Where to start?

It’s been two months since becoming the caretaker for Augie Acres, Augustana’s campus garden, and I’ve spent many hours picking (fruits and vegetables), pulling (weeds – mostly crabgrass), pushing (wheelbarrows), pruning (tomatoes), and praying (for the natural death of vermin). It’s been a summer full of near-perfect weather for the garden on 6th Avenue – I’ve only had to water once – and only yesterday did it really feel the 90-something degrees Fahrenheit. We’ve had a variety of volunteers for “Pickin’ and Pullin’ Fridays at Augie Acres” – plenty of students, faculty members and their children, and local community members have come to weed, chat, and lend a miscellaneous hand. We took out all the Burdock around the Cottonwood tree. We cleared the vineyard hill. We put up a fence. We’ve done our best with the Japanese Beetles that prey on the fruit trees.

And I’ve succesfully procrastinated this blog for long enough – but no more! I’m going to try and make this a regular deal, at least once a week. I find myself having something to say every once and a while, as I’m ankle-deep in mud, or eyeing down seven – yes, seven – groundhogs, or wheelbarrowing produce to the Farmers’ Market, or bicycling home.

So, hear from me soon.

Glebe: n. 1. The soil of the earth, regarded as the source of vegetable products; earth, land. 2. A portion of land assigned to a clergyman as part of his benefice.

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by Dan Hadley
Dan Hadley is a 2009 graduate of Augustana College

I’m anxious, ready for spring even though winter isn’t even halfway over, anxious to stretch my legs and enjoy that sweet sunshine and the sight of birds returning from their much warmer hideaways, and anxious to get my hand dirty again, to feel tired after a long day of work. For those of you stuck indoors fighting the cold, eyes and hands glued to the screens and keyboards typing away at those papers (they never end do they…), wondering what’s next after the four year party ends, here might be some food for thought.

No doubt many of you have figured out by now that we need to start rethinking the way we grow and eat food; that is to say, we need to start thinking and acting locally, growing food that is based on ecological limits and a local economy, and producing food that actually tastes good! If you have the desire to eat healthy food and want to participate in that wonderful act of growing something delicious out of that mysterious soil we all so depend on, then here are some things to check out.

This past summer I worked on a small 20 acre organic farm in the Williams Valley in southwest Oregon. Consisting of the hills and valleys of the Siskiyou and Klamath Mountains, this region is known for one of the highest diversity of plants in the U.S., its extremely complex geology, and its numerous microclimates. It’s this diversity of rock, weather, and plants that has made this region home to so many
unique small-scale farms, with each adapting to their own local conditions, producing things of real, healthy value. The farm I worked on is one of several farms involved in a program called the Rogue Farm Corps, which is a program that places interns on farms for a season and gives them the opportunity to learn many different aspects of organic growing. By offering classes and tours at other farms throughout the region every few weeks, students get a chance to meet other interns and to learn about the farms they are working on and the people crazy enough to run them, and to learn other aspects of food production and sustainable living. So while I learned about vegetable production and raising chickens on the farm I worked on, I also toured a bison ranch, learned about ecological straw bale building techniques, crop and livestock rotation, and how to brew beer. The farms are also part of a network called the Siskiyou Sustainable Cooperative, which contributes to numerous CSAs, restaurants, and farmers markets in the region. More information about the program can be found at http://www.roguefarmcorps.org/.

You can also check out internships and apprentice programs on sustainable farms and ranches throughout the U.S. at the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service (ATTRA) website (http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/internships/). This is probably the most comprehensive list of internships and work opportunities on small scale sustainable farms within the U.S. out there, along with publications and information on sustainable agriculture. For those of you with a more adventurous spirit there are also farming opportunities throughout the world found at the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms website (http://www.wwoof.org/).

by Nick Borchert

A few days previous, I happened to perceive both that my hair had exceeded acceptable length (even by my lax standards) and that there was a lovely snowstorm occurring outside my window; thus I determined to use the occasion of the former to pursue a more intimate relationship with the latter. The walk was pleasantly uncomfortable, as anticipated, but the spirit of it was somewhat ruined, for I must confess that, having in my possession an inducement nigh-irresistible to the college undergraduate—a $2-off coupon—I bypassed several local barbers en route to—apologies, Fr. Peters—the “high-overhead chain just up the street” known as Big League Barbers. Herein, in lieu of the small-talk that traditionally accompanies the shearing process, I enjoyed the dubious privilege of watching ESPN over the buzz of the clippers.

Oh that the buzz had been louder! I had just convinced myself that making NFL Live’s “Twitter Tuesday” the subject of a public tirade would be both curmudgeonly and uninteresting when, at a commercial break (which on the contrary offered no reprieve at all), I was obliged to see Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” being used to tout Levi-brand jeans. In the commercial, an austere voice reads the opening stanzas of the poem while sweaty young men and women, presumably of the “youthful sinewy races,” run about wielding torches, dashing through the wilderness, doing back flips, riding horses, cuddling, coupling, and looking generally athletic, as catchwords like “strong,” “capable,” and “America” flash across the bottom of the screen.

Now it is true of course that Whitman is to some extent receiving his just deserts; after all, the poem in question does contain the following stanza:

“We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!”

And though I would forget it, we must also remember that it was Whitman who gave us the abominable “Song of the Redwood-Tree.” But he elsewhere instructs that “You shall not heap up what is call’d riches, / You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve” and calls us to “Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!” If the Good Grey Poet was sometimes caught up in the capitalist spirit of the young nation, it was only because he perceived in that spirit leanings toward the “divine magnetic lands” of which he dreamed. When Whitman thought of “progress,” he thought of spiritual and moral progress, an eternal march of the American people toward “inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks.” The enterprising, pioneering American spirit seemed to him exactly the disposition needed for such a journey, but no level of material success was ever the goal: “Have you outstript the rest? Are you President? / It is a trifle….they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.”

When Whitman offered that “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it,” I rather doubt that what he was searching for was that the American spirit which he so cherished be spent in the never-ending pursuit of wealth. But that is what happened in the main, so now the urgent words of the “lonely old courage-teacher” are being used to sell designer jeans. But the marketing gurus over at Levi Strauss & Co., if they had any ends beyond the creation of a successful product, would do well to heed these words of the Camden Sage:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others…”

But all things considered, Dr. Peters is correct, and the real travesty of the day was that I consented to set foot in the chain barbershop in the first place simply to save a few bucks. Therefore, if you chance to be the next unfortunate soul to hear me moralize about the superiority of the farmer’s market to the supermarket, I hereby entitle you to scoff. But the next time, so help me Walt, I’m going local, where at the very least I won’t have to chance twenty minutes in front of a television.

by Margaret Foley

After weeks of planning and anticipation, the students of Augustana’s Spring 2009 Vienna Term held a reunion. We ate schnitzel and bratwurst at a local restaurant specializing in German food (as close to Austrian as we could get) and then partook in other favorite activities, including eating some delicious homemade apfelstrudel (apple strudel), and playing several rounds of a favorite Italian card game impersonating the old American West (cowboys and duels and all that jazz) named ‘Bang’ we frequently played at night and on Sundays. Although the turnout was fairly small, the nostalgia hung in the air, heavier than the scent of the sugary desert we loved so much.

And how is this local? It may seem a bit backward but hopefully not uncouth to examine a foreign experience in respect to local matters.

Our group of 36 students lived together in a hostel for three months in the 6th district of Vienna. We took classes offered by three Augustana professors. We went to parks, restaurants, museums, concerts and karaoke bars together. We traveled to foreign cities on the weekends, including Prague, Krakow and Amsterdam. We learned the value of getting lost, eating new foods and conversing with complete strangers. We saw the Hofburg Palace together, we saw the Vienna Philharmonic together, and we saw Auschwitz together.

And now we’re home. I still see many of these people regularly; during the intense period of time we lived and studied together, we formed a community of our own which has continued at our college. We have jokes and stories and memories and experiences that could not have been replicated anywhere else. Studying in Vienna allowed this unique group to exist, and this transplanted community has been invaluable to me since my return.

Along with this new community of peers and friends I am grateful to have, another major aspect of the experience has contributed to my education: I learned to recognize traits of my own culture with the template that Vienna taught me to recognize traits of its own.

During my time there, cultural observations, at first a novelty, eventually became an engrained part of my unconscious behavior. The term’s umbrella theme was “Dream versus Reality.” Viennese culture and history is nearly more steeped in dualism than schnitzel is dipped in breading. As time progressed and my cultural observations continued, I became accustomed to recognizing and internalizing the duality of facade and reality in every thing and every situation I encountered.

For example, when I attended concerts at the famous Musikverein or Wiener Konzerthaus, I couldn’t help but compare the social constructs which produced the Schönberg piece I heard one night compared to the Mozart I heard on another. Nor could I ignore the historical background that allowed the quick construction of elegant limestone facades over plaster buildings. Or why the Nazi eagles which perch on pillars of the old city gate still exist – and why they were put up in the first place. I found myself almost confounded with my inability to turn off this acquired sense. So much so that even though I was never as totally immersed in Viennese culture as its more permanent inhabitants inevitably must be, I brought this lens of cultural and historical dualism home with me. I now look more scrupulously for the reality behind my own culture’s architecture, art, music and scholastics. I cannot help but see the oil business behind every gas station, the garden deficit behind every grocery store, and the lack of funding behind every run-down public school.

And yes, there is a sense of guilt and hypocrisy when I attempt to reconcile the less environmentally and ecologically sound aspects of my study abroad experience with my reverence for all things local. But what I have gained from the experience is invaluable. I intend on using my newfound characteristically Viennese observational abilities for good, to improve the desperately disparate aspects of my own culture.

And while bringing these new observational abilities home has involved a bit of estrangement along with its wisdom, bringing home the friendships and community as well has introduced a sense of comfort and camaraderie to the transition, soothing this transplanted place memory and these valuable observations of dualism.

by Katharine O’Connor

Perhaps I have just missed out on some common knowledge, but I am willing to venture that others too do not know why we call that all-important shopping day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday.” I have only recently been enlightened on this fact and I will pass along the favor. Up until today, department stores operate at a loss, and do not usually break even, but with today’s sales, they make up for a whole year’s worth of losses, going from “the red” to “the black”. This makes me pretty nervous.

I do not mean to be a complete grouch about Thanksgiving, and so truly enjoy the time I spend with my loved ones, but I can’t help wondering about the spirit of this holiday and how it fits in with a modern American worldview. For the previous year the primary thoughts of a lot Americans has been getting “green,” frugality, and buckling down for some tough times ahead, but this holiday is not particularly conducive to that sentiment. Thanksgiving traditionally represents being grateful for what we’ve been given, that we have survived another year, and that we are pretty sure we’ll have enough food to get us through the winter. It is this last part I am interested in at this moment. We have come to associate Thanksgiving with fecundity, abundance and surplus, and with the classic iconography of enormous obese smiling turkeys dressed up as pilgrims and the requisite full-to-bursting cornucopias. For this one holiday we forget those issues we have been concerned with the rest of the year. “Le Green, C’est Chic” and watching our spending are for a little while set aside, and we celebrate with mass transit and overconsumption. Am I suggesting that our behavior at Thanksgiving is a neat little microcosm for the general American attitude? Not particularly, but I do think that showing restraint in one area of our lives teaches us to show restraint in others.

I am currently spending my day at home with my family, we having sworn amongst ourselves that no deal, however tempting, will in any way induce us to enter any store upon this day. While it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that anyone can stop Americans from shopping on Black Friday, I think a little pause for an examination of how we honor this holiday would not go amiss. That abundance does not mean an obligation, or permission, to consume that abundance without boundaries, and that just because something is available to you at a low cost does not mean that it should be indiscriminately and instantly obtained, are lessons that should not only apply to the holidays in turbulent times, but to our friendships, relationships, eating habits, household economics and interactions with our planet. Until we change our fundamental thinking about how to treat abundance, we cannot possibly hope to change our behaviors of consumption. As I sit here in the post-holiday daze, with my cold turkey sandwich, taking one small step at a time towards a change in that thinking does not appear so difficult.

“Refrain…and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence and the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature…”
— Hamlet, Act. II, sc. IV

by Dana Swanson

The daylight is shorter, the mornings are crisper and the leaves are littering the ground; it is officially autumn.

Each year, Augustana’s fall break brings me home for one of my least favorite family traditions. Not-so-creatively dubbed “Leaf Day,” it is the day my parents, my brother and I rake the leaves off the lawn. (I thought when I left for college I was escaping this chore, but alas, the past four years my father has intentionally waited for me to be home on break. Thanks, Dad.) No surprise, I found myself present to participate in the festivities when “Leaf Day” rolled around last weekend.

I claimed conscientious objection to the leaf relocation this year; safe to say, my sentiments were not respected. Despite my childish reluctance to complete an assigned chore, I was sincerely questioning why we rake leaves. Why not let them be? I don’t mind the quilted spectrum of leaves littering the grass. I appreciate the colors on, as well as off, the trees.

From what I gather, we rake leaves because we don’t want them to suffocate our lawns. If left on the lawn, the grass will brown from the leaves. I also understand that leaves can create potential safety hazards when covering sidewalks and roads, especially when damp. So instead of leaving the leaves, we collect them. What do we do with the piles and piles of raked leaves? Some are burned, creating air pollution. Others are collected by the city, which requires fossil fuels for transportation and disposal. At Augustana, Facilities terrorizes campus with loud leaf blowers and then sucks up the leaves with a vacuum-like hose attached to a truck. Nevertheless, a few leaves actually prove themselves useful.

Last fall, the city of Moline brought truckloads of leaves to Wesley Acres Produce, the farm where I interned this summer. The massive wall of leaves shrunk all winter, releasing heat as it decomposed. By the summer, the leaves were ready to be used as compost; in this picture, the leaves were used as compost around a tomato plant. I had the pleasure—and I use that word loosely—of spreading the decaying leaves between the rows of crops. When I pitchforked the leaves from the back of a wagon into the rows, the scent from the compost overpowered my own perspiration. The odor was pungent, yet not unpleasant. As the leaves decomposed, they released an earthy aroma, rich in substance, similar to the way it smells in the woods after rainfall. The leaves I spread as compost keep the weeds down, but they also improve the quality of the soil.

When we rake the leaves, we are preventing them from fulfilling their role as soil enhancers. The leaves should continue the natural cycle, contributing a layer of humus, enriching local soils and local culture.

Every autumn the leaves will fall—let them. If leaves must be cleared, use a rake. Listen to the rustling teeth of the rake grazing the grass rather than the obnoxious leaf blower’s scream. Instead of burning the leaves, use them as compost in your gardens. “Leaf Day” comes but once a year, best to make the fruits of your labor count.

by Katie Fick

I found myself romping around the Shedd Aquarium this fall break with some Augie students who had never been to Chicago. Admission was free that day, and heck, who doesn’t love dolphins? Somehow I didn’t experience the complete carefree wonderment that my ten-year-old self did when I last visited. I was actually a little distressed at the sight of those incredible marine animals in captivity instead of where they naturally belong. I felt a tugging in my conscience. It’s wrong to meddle, to remove animals from their natural habitat, to play God.

The dolphin show, called Fantasea (not a good start), was troublesome for a different reason: it was ridiculous. Granted, it began with a video that gave reasons for our needing to take better care of our own local cultures because it affects the animals’ habitats in the wild. I’m hoping that message sunk in for some of the kids there, but I fear that most of them were picking their noses and waiting to be overly stimulated by the show. If so, they got their wish. The show began with a dramatic closing of the curtain on the window that looks out to Lake Michigan, loud music, and colored lights, as well as the appearance of characters (animal trainers?) in attire that suspiciously resembled the costumes from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At the risk of sounding like my grandpa, what’s more concerning is that I suspect that show represents a standard for capturing kids-these-days’ attention. Yikes, America. We’re in trouble. Just a decade ago, I was awed by the animals and their trainers, in their plain old boring wet suits. I asked Mom, “What do I have to do to play with dolphins like they do?” She answered that I should study Marine Biology, and after that Bio was my major of choice until Middle School when I realized the closest I’d get to a major in Bio was watching Animal Planet. Can I get an “Amen!” from all the English majors for whom the Sciences are elusive? Anyway, I felt for the trainers. They studied Marine Biology, not Musical Theater, but here they were, dancing and looking like fools. My little brother summed it up nicely when he said, “If I ever have to fanta-see that show again, I’ll poke my eyes out.”

I think what finally relaxed my conscience a bit was the message implied by the signs next to each exhibit, the Aquarium employees, and even the dolphin show: one has to know about these animals in order to want to protect them. What better way to do that than to watch them eat, play (did you know that some scientists think otters are one of the only animals that play for pure enjoyment in the wild?), and communicate? The Shedd’s rather honorable aim seems to be to awe ‘n educate. For example, they get kids hooked by showing them baby sharks growing in their eggs right before their eyes (scroll over the above image), and then let them know what’s happening to that species of shark in the wild because of the lifestyle we choose every day. It’s a rather sneaky and effective way to teach kids at an early age about responsible, sustainable living. So, over the holidays, visit the Shedd with your kids, siblings, or little ones you babysit. But for goodness’ sake, save the $16.95 it costs to watch the Shedd’s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and perhaps donate it to WWF.

by Jaron Gaier

I face a crisis. I know no local culture. My family is healthy, but the surrounding community lacks a healthy cohesiveness. My friends are great, but my peers are, at large, in danger. This is especially a problem, because I was recently asked to be a part of this here team, these bloggers, these “sustainables,” editors, Glebes. I am now engaged in a project to help maintain any semblance of locality, of approximation, and to help my peers to realize for ourselves a truly “sustainable” future. But my twentieth birthday approacheth, and I find that I know this future animal less and less. All I can know is the past, what is history (and I know this seemingly less and less, too), what remains, what I can see. And I can see only a few things. The five-fingered, opposable-thumbed handprint on the ass of the natural world. Vacant seats in children’s school plays. Welfare homes with doorbell-high lawns and yawningly hungry doorways.

This website calls for communities (built to human scale, of course) preserving themselves and their respective places. But what does it mean to preserve? It’s from the Latin praeservare, “to guard beforehand”—I can say that much. But what does it mean in my life? I’ve always negotiated it in my mind to a near past-tense affectation. Maybe it perpetually associates itself with “preserved”—like a dead body, or “preserves”—not the same as jam or jelly, mind you. And both variations of this key term ascribe themselves to actions done in the past, in order to be consumed (by mouth or by earth) later.

Later. What a strange term. I have a dubious time preparing for this later business. Money never wants to stay in a pocket for later, food never keeps ‘til later. Preservation of even the smallest things in life poses a great challenge to me, as it surely does to my peers and the world at large. Everyone’s in debt, they say. Everyone’s hungry, they say. If we cannot preserve our dollars, our food production and intake, and our words, how can we expect to preserve, to keep safe beforehand, entire communities?

Much is wrong ‘round here—evidence of our ancestors inadequately pre-serving in their own time. The flooding of the Cedar River in Iowa put thousands of people out of their homes in the summer of 2008. The Iowa River, once surrounded by some of the most nutritious soil in North America, now ranks as the third most toxic river in the United States. A vast ice shelf (one much different than the receding, melting few, way up north and way down south) encloses us on all sides—one of ignorance and complacency. And, until we learn to pre-serve our way out of it, our communities (built on a human scale, of course) will remain in danger. Like this picture here, we must reawaken our structures left dormant in the winter. Our bridges, our connecting structures must be reopened—but, differently than is documented in this picture, without the use of dynamite. We must use sights and sounds—“lore and story and song”—to pre-serve, in a non-destructive way, our future communities. We must create something (not destroy something) spectacular, so that young men like me will not be deprived of two decades of local culture. We must pre-serve this future, this waiting world, and guard beforehand everything cooperating in that community, so that each, respectively, might pre-serve their subsequent communities and cultures.

by Lindsey Haines

Does anyone else remember Captain Planet? I maintain that it was from Captain Planet (as well as movies such as Fern Gulley) that I received my first introduction to environmental awareness. Recently, this phenomenon of terrestrial responsibility as a theme of children’s popular culture has resurfaced. For instance, if you failed to see the environmental message in Wall-E, you and I did not see the same movie. Like when we were growing up, kids today also encounter examples of sustainable practice often and from a very young age.

For instance, my three-year-old niece is better about consistently recycling than my twenty-eight-year-old brother. My family and I teach her all we can about responsible habits, but she also has the benefit of reinforcement in the media for her age group. Case in point: on the Sprout network, a TV channel aimed at preschoolers, there is a friendly yellow moose (Moose A. Moose, in fact) who does puzzles and songs with the audience in between shows. One such interlude involves Moose guiding children through separating recyclables and items which can be donated to people who can use them, and another focuses on turning off electrical appliances when they are not in use. Very basic things, I know, but how many adults follow these practices as unfailingly as an enthusiastic child? Moreover, how many episodes of “The Office” and “Desperate Housewives” have had themes of sustainability and environmental responsibility?

The point I am trying to make here is not about topics in the media, but about the mindset of children. When you’re a kid, everything is a big deal because it’s new, and children have plenty of reminders to recycle and conserve water and energy, and therefore they do. So why is it that a girl in my dorm last year kept the faucet on full blast while she brushed her teeth and sauntered lackadaisically around the bathroom? Was it a kind of pop culture deprivation she suffered as a kid? I suppose it is possible that she lived under a rock in her formative years. More likely, however, she probably just forgot. Because once you start to grow up, the things which at one time were so important begin to seem less and less significant as more and more new experiences come your way. Also, as adults, we don’t get so many reminders to do the right thing, and we are therefore allowed to forget what that even is.

Well, we shouldn’t forget. Turning off the water while you brush your teeth should matter; picking up that plastic bottle and putting it in the recycle bin should be important. Just because an action is small doesn’t mean it is not worth doing. We should continue to approach environmental responsibility—and life, as long as I’m on this handy soapbox—with the zeal and enthusiasm we had as children. After all, we were all kids once—all we have to do is remind ourselves now and then.