Past Projects: Ella
I have been interested in protecting the environment for some years now, well before the beginnings of PPFP. This group’s co-founder and my good friend Roger, as well as many of my other friends, told me that I was crazy the summer I dedicated my precious days to digging a huge new garden in my backyard, and weeding the one I already had. I’m sure their beliefs remained unchanged when I purchased two Nigerian Dwarf goats the following summer, and woke up every morning at 5:30 for the following year to milk and feed them. I suppose my friends were just used to my unexplained ways by then, having suffered through years of reprimands whenever they threw food into my trash, forgot to bring their reusable grocery bags to the store, or opted for plastic cutlery instead of metal.
Thinking back, I can trace the beginnings of my environmentalism to a summer reading assignment in 8th grade. Of course, I had learned to deeply respect nature during four childhood summers spent at a wilderness camp, but I was not actually aware that it was in any immediate danger. The summer of 8th grade I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which astounded me with mind-boggling facts regarding our extraordinarily wasteful culture. Despite my eyes having been opened, I still lacked inspiration to act, or any clue of where to begin. It wasn’t until the next year when I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that I knew I had to do something, and that I had to do it immediately. That summer I feverishly planted all the seeds I could lay my hands on in our raised bed garden, and began making plans for another industrial-sized garden to go right behind it. Granted, even by the time I had built the second garden the following year, I was still terrible at growing produce. Most of it was slug-eaten, wilting, or refused to grow at all. In any case, I could easily buy fresh, local produce at my town’s farm stands, so I decided it was time for me to take a big step, and become responsible for producing something my family could eat year-round. So I got the goats.
The goats were named Aphrodite and Juniper, and were my near-constant companions for a year. In exchange for taking care of them, they gave me goat milk with which I made cheese, yogurt, and butter. I learned an awful lot about goat care, as well: don’t feed goats pine needles, because these cause miscarriages. Goats need at least one other companion to live with, they get quite as lonely as humans. Goats do not actually eat everything, they are just very curious. Etc. It was a wonderful, yet often frustrating experience; balancing the goats with my school workload, college and scholarship applications, and time with friends was very difficult. And somehow I kept the goats, and the garden, because I recognized that there was more to my activities than just taking care of my own carbon footprint.
I pursued these projects of course to minimize my own and my family’s waste footprints, but I also had another intention with all these homesteading adventures. I wanted to prove to my neighbors, my friends, and my acquaintances that if an average high-school girl from suburbia can make material sacrifices and take some time out of her life for the sake of the environment’s health, then so could they. I wanted to show that my hard work was not fruitless, antiquated, or based on utopian fantasies, but aimed towards achieving a very real and important goal: to reduce my own consumption, and therefore pave the way for others to do the same. This blog will follow the progress of my and my friend Roger’s next conspicuous non-consumption endeavour, as we continue to show that everyone can be the part of the solution, if they try.
Thinking back, I can trace the beginnings of my environmentalism to a summer reading assignment in 8th grade. Of course, I had learned to deeply respect nature during four childhood summers spent at a wilderness camp, but I was not actually aware that it was in any immediate danger. The summer of 8th grade I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which astounded me with mind-boggling facts regarding our extraordinarily wasteful culture. Despite my eyes having been opened, I still lacked inspiration to act, or any clue of where to begin. It wasn’t until the next year when I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that I knew I had to do something, and that I had to do it immediately. That summer I feverishly planted all the seeds I could lay my hands on in our raised bed garden, and began making plans for another industrial-sized garden to go right behind it. Granted, even by the time I had built the second garden the following year, I was still terrible at growing produce. Most of it was slug-eaten, wilting, or refused to grow at all. In any case, I could easily buy fresh, local produce at my town’s farm stands, so I decided it was time for me to take a big step, and become responsible for producing something my family could eat year-round. So I got the goats.
The goats were named Aphrodite and Juniper, and were my near-constant companions for a year. In exchange for taking care of them, they gave me goat milk with which I made cheese, yogurt, and butter. I learned an awful lot about goat care, as well: don’t feed goats pine needles, because these cause miscarriages. Goats need at least one other companion to live with, they get quite as lonely as humans. Goats do not actually eat everything, they are just very curious. Etc. It was a wonderful, yet often frustrating experience; balancing the goats with my school workload, college and scholarship applications, and time with friends was very difficult. And somehow I kept the goats, and the garden, because I recognized that there was more to my activities than just taking care of my own carbon footprint.
I pursued these projects of course to minimize my own and my family’s waste footprints, but I also had another intention with all these homesteading adventures. I wanted to prove to my neighbors, my friends, and my acquaintances that if an average high-school girl from suburbia can make material sacrifices and take some time out of her life for the sake of the environment’s health, then so could they. I wanted to show that my hard work was not fruitless, antiquated, or based on utopian fantasies, but aimed towards achieving a very real and important goal: to reduce my own consumption, and therefore pave the way for others to do the same. This blog will follow the progress of my and my friend Roger’s next conspicuous non-consumption endeavour, as we continue to show that everyone can be the part of the solution, if they try.
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