I Need To Do Something

You know, the weather turns and you’re cutting the perennials down to the ground and mulching the berries and storing away your gardening tools and then you finally have the time to pick up a book and BAM!

David Holmgren, in Permaculture:

The evidence of 4000 million years of evolutionary history is that, if we get to a point of seriously affecting the fundamental life-support systems of the planet, we will be “neutralized” by one or more co-evolutionary mechanisms.

He quotes Wendell Berry, “who has criticized the notion of planetary stewardship as our arrogant disconnection from nature and belief in our own power.” Here’s Berry:

The question which must be addressed… is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious and exciting way different from all the others.

I need to do something beyond my own backyard. I need to do something.