This is John Marek’s seventh and final Field Notes “Summer of Sustainability” article focusing on sustainable living, community agriculture and food security.
Anyone who lived through the Great Depression as anything older than a toddler is pushing 100 years old. By the end of the decade, almost no one who survived those lean years will be around to tell about it. My parents were teenagers when the Depression began and were married and starting a family by the time it ended. Despite similar backgrounds as first-generation children of immigrants, they experienced growing up during that period in very different ways.
My mother’s family had a house on a plot of land where they kept a garden, chickens and, most critically, a cow. While their life was not comfortable – my mother shared a single “good dress” with her older sister – they were able to provide for their most basic needs and scraped by without much existential misery.
On the other hand, my father’s family suffered far more. Their company house, provided by U.S. Gypsum, had almost no yard and was contingent on my grandfather’s continued employment in the mines. While I am unwilling to say the company took advantage of this situation, they paid little for long hours, effectively trading hard labor for a (leaky) roof over their employees’ heads. What little my grandfather could grow in the space between houses was supplemented by what he could catch from the nearby bay, mainly carp and catfish. At 14, my father quit school and got a job picking and packing fruit and vegetables for a local farmer. The pay wasn’t much, but he could take home some of the overripe and blemished produce that wasn’t suitable for packing. He recalled occasions where a few wormy apples were all he had to eat for a day or two.
Those experiences left a mark on him and influenced his thinking and decision-making for the rest of his life. He planted the biggest garden he could manage, avoided spending money on anything other than necessities, insisted on owning his house and land and only borrowed money once to make that happen. He never had a credit card and paid cash for nearly everything. While he did have a checking account and wrote an occasional check for purchases where he wasn’t comfortable sending money, a standard book of checks probably lasted him a decade.
While I am not nearly as frugal or indifferent to social status as my father, I like to think a few of his life lessons trickled down to me and that I am a better person for them. Those lessons are self-reliance and sustainability founded on three basic principles: wise use, smart consumption and creative reuse. Our advanced, interconnected civilization provides us with things we could not conceivably create on our own, which are good and valuable, but there is a difference between taking advantage of the wonderful advances our world has to offer and relying entirely on them.
If that particular lesson had previously escaped us, the events of the last two years have been a rude awakening. Shortages of everything from gasoline to toilet paper to baby formula have demonstrated there is no guarantee the shelves at the Food Lion will always be full. There was a point early in the pandemic when I went to my pantry, sorted through the food on the shelves and determined how long I could go without leaving the house if it came to that. The answer – a week comfortably or a couple of weeks if necessary – was sobering, and I suspect our pantry was in better shape than many.
COVID hit at the beginning of the growing season, and you can bet I took planting that spring very seriously. I typically order my seed for the coming year in January, so I was set in that regard, but with mandatory lockdowns and closures, many were not so fortunate. I recall the governor of Michigan declaring that seeds and gardening supplies were not “essential,” so garden centers remained closed during that state’s lockdown.
At the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine with different political views posted a meme on Facebook that said, “If people are worried about supply chain disruptions, then why are they buying guns and practicing their aim instead of buying seed and planting a garden.” I didn’t respond because there is no greater waste of time than arguing on social media, but the person who created that meme and the people who reposted it are either incredibly naive or willfully ignorant. The self-reliant among us already have gardens and can take care of our basic needs; the guns are to secure them against those who don’t and can’t, and are willing to take what they want by force.
That may seem an odd statement from someone who manages a community garden and grows vegetables to give free to the food insecure of the community, but there is a difference between need and theft, as illustrated by an anecdote from a few years back when I worked in another city.
It was traditional for the businesses in downtown Statesville to give out candy at the end of the business day on Halloween. My office cheerfully complied and set up a small table with a plastic jack-o’-lantern filled with various candies, which I distributed to anyone who stopped. About an hour into the event, I had to briefly attend to something in the office, so I left a note saying “Take One, Please” on the table. When I returned after maybe 10 minutes, the jack-o’-lantern, the candy and the note were all gone. Someone had stolen the “free” candy.
It is hard to look at the headlines and conclude anything other than that the world we live in today is broken: Broken by hate, violence, greed and political division. Perhaps as a society, we will get it back together and embark on a new Golden Age. Maybe better times are just around the corner. But in the meantime, working on our self-reliance skills might not be a bad idea.
I hope you have enjoyed this “Summer of Sustainability” series and gleaned some ideas on how you can live a more self-reliant, sustainable lifestyle; plant a tomato in a pot on your patio, engage in community agriculture, begin composting, replace some shrubs with lavender and blueberry, or try your hand at home food preservation. For those interested in a more in-depth look at these and other ways to be more self-reliant, my latest book, “Getting Back to the Garden,” will be published by Amazon on Sept. 27.