tits have been visiting the nesting box for several weeks and I am sure they are now feeding their young in there. Is there enough food for them?

Even the daffodils are at last opening in the garden. Perhaps spring really is on the way.

 

I have just spent a glorious morning on the allotment in sunshine that was so warm that I stripped down to just a tee shirt!! Now it is cold and raining yet again! But there are wonderful spring signs up there. The rhubarb is showing through and the lovely Cerinthe have self seeded for another wonderful flower show later in the year. The brassicas have recovered from the pigeon damage in the snow, with the help of some less than neat netting that I put up in an icy wind and there are still some brussel sprouts for picking.

It is a wonderful feeling to be able to obtain all our vegetable needs from the plot, free of chemicals and other unknown nasties on shop produce. I shall be posting photos and a diary of my vegetable growing endeavours throughout this coming year.

And how about these amorous parsnips!

cell phones in the bathroom

Alternative title - don't use mobile phones in the loo. I am still trying to find a connection between this and compassion, spirituality, love, the Wounded Healer. Indeed I feel anything but love and compassion for pigeons at the moment.
But first - my experiment - dont spoil it for me - please leave a comment just to say you've passed by this blog.Why?
I have just read a blog where the blogger said his hits and comments left on his blog for writing said item suddenly jumped to 100's from the total anonymity of his more serious but definitely more worthwhile musings both before and since. So this is my experiment - to see if this has the same effect for me!! Out of interest I googled said title - and hey there are literally millions of entries - of all sorts - videos - advice serious and otherwise - around "Don't use your cell phone in the bathroom."

On to pigeons and pigeon netting again. Why do the pictures in gardening catalogues always show such neat netting around perfectly formed frames around the vegetables. I spent two hours this morning in bitter cold putting new nets around the broccoli that the pigeons are determined to strip bare before any of it gets to my dinner plate. And it looks far from neat and symmetrical - it's a bit lopsided for sure - but I just hope it does the trick!

The Solace of Landscape and Soil

Broad Beans, I learn, are some of the oldest recorded vegetables, cultivated since biblical times. Apparently by the Middle Ages, stealing the crop was punished by the death penalty!



Yesterday the temperature went up to 9 degrees on the allotment and my spirits soared as layers of clothes were peeled off to stay cool! And all this after weeks of temperatures hovering around freezing and when I often found it hard to summon up any enthusiasm to do anything!

Part of our spiritual healing comes from our commune with, our intimate contact with, the earth, the soil. In Alastair McIntosh's wonderful book, Soil and Soul, he writes: "If humankind is to have any hope of changing the world...we need, first, to make community with the soil, to learn how to revere the Earth." Belden Lane writes of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes in a book of that title. Peter Owen Jones in his new book Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim, writes: "God, I loved the desert. It allowed me to see to what was broken - with all my hate, with all my love, my unknowing, my unbeing - and gave me the time to begin to mend."

Back to the allotment. And doesn't it look a mess!? The heavy snow brought down some of the netting protecting the brassicas from the pigeons, and before I could get up there the pesky birds had made a good job of stripping all the fresh young growth off the sprouting broccoli. The plants are now struggling to recover - although I think they will. Other plotters pulled up their pigeon stripped brassicas last year and put them on the compost heap. I persevered with mine and eventually had a tolerable crip. Let's hope this year is the same. At least the Bright Lights Swiss Chard is recovering after looking dead when the snow melted.

So back to those broad beans. Soon I shall be sowing them, alongside Cauliflowers, Globe Artichoke and Tomatoes under cover for transplanting out later. 
Let Shelley have the last word:

I love snow, and all the forms

Of the radiant frost;

I love waves, and winds, and storms,

Everything almost

Which is Nature's, and may be

Untainted by man's misery. (Percy Shelley 1792-1822)