Urban Sustainability

How do you compromise sustainability when living in an urban setting? I have been facing moral dilemmas every day since I moved back. I can't get raw milk in the city so I settle for expensive organic milk purchased at the co-op. I have been composting despite not yet discovering where I will bring the compost when it is full. I have been eating an incredible amount of non-local guacamole, which i feel is justified by the fact that it will get thrown out from the bakery if I don't take it to a good home. I miss farming desperately - I went up to Methuen to help out with some gleaning last week. A farm up there donated 30,000 heads of lettuce to the food bank and they had to come up with volunteers to harvest it. We spent the morning cutting lettuce into laundry baskets, dumping them onto a tarp and then hoisting the tarp and throwing the rest into the back of a pickup truck to drive it to another farm where they were delivering the pallets and boxes to ship it all into the city. The soil out here is incredibly sandy compared to western Mass, the fields are flat and the sprawl has surrounded the land, but it is still a joy to be outside in these late fall days, getting my hands in the soil and contributing to one part of the growth cycle.



I've started working at the bakery (www.canto6bakery.com) and learned how to make lattes, cappuchinos, sandwiches and how to run the register. I've been back to work on target hunger meetings in western mass and I've been down to Maryland to wait with my mom in doctors' offices. All the while i've been reading Wendell Berry's "The Unsettling of America", bell hooks' "Belonging" and Helen Nearing's "Loving and Leaving the Good Life". All of them are pointing me towards the land, towards overcoming the fear of change and the lack of security of farm life and going for it. I often think of my personal goalsetting through the question "what would i regret NOT doing years down the line?" I am likely to regret decisions I make through fear or lack of confidence in my abilities. I am likely to regret taking the easy road. If I go boldly in the direction of my dreams, I don't think I will regret it, even if my dreams change and I learn that I am actually supposed to be moving in another direction. We'll see where those dreams take me next...