Happiness Begins With Compost

Fresh food.  Healthy bodies.  Smart minds.  Well Being.  Security.  Warm in winter, cool in summer, and a nice hot shower. Computers, Gardens, and Music.   Abiding Happiness.
 
These are for me, the best of life, and the foundation required to realize  my own potential as a sentient being in this wondrous universe.   No matter the endeavor - writing some wicked Android code, or spinning psytrance in a virtual world, or producing a tasty track of electronic eargasm, or writing,  or working in my small shop battling a luthier’s dream, or trying to understand the latest issue of Science magazine, or planning a night out at the opera or a week at Burning Man, the beginning of all this happiness is  my compost pile. 

It is clear to me that the rest of my life will be spent surfing the huge energy gradient we will be sliding down as oil depletes and the world realizes we should have been planning for this 40 years ago.   8 years ago for me  it was the warning being raised by the likes  of Kunstler, Heinberg, Campbell, Greer, Orlov, and certainly being affirmed and validated by the 30 year update of Limits to Growth that drove my panic to seek the escape farm.  Upon my return to my suburban home, I realized I had it all right here, and there really is no where to go other than where you are.  It’s the space where you are that needs to change. 

As mentioned earlier, I got the message, and began the transition.  My ‘panic’  has been tempered a bit, and I see a Long Descent (Greer) and a Long Emergency (Kunstler) as being the way of it.  But is IS underway.  Look out your window, fill up your tank, buy some groceries, paying your heating bill, and you will feel it unfolding.  The Brent Spot price for a barrel of oil is 118.86 as I write this.  This is 3 years after the worst economy   since the Great Depression.  In the current agricultural, food processing and distribution system,  Oil=Food.  Got Oil? 

An appropriate solution for suburban dwellers  is in becoming as self –reliant as possible.  As local as possible.   I begin to produce food around my house, learn how to store it,  begin to understand the energy requirements in my suburban household,  begin to trust my skill and begin to make the changes.  I make the transition from a mental  map based on the realities of 1930 (40 years before U.S. peak oil production)  to a mental map that is based on the realities of 2010 (40 years after U.S. peak oil production).   My expectations, my responsibilities, my priorities are now adjusting to a future with 70% less energy than I have known in my lifetime.

Oil and food are so tightly connected in this current social system, that the expense of feeding myself can be projected just by watching the gas stations change their prices.   I certainly don’t expect to be able to produce every morsel of my diet,  but knocking 40-60% off my grocery bill by eating  guaranteed  organically grown, salmonella free, un-processed vegetables, soups and salads moves me a lot further along into my own  sustainable future.  My only cost is sweat of my brow, same as it ever was.

The true pillar of this abiding happiness is, believe it or not,  Compost.  The beginning of the journey to a more self reliant future, to a future based on wind and sun, to a future economy that maintains rather than grows, to a future with less toxins, less radiation, less anxiety,  is one compost pile.  In My yard (and yours). 
Food not Lawn.  Compost, not petrochemicals.  Organics, not pesticides.  Clean food for clean bodies and smart minds.