Sustainability

Last night, while we were scooping homemade wild blackberry preserves into the goat's milk yogurt I made for the first time, Ian said “Too bad you didn’t milk the goats, too, Mama. Then you could really say that you made this desert.”

Now to clarify, I’m not out to be some gourmet cook, or an aspiring Martha Stewart for the Oregon countryside. I simply made preserves from the pounds of wild blackberries we picked over the past two weeks. And, because canning fever struck me at 5pm this past Tuesday evening, Will and Ian ate microwaved Lean Cuisines that were inherited from my parent’s freezer, just weeks before the expiration date. Now I reckon that’s sustainable, but in a strange, un-Martha sort of way.

What about the homemade yogurt? Again, this was not a bid to attain the stature of a Domestic Goddess. Nope, I jumped into making yogurt because we can’t keep up with all the goat's milk I get each week as part of my work-trade at Living Earth Farm. In fact, when I asked my friend, Sharon, to skip giving us milk last week, she told me that if we didn't take it, she would have to feed it to the pigs. She has that much milk. So, yogurt-making it was.

It’s funny how the process of trying to live more sustainably grows from a small seed of a single action, or resolve, into something with a life of its own. Me? I wanted to grow some food and have a few chickens. That, and I loathe shopping at Costco.

But with each step into something a bit more homemade, homegrown, or handmade, new questions arise. Take chicken feed, for example.

We have our chickens in chicken tractors, so they can forage for bugs and eat green grass as part of their diet, but these gals need far more than that to live. Buying feed, though, even organic, doesn’t feel so sustainable when it is shipped from across the state, at best. It’s great to grow my own eggs, but in reality I’ve shifted a portion of the ecological burden, and participation in the consumer economy, to a different part of the supply chain.

So now I am thinking about growing corn and potatoes, both of which can be fed to the fowl, or alternatively, to my guys when I am in super-canning overdrive. I may even figure out some grains, and crops for seed proteins, which I can grow for the chickens’ use. There are multiple uses for all these staple crops, of course, but suddenly the scale of my kitchen garden has grown considerably.

Sustainability, or “able to be sustained.” It’s a helpful goal, and a noble endeavor. I relish the challenge of it, the skills to be acquired, the taste of real food, and I value the incremental victories we are gaining in being less of a burden to the planet.

At the end of the day, however, sustainability is a communal venture. I have no desire to grow, milk, pick, preserve, and prepare it all. Not only is it impossible, but it sounds like no fun to me at all. Just as in a balanced ecosystem, a sustainable society presupposes variety. We need each others' gifts, talents, and all-consuming interests. Without community, you can’t sustain much of anything long-term, no matter how vital.

Community is the crop I most want to cultivate to help us live more sustainable lives. After a year of homeschooling, Ian now attends school in town at the Village School. While burning up the gas daily seems a step in the wrong direction, this is one way our family is moving toward fostering deeper community participation, and with any luck, a more sustainable future.

There's no clear path forward, but with each step, we are learning a heck of a lot, even if it doesn't (yet) include milking goats.