The Simple Revolution

This past week I spent spring break in Sacramento working with an organization that is trying to ignite a revolution. It is a revolution that affects politics, culture, and our sense of community, and it takes us back to our roots. I’m talking about the local food revolution, which is picking up in cities across the nation, but particularly on the Pacific coast. Their ideas are radical, but far from new, and challenge the core values of what America has become, while speaking to our innermost humanity.

Ubuntu Green was founded last year, and has already received funding to carry out their mission of localizing food production. Working in low-income areas, they provide the service of building free home gardens for anyone who is willing to accept. Their plan is simple: target specific neighborhoods, teaching the skills needed to grow food, encourage inter-community dialogue to spread the knowledge, and finally to create a sustainable source of fruits, vegetables, and herbs that bypass the corporate food structure. They’re bringing it back home in the most basic sense, and they’re having fun doing it too.

The staff of Ubuntu is filled with energy, probably because they understand the importance of what they are hoping to accomplish. There is an easy charm in them that comes from working with the growing process that is hard to describe. I guess you could say they’re down to earth, literally. This is still a young organization, but already they have made an impact on their community. This revolution can only happen at local levels, and can be fueled by increased social communication technology and word of mouth. Ubuntu is hopefully the first of many like it, paving the way to deconstruct the food production mess we have gotten ourselves in over the last 60 years.

This highlights something seriously wrong with our culture. With more money than any other country (well, not anymore) and the best self-proclaimed inventiveness of any people, we still have to be encouraged to take care of our land and get to know our neighbors. Our culture promotes chasing high-end salaries and vacationing in third-world countries, but for how long can that really sustain happiness? Ubuntu showed me that taking care of the simple things is the quickest way to boost self-esteem and find meaning in life. Instead of chasing fantasy narratives of corporate escalation, take care of the land you live on and meet the people who live around you. There is nothing more important that being a good human being. Everything else is secondary.

-Sean McEvoy

A Mushroom Miracle

As a species we have accomplished many wonderful things. From art, to exploration, to invention, we are curious and able to manipulate our environment. However, we have also made large mistakes on our journey to the present, some out of will, and some out of ignorance. the production of Styrofoam falls under the latter category. This product has been useful in many areas of human life, however its consequences have not been thoroughly thought out. Just because we can make a poisonous, expensive, and non-biodegradable substance, does that mean we should?
Styrofoam takes up about 25% of all landfills, making it the number one perpetrator of solid pollution. The reason is that it has such a short life of use, and is produced at a tremendous rate. It serves its purpose of boxing in a T.V. or refrigerator, and then becomes trash. In water, Styrofoam breaks down so that it is impossible to clean up and hazardous for marine life. On land or sea, a piece of Styrofoam has never done any good to any organism. Even if Styrofoam were easily and safely disposable, this would still be a problem. It takes 1.5 lts of petroleum to produce a square foot of the material, and using such a precious resource for such a wasteful material simply does not make sense. From start to finish Styrofoam is a bad idea, but we clearly have a use for it, so what are we to do?
A company called Ecovative Design has invented a contender to the Styrofoam institution. Their new product is called Mycrobond, and it is made up of mycelium, which is the root structure of mushrooms. Mycrobond assembles itself using food waste such as rice stalks and cornhusks. Once molds are set, roots are placed inside and left in a dark room for 3 days, after which the product is ready for use. There are absolutely no byproducts and when Mycrobond’s use is done it can be crushed onto any ground and will actually improve the quality of the soil. Instead of tossing waste into a bin to be picked up, imagine using used packaging products on potted plants, a home garden, or anywhere things grow. Mycrobond is cheap, easy to produce and has many uses, from acoustics to insulation. Mycrobond could be the healthy plastic of the future, used for more things than we can imagine today.
But this one victory in sustainable living practices is just that, one victory. Although Mycrobond has the potential to change many production markets, it is part of the larger concept of redeveloping what we think we have already developed. As individual consumers we need to support products that are zero waste, and with each purchase we cast our vote. The goals of this century are not the same as those of the past, and the culture of over consumption and disposable living are ending whether we like it or not. This is not something to be detested, but embraced as we have a last opportunity to reconnect with the millions of organisms that have made our existence possible. We need to stop thinking of our environment as a separate entity that we can abuse endlessly, and rather recognize that our species and the planet are one, the only difference between us is that one can live without the other.

-Sean M.