Good Article

I love coming across an article that expresses our ideology in such a succinct way....much better than I ever could. The following is an older post from a blog I regularly read called Little Homestead in the City. It was originally posted in Feb. 07 after a fairly serious freeze affected many of the crops grown on their property.

The Dervaes family has become nationally known for living almost completely self-sustained on a city plot in Pasadena. They even keep goats and chickens...pretty cool!

The idea of eating seasonally and buying locally are two of the reasons for starting our own farm project as well as encouraging us to continue digging up more grass :)

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Tuesday more rain fell and what a blessing that was. The crops perked up and the warm rain certainly put us in a planting mood. In our south side seed starting nursery we planted all sorts of veggies even tomatoes. Knowing there’s still two months of winter left, we hope and pray that there will be no more cold snaps because it will take us months to recover from the worst hard freeze we had in years. We called our clients this week and said that we may have something for them by Friday, but in small quantities. Of course, they were thrilled we could bring them anything. One of our clients who buys quite a lot of our salad, and who was interviewed for the Times piece, noted that of all the months the article had to come out it had to go to print right when the deep freeze hit (and hit our salad crops hard). You could sense he was slightly frustrated that he couldn’t offer “the salad mentioned in the LA Times” at his restaurant even though people were coming in and asking for it.

There’s a lesson to be learned in all this. It’s a good course in seasonal eating - getting people to realize that localized food localizes natural cycles whether they be from global warming or freaks of nature. Nature is unlike a 24/7 grocery store where food is on the shelf no matter the weather. Perhaps if food was more localized and shelves bare maybe people would pay more attention the affect we are having on nature. So what if strawberries freeze in Oxnard or the citrus in the San Joaquin Valley, the stores shelves here in the Southland will never be empty. No, never! Instead we’ll truck, fly, export our food from hundreds of thousand miles away. Such artificial lifelines are buffering us from the effects of global warming - and contributing no doubt. The folks that grow our food supply are smack dab on the front lines of the changes global warming is having on our climate; however, we are so buffered from experiencing these slight (yet noticeable) changes they hardly affect or disrupt our daily lives/routines.

Global warming will not only affect our climate but our food supply. It’s frightening and frustrating, but you can take actions - small actions. Doing something is better than doing nothing.

- Anais Dervaes

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And my little disclaimer...I'm not entirely sure how worried I am about Global Warming. Not that I don't believe it's happening, but I think even the scientific community is not entirely in agreement about the causes and whether we can significantly affect climate change, good or bad. I've put my future in the hands of a loving sovereign God and that will not change with the weather.

BUT....I believe to my very soul that our God has entrusted us to cherish this earth and the resources we have. He expects us to use our intelligence in managing the land and taking responsibility for actions that will affect our children's future. Whether in choosing an efficient mode of transportation, combining trips to Visalia to do errands, riding bikes, walking, eating seasonally and locally, turning down(off) the heat and air conditioning, recycling, etc....we must be good stewards of the planet He created for us to live on.

Our goal is to take the best possible care of the gift we have been given.