Tomorrow's Lifestyle

OUR NEXT FRONTIER

A PERSONAL GUIDE FOR TOMORROW’S LIFESTYLE

ROBERT RODALE

RODALE PRESS            1981

Choosing Our Next Frontier

• We need water, fuel and many other things to live happy and productive lives. But most of all, we need a frontier, new territory to grow into, as our numbers grow. Our first frontier – making America the greatest, most fertile, most productive frontier ever opened, came to an end about 100 years ago.
• Now we are seeing that the second frontier – those riches stored away in the earth by nature for millions of years – will someday come to an end, too. Where do we go from here? While other planets may hold treasures that can enrich and preserve our future, it will likely be many decades before we can venture into that far-off territory.
• I believe that our next frontier is right here on earth, and it is a frontier already at hand. This third frontier will be shaped by our ability to stand our ground, to face up to the end of the era of oil, to save what farmland we have left, to reduce the use of the water that cannot be replaced, and, most importantly, to make better use of the renewable resources whose great potential we are just now beginning to realize. It can be a time of many opportunities and a chance to enhance the quality of our lives and our environment.
• Many people have already begun to live lives focused on the exploitation of this third frontier. People who have freely and consciously adopted this lifestyle are more adjusted to their environment and more satisfied with the material things they have than people who live without the benefit of a philosophy of real environmental and resource consciousness, or self-reliance, as many call it.
• The average person today – early 1981 – has yet to feel that renewable energy can heat all homes or that gardens and small farms are becoming important as sources of fresh food. Ways are being found to avoid insect damage without the use of toxic pesticides and the creation of health is moving out of the province of the physician back to the mind and body of the person who can both improve and enjoy that health.
• A major purpose of this book is to suggest the necessity for exploiting this third frontier, and also to convince you that it is, in fact, a frontier, one critical to our personal and our planet’s well-being, maybe even survival.
• There are many ways to stand our ground, to use the land and the renewable resources that are all around us, and still be able to build a better way of life for more people. The land, the sun, the wind, and the rain will have to be used more diligently and creatively. And we must be more cautious and careful in our use of oil, minerals, coal, gas, and other resources that do, in fact, have an end.
• I start this book with an explanation of the great promise of gardening as a way to venture into the third frontier, because gardening is the most convenient point of entry to the idea of self-reliance. We can manage to garden in a totally biological way, using only our minds, our muscle power, and renewable resources to create the finest quality food in abundance.

SECTION 1: THE ORGANIC GARDENING IDEA

Chapter 1: The Organic Gardening Idea

• What could be more valuable than a small garden, free of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, yielding food that tastes as good as the vegetables and fruits we used to be able to buy in markets years ago? Valuable not only to the body but also to the spirit.
• The pollution and degradation which so many people experience today were predicted almost 50 years ago by the founders of the organic method. Organic thinking began with Sir Albert Howard, an English agricultural advisor to the Indian state of Indore in the 1920s and 1930s, developing farming systems based entirely on renewable resources.
• Under the ‘scientific’ system of farming, soil became primarily something to hold up plants so they could be fed with artificial solutions. The age-old rhythms of nature which had built the soil were violated.
• Howard preached that it was possible for thinking farmers to preserve the cycle of life by returning plant and animal wastes to the soil, by countering insects by non-poisonous means, and by avoiding the synthetic, soluble fertilizers with their toxic residues. If the life cycle wasn’t preserved, future generations would be faced with declining fertility, hunger, and increases in disease and pollution.
• My father, J.I. Rodale, first read about Sir Albert Howards’ ideas in the late 1930s when the US was so industrialized and technologically ‘advanced’ that it was possible to see what Howard was predicting. The American Dust Bowl experience of the Depression years was graphic evidence of the disruption of the cycle of life.
• But there were signs of trouble everywhere. Food quality was low. Pollution was intruding on people’s lives. Disease caused by physical degeneration – not just by microbes – was increasing. J.I. noted with dismay that the grim harvest predicted was about to be reaped.
• My father first used the word organic to describe the natural method of gardening and farming, mainly because compost, humus, and the organic fraction of the soil were emphasized so strongly. He proclaimed that to be organic was to know, to understand, and to use the lessons of nature in the evaluation of the ‘blessings’ of science and technology.
• What good is it to grow food without using chemical fertilizers or pesticides, if it were then processed and its content of vitamins and minerals seriously depleted? If it is synthetic, avoid it, he said. If it goes through a factory, examine it with special care. Follow the dictates of the cycle of life when growing things, he advised, and you will be blessed with foods of surprising taste and quality that are little troubled by insects or disease.
• J.I demonstrated the value of these ideas by creating a research farm based on Howard’s concept just outside Emmaus, Pennsylvania where we farm using only manure and wasted organic matter as fertilizer, and won’t use poisonous pesticides.
• Then he expanded the concept of his organic research to look for ways to improve the health of people by growing better food. A visitor would see fine crops of grain, healthy animals, and productive gardens. Underlying all was an effort to achieve a much bigger harvest – a better way of life based on natural principles.
• In recent years, events have forced the concept underlying organic research to expand even further. There is an energy crisis, and the nonorganic way of growing food uses too much energy. Our environment has become contaminated by agricultural chemicals, many of which pollute the normal sources of food.
• The ozone layer of the upper atmosphere, which screen harmful rays of the sun, is threatened with destruction by the overuse of chemical nitrogen fertilizers. Inflation has forced the cost of food to new highs, and the food-distribution web has become so complex that economic or military disruption could cause widespread suffering.
• Because of these and similar conditions, there is now a need for a concept of organic research that will support an effort going far beyond the basic goals of natural soil improvement and improved food quality. To meet the challenge, those of us continuing J.I.’s work are involved in a major research effort at a second site.
• The Organic Gardening and Farming Research Center is located on a 305-acre farm near Maxatawny, Pennsylvania. All the experiments being done there are aimed at finding out how to do more with less – how to make organic methods even more efficient than they are already.
• Many can now see the direct result of the misuse of our environment and of the failure of industry and agriculture to adapt to constraints of the cycle of life. You no longer need to be a prophet or a visionary to perceive that abuse of our world is leading to trouble.
• I know – and I think you do, too – that the organic way of living points to the right road, even though that road might have a few bumps and hills in it. Growing food naturally, using renewable resources, provides the basic foundation for the building of a livable society.

Chapter 6: Gardening for Security

• By helping you to avoid toxic pesticides and harmful fertilizers, organic gardening can contribute a lot to your health security. Moreover, as drought and soaring production costs send grocery bills skyward, food put by is beginning to look more and more like a mainstay of financial security.
• Gardening now is basic production of food. People are digging up part of their lawns to be able to save money on vegetables and fruits. They are recycling the organic wastes of the household and yard through a compost heap, to get free fertilizer. Cellars are again filling with canning jars, and freezers are bulging with home-produced food. The food-storing habits of the old days are coming back.
• Gardening leads directly to the idea of homesteading, where improved personal productivity becomes part of a family’s whole lifestyle. In homesteading, the garden remains the center of your thoughts, but food is produced, processed, and stored in all possible ways.
• Most important of all, the ethic of homesteading encourages people to examine more carefully their lifestyle, and especially their patterns of consumption. The homesteading ethic is the best handle for the average person today to grasp to get both the feeling and reality of security.
• The gardening-homesteading way of life is fun, not only because of the thrill of production and the solid satisfaction of building your own secure reserves, but because it is tied in with relief from hectic old habits of waste and consumption.
• I’ve listed 6 ways that a garden saves (maybe you can think of some others): land is saved by a garden; time is saved by a garden; another garden saving is energy; the biggest garden saving is of waste itself; gardening saves water, rainfall in particular; and finally, a garden can save money.

Chapter 8: Coping with the Weather Changes Ahead

• Organic gardening practices may make even more sense in the future than they do now if certain long-range weather predictions turn out to be accurate. Studies of weather records going back far into the past reveal a rather startling picture of the stability and favourable nature of the weather we’ve enjoyed for the past 40 to 50 years.
• On average, during our lifetimes we have enjoyed some of the best weather for farming, gardening, and all kinds of food production that is likely to occur in any but a totally utopian world. Take a look at historical weather records that go back more than 50 years and you begin to see what real climate variations can be like.
• There have been two fine weather decades leading up to current times, and they have bred dangerous complacency with new agricultural technology that is ill-equipped to cope with weather that won’t conform to the expected ‘norm’.
• Understanding the bad effects that more climate variation can have on food production is difficult for many farmers and gardeners because we already expect seasonal and other changes. Some of our crops would never reach maturity.
• A CIA report points out that European farms now support an average of 3 people per arable hectare (about 2.5 acres). If the temperature declined by only 1 degree Celcius, that figure would be cut to 2 people per hectare.
• A better approach is to multiply the number of people who are able to produce at least some of their own food in gardens. Gardens are much more secure and reliable sources of food in times of climate extremes than farms.
• When my father bought the Organic Gardening Farm back in 1942, the soil was depleted of humus of decades of exploitative farming practices. Even a mild rain would start strong streams of water flowing off the fields, through the barnyard, and even into our basement. When I would try to walk through a cultivated field after a rain, the mud would stick to my shoes like orange glue.
• Now, after years of building up the humus in our soil, even heavy rains present little problem. Water soaks in quickly, and only during a cloudburst will much water flow off the soil surface. Nowadays, even during a rain you can walk through a plowed field in comfort, with clean boots. Humus has important temperature-moderating effects that help improve the yield of both gardens and farms.
• To sum up – we should not expect that the favourable climate we have experienced in the recent past will continue, but there is no need to be fearful of the future as long as we act intelligently. That means designing and using food-production systems which will work well even if mother Nature doesn’t seem inclined to cooperate as well as she has recently.

Chapter 9: Stocking Up on Future Food

• The question is no longer whether a food crunch is going to follow on the heels of the energy crisis, but when. The real crunch is only a few years ahead and spot outbreaks of the problem are here now.
• The number of eaters is increasing at the rate of 6.2 million a month globally, and 159,000 a month here in the US. Every year the US loses over 3 million acres of agricultural land to the building of highways, factories, stores, homes, and other structures.
• We lose 4.8 billion tons of soil from our agricultural base each year due to erosion, with as many as 20 bushels of topsoil disappearing for every bushel of wheat harvested in the state of Washington. Across the length and breadth of our country we are eating up more land than food, consuming 25 square miles of our agricultural base every day.
• Irrigation water is being pumped faster than it’s being replaced by rainfall. Instead of producing as much food as possible close to where people are, fertilizers, vegetables and fruits are moved thousands of miles. The processing and distribution of food is becoming concentrated in the hands of a few large companies.
• It’s critical that we change the structure of our food system. So far it has been a mining operation. We are mining the soil of its fertility and draining oil and gas fields of their wealth to get the energy to do that. Mines always become depleted. We can’t afford to let our food system just run out someday.
• Widespread application of organic farming techniques is the way to build permanence into our farms. Organic farming feeds the soil instead of mining it. Humus is built up, creating an intensely alive soil environment that liberates minerals and other nutrients gradually, in ways that allow a soil to remain fertile for many thousands of years.
• Conventional farmers are actually burning up their farms to produce today’s commodities. They are consuming their capital – the fertility of their land – in order to try to stay solvent financially. That is a giant hidden cost which doesn’t show up in your food bill today, but which will have to be paid soon. We are getting close to the danger point now. Organic farmers refuse to sell their soil along with the food they move to market.

Chapter 10: Plan Your Food Future Now

• Our Cornucopia Project studies suggest that food will become terribly expensive in the future as the amount of good land available for production declines and the number of mouths to feed increases. The food system can be transformed in Cornucopian ways with very little capital – provided people return to the diet of largely fresh foods, eaten in season. Production, processing and storage of food will have to be done at home or in the local community.