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SustainableMiddleClass.com |
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Environmental Quality:
Energy, Food, Water, Air, Soil,
and Biodiversity
Options and opportunities for
creating sustainable systems
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Photo Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), U.S. Department of Energy.
US Environmental Quality Statistics
Canadian Environmental Quality Guidelines
In the late Eighties while a graduate student
at the University of New Hampshire, I recall a conversation about what it takes
to be an "environmentalist." One older graduate student, returning to
study after raising her family, said that her husband, a retired commercial
pilot, claimed that all it took to qualify was to grow some of your own food
and use a clothesline in your back yard. This minimalist view was appreciated
in the discussion group, but generally regarded as too simplistic. People
needed a respect for nature's riches and to understand how natural systems
worked so that they could live with them without disrupting and depleting those
systems - and that is certainly true. But I think the pilot was on to
something. Criss-crossing the country six miles high, from the cockpit of a Lockheed L-1011,
much of the land probably looks like a garden: a patchwork of green and gold
fields, pastures and woodlots. The pilot's craft is all about fuel and forces
and wind and sun and velocity - and flying over "big gardens".
Anyone who's grown a garden has been pretty
well initiated into the realm of ecology and environmental quality. A gardener
eventually learns about the importance of the different kinds of soil. They
find out that some things need lots of water, while other plants, not so much.
Some like full sun, others burn out if you don't give them shade. Without ever
hearing the term "adaptation" the gardener learns that plants need
certain conditions, the right niche.
This probably sounds all too "pedestrian" to anyone except those who are gardeners, but growing some of our own food brings us back to earth in every sense, forcing us to consider sun, water, soil, competition, bugs, and the cycle of growth and decay. Read more…
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