Female

29

Washington, D.C.

I am a wanderer. I embrace sense of place. Like to dig in and get soil between my fingers and toes. I usually have dirty feet. I am inspired by those around me, by the beauty in the world, the magic within a plant and the hopeful change before us. I love learning and teaching, being challenged and finding the way---
I believe our homes, all our homes internal and external, can be places of kinship with our Mother. I believe in the power of believing and that small steps will change the world.

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"The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” - work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it. All of us are responsible for bad work, not so much because we do it ourselves (though we all do it) as because we have it done for us by other people.

Here we are bound to see our difficulty as almost overwhelming. What proxies have we issued, and to whom, to use the earth on our behalf? How, in this global economy, are we to render anything like an accurate geographical account of our personal economies? How do we take our lives from this earth that we are so anxious to protect and restore to health?

Most of us get almost all the things we need by buying them; most of us know only vaguely, if at all, where those things come from; and most of us know not at all what damage is involved in their production. We are almost entirely dependent on an economy of which we are almost entirely ignorant. The provenance, for example, not only of the food we buy at the store but of the chemicals, fuels, metals, and other materials necessary to grow, harvest, transport, process, and package that food is almost necessarily a mystery to us. To know the full economic history of a head of supermarket cauliflower would require an immense job of research. To be so completely and so ignorantly dependent on the present abusive food economy certainly defines us as earth abusers. It also defines us as potential victims."

from Wendell Berry, “Conservation is Good Work”,