Il Faut Cultiver Son Jardin
reducing my footprint one day at a time

I've been working and wondering recently a lot about how I live my life, seeking as one friend calls it "to go off the grid" in order to become more self-reliant, earthy-friendly, less consumeristic, and leave a smaller carbon footprint as I seek to follow Jesus as spiritual guide in my life. So I've decided to take up a weekly blogpost on my efforts ranging from organic gardening to supplement (and maybe primarily produce?) our family's green intake, raising egg-laying chickens in an urban context, reflecting on the integration of faith and ecology, and seeking to raise our children to be more about cultivation than consumption.

I'm calling this weekly blog-post "Il faut cultiver son jardin." The phrase is the concluding word and principal theme of Voltaire's short novel Candide. In English we'd say "One has to take care of one's garden," the notion that life is about cultivation, growth, maturation, discovery and life-living. It's an a propos title for my emerging thoughts on this.

I read a great article in today's SF GATE "Quest for Cutlural Oasis: Standford professor finds hope that consumerism won't render caretaking obsolete" by Susan Fornoff detailing the book "Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition" by Robert Pogue Harrison. It all makes you wonder. We live in a culture that's so quick to replace something old with something new. Don't cultivate, encourage growth or transformation of anything we already have...rather just buy something new. Replace don't reuse. Isn't it ironic that when an appliance breaks it's almost always cheaper to buy a new one then to have the old one fixed? We are being spoon-fed a culture or impotence, where we have to have the latest thing we see on tv, on the internet or on the side of a passing bus. Bigger is oftentimes better. And we don't have to always being upgrading to have it. We seem to place our optism on future products that can be made for even less money in the 2/3rds world. Where is our hope beyond in the next season of clothes, generation of cell phones, and next cd? Maybe that's what Voltaire was on to. I myself am a freak in the sense that I feel this deep "have to" urgency to make purchases when items are really reduced and cheap, like I can't miss out on the deal so I overbuy instead of using what I have. I'm a sucker for our modern advertising powers. Undoubtedly I'm not alone. No wonder our carbon footprints are so big. We're always buying bigger and better shoes.