Permaculture

We gathered around an open-pit fire at Hidden Villa, in Northern California's Los Altos hills, a landscape where they teach "sustainable" practices on farms and for humans in general on Earth. Hard to believe this parcel of 1600 acres, woods, mountain, and farm, were a mere 38 or so miles from San Francisco. So far that day, we had hiked the trails and talked about how this part of the lithosphere was once deep under the sea, how banana slugs on the palm will gnaw skin, and we had worked the farm, milking, feeding, and learning how all the wiggling piglets, covered in shiny umber down and born three days earlier, were bound for the fry pan.

All this filled my brain as a shooting star zipped across the cool violet night while one of the interpreters, Will, talked about a sustainable world culture. The term he used was "permaculture, " and he explained the ideals: rather than thinking about the individual elements themselves, think about how they all weave and unify.

Most of this audience had logged a mere decade on the Earth's surface and I wondered if Will's urgings seemed too fantastic. Yet children do indeed consider all ideas -- from flying wizards to talking pigs to the possibilities of deep ecology. A hopeful moment.

Soon we broke into smaller groups and headed away from the camp fire out into the woods for a night hike. In my group , there were two other mother/chaperones along with our two wilderness guides. Both of these mothers wore lipstick, which they must have applied sometime between dinner and the walk into the dark woods. One of our exercises entailed staring at an index card displaying an outline of a Disney mouse head and then writing down its color. The guides described how in the dark, we lose our ability to see color; because three things are required to sort out color: a light source, an eye, and something at which to gaze. I thought about the lipstick. A gesture that made sense in a night world of lights and restaurants but here you had to adapt.

What came to mind as we stood listening to a Great Horned Owl,
bubo virgianus, was how out of luck we would be if we had to actually survive at night without light. Most of the children in our group lost themselves in some version of mini-terror when we were challenged to make a short "solo" hike on the trail.

Perhaps most of our current debate on how to maintain human habitats on Earth as the climate changes, a miasma of light bulbs and hybrid engines and plastic shopping bags, questions about permaculture and embracing ideas of deep ecology, then, are simply questions of fear.

After we returned to our city school later the next day, the children watched "An Inconvenient Truth." My little daughter said the film made her feel both sad and afraid, which seemed like a reasonable and thoughtful response.

For some reason, this reminded me of something an editor at The Washington Post had once told me, as way of a scolding: Fear is a great motivator.

Tonight I plan to lay in my bed and listen to the ocean's roar and consider the weave, the sea and its ecosystem, the stars overhead, those piglets down the pike. Is our sort of soft indifference to their fate, amazingly, the dominant sentiment about our fate as well?