Celebrate Earth Day!

It’s Earth Day! What can you do today to celebrate the earth? Here are just a few ideas:

1. Walk or bike ride to class or work instead of driving your car. Or at least, take public transportation!
2. Join a CSA. That’s community support agriculture for those of you new to the sustainable or local food movements. Find a farm near you at: http://www.localharvest.org/
3. Recycle. Or better yet, fill up a reusable water bottle from the tap before heading outside.
4. Offset your emissions. There are a number of places you can do this. Check out Carbon Fund or Terra Pass
5. Power off and get outside and enjoy the day – rain or shine! And, when you power back up tomorrow, share with us how you celebrated Earth Day today so that we can take your advice tomorrow. Every day should be Earth Day!

Time To Consider CSA

No, not the Confederate States of America — Community Supported Agriculture. I started this blog last fall saying how much I appreciated everything about a new farm in my town created by a young couple using the CSA formula. CSAs are popping up all over the U.S., and this is the time of year when new ones solicit subscriptions in advance for shares of whatever they grow this summer. You pick up your shares of food once a week, fresh from the farm. Big Picture – It increases national security when we grow locally and don’t rely on food trucked from California’s Central Valley. Piety and virtue aside, it tastes better. Here’s info on the CSA I belong to in Poland Spring.

“How We Eat Determines… How the World is Used”

This winter our family bought a share in Summit Springs Farm, a new CSA (community-supported agriculture) group in Poland Spring. I was impressed with this sign-off in its first newsletter on June 10,2008:

“… a quote from the great Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, a long-time advocate of local economies and farms: ‘Eaters … must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact,as far as one can, this complex relationship.’”