Wendell Berry's Rule #11

As always, with thanks to visionary writer, Wendell Berry who wrote these provocative "Rules for a Sustainable Community" that are presented here as excerpted from the poster of the "Rules" published by Yes! Magazine:


"Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, teaching its children."

Should we be looking more deeply at our how we "clean" ourselves?  There is more to this than we might think at first glance.  This could relate to personal hygiene and the products we use and their effect on local water.  It could relate to how we clean our clothes and homes, with similar concerns.

Also, as a community, how do we clean our roads, public buildings and dispose of waste?  Should we assess the waste stream leaving our town or neighborhood and develop better ways of re-using the discarded materials in local manufacturing or soil building? 

As an example, every week my husband and I bring home as much discarded cardboard, and sometimes thick wads of discarded newspaper, as we can handle from the local "dump" (actually a waste transfer station).  We strip off the plastic packing tape or staples and use the cardboard or newspaper as mulch to smother areas of ground we want to convert to fertile food growing areas.  Over the cardboard we spread leaves, hay, grass clippings or other organic material which hides the cardboard and speeds up the soil building process at the same time.  Since we are farming on shallow soils over bedrock with lots of loose rocks and stones, this process allows us to easily and cheaply develop fertile soils in which we grow most of our fruits and vegetables, all of our flowers and herbs, and now mushrooms too, for the whole year.

Even where the soil is naturally good, it needs to be replenished with rotted organic matter in order to maintain fertility and avoid erosion.  A regular compost pile is a good thing to do as well, but most households cannot make the quantity of compost needed to produce large amounts of edibles on a regular basis.

Mulching the soil has other benefits too.  Mulch keeps the soil moist, maintains a more even temperature and smothers weeds.

If everyone in our community would do this one thing - using the waste cardboard and newspaper, our community would be cleaner, require fewer truckloads of waste to be transported "somewhere else" and would be on the path to future food security by building healthy soils.  Teaching our children these basic skills; growing surplus food to feed older citizens who may not have access to fresh grown produce of their own, fulfills other aspects of Mr. Berry's Rule #11.  I am sure there are many other examples that people can think of.

If readers of this blog can think of other ideas, please share them in the comments area of my blog.  This is a challenge to all of you out there!  Go for it.

This is just one example of a cleaner community.