Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

In Alaska the three-day Memorial Day weekend is traditionally planting time.  By the end of May the soil has thawed and those plants that thrive in the ground can be planted.  We have been right on time this year, I suppose.  Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and we got most of our planting done, and I am thrilled.  It feels almost like the first harvest, though we have only just planted.  It’s just that it took a lot to get this year’s planting in, and we did it! In fact, we have been working hard for a long time to prepare for this month’s planting.  Last June a number of our friends and acquaintances helped organize the Alaska Food Challenge .  The idea was to participate as little as possible in the inefficiencies that go along with getting most food in Alaska.  Participants in the Alaska Food Challenge pledged either to avoid all food that is not produced in Alaska (only a few were quite that hard core), or to take specific meas...

When it comes to raising one’s own food there are certain times of the year that require more time and effort than others.   This is especially true in Alaska, because our winters are so long, and winter restricts so much outdoor activity.   So, springtime and early summer are busy times at our bioshelter home—and May is extra-busy. One of our goals in the bioshelter has been to try-out strategies to become more self-sufficient and less a part of the consumer culture.   Recently, this has meant focusing on how to produce more of our food, either through hunting and fishing or through small-scale gardening.   Now is the gardening season, so we are at it. The big task this week has been filling the garden boxes on our garage roof-deck.   This has been a bigger project than some might think, since it began last year with the harvesting of our own cottonwood trees, then continued by eventually finding a friend to mill the trees into lumber, then ...

Yesterday really felt strange to me.   On the one hand it was a great afternoon to be outside.   The snow is gone, the ground is drying out, and the mosquitoes are not biting…much.   I found myself reveling in the work of cutting out some dead wood and making room for the new growth we are planning this year.   I almost never get to do brush-work when there is no snow and no mosquitoes.   What a day! On the other hand, I was doing this work with my Smith-and-Wesson .44 magnum handgun hanging on my hip.   You see, the day before yesterday our neighbor was attacked by an 800 lb grizzly bear .   The bears are particularly hungry this time of year, given that they haven’t had much to eat in six months, and that the salmon won’t be in our river for another six weeks.   The bear chased our neighbor down, clawed him up a bit and the, mercifully, left him alone.   As I enjoyed being outside preparing ground for permaculture-style ga...

It is April 6, Good Friday 2012, and it is snowing outside. I am watering the small pepper and tomato plants that have just managed to peek their newborn heads up out of the soil. It seems incongruous—somehow not right—to nurture new life on the day we commemorate the sacrifice and death of the Savior. And it is really snowing outside. It is just plain counterintuitive to put effort into raising up new life on a day of loss—such suffering, pain and death. It is also counterintuitive to plant and water in a snowstorm. I know, of co urse, that life follows a cycle of seasons. There are seasons of building up a new idea and out of a growing sense of visions and conviction; seasons for watching as all the potential moves toward great fruitfulness—and doing the weeding and pruning necessary for even greater fruitfulness; seasons for harvesting and celebrating the plenty; and seasons for watching the old plants wither and fade away. I hate the season of death. Maybe ...

I promised to write a blog out of my understanding that the biblical witness desc ribes human beings as the youngest members in the Creation Family Tree. This is one way of understanding both our relationship with God’s creation and our responsibility to it. In earlier blog posts I already described why I think that is so ( here and here ). I suggested that it truly is appropriate to treat Genesis 1:1-2:4 (the six days of creation, plus the Sabbath) as a genealogy. Further, I pointed out that the Bible calls on the younger members of the family to honor and respect the older generations of the family. What my colleagues have asked me to do now is to spell out some examples of why I think we are failing in our task to honor and respect the older generations. As I have thought about it, I realize that I can’t cover it in one blog entry. How do we engage in caring for nature-as-our-elders in a way that will truly make a difference today? There are over seven billion pe...

Last week we held another One People, One Earth public forum, but in Juneau this time. For those who don’t remember what that is about, I described our Anchorage meeting in my November blog entries, and you can see a synopsis here. I will say here that the One People, One Earth event is an interdisciplinary public panel focused on the moral urgency of dealing with the issues behind climate change and ocean acidification. It includes scientists from the University of Alaska, traditional Alaska Native elders from three tribes, and religious leaders from the Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic faiths. There were a couple of differences this time compared the OPOE forums in Fairbanks and Anchorage. One difference was that a completely separate event was held at Northern Light United Church, just for the religious leaders to speak. Participating once again were Fr. Thomas Weise (Roman Catholic), Imam Ataur Chowdhury (Muslim) and myself (Protestant). How...

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.” John 1:9 There is great wisdom in placing the Christmas celebration at the darkest time of the calendar year. If we think of God as the Maker of all that is good—as the source (the true light) of the light that we find in our dark world—and if we think of Jesus as that source bearing light to us, then putting the celebration of Jesus’ birth in the darkest season is a true inspiration. Most of my adult life has been about living in ways that, in some small way, engage what we might call the “darkness” of human existence. Most recently, Cindee and I have especially worked to lift up the plight of our planet. Our planet’s ability to sustain living systems is suffering under the weight of too large a human population. More specifically, the planet suffers from too many people living in ways that are fouling the habitat for most of earth’s other creatures. This is why we bought our biosh...