What is Sustainable Living?

Simply put, "sustainable living" means using no more than your fair share of the world's resources. However, it often overlaps heavily with the concepts of organic gardening and self-sufficiency. Most of the time when I use the phrase "sustainable living", I mean by that an entire way of thinking that encompasses sustainable living, organic gardening, and self-sufficiency. Sometimes I use "life philosophy" to mean all three elements, as well.

Sustainable Living, Organic Gardening, or Self-Sufficiency?

What's the difference? Well, quite a lot, really, but the three terms are often used interchangeably. The actual definitions, as I percieve them, are below. Of course, these three terms are going to mean different things to different people! But here's how I see them.

Sustainable Living

As stated earlier, sustainable living means using no more than your fair share of the world's resources. We may complain about the economy and the jobless rate and the stock market, but let's face it, we have it pretty good here. If everyone in the world tried to live the way the average American does, things would just collapse. The world doesn't have enough resources to keep up (sustain) our American lifestyles for all its inhabitants. We're seeing a little of this now as China's standard of living starts approaching America's. For example, more people in China have started owning more and bigger cars. Their resulting need for more oil is one of the things driving the current gas prices at our pumps here in America. There simply isn't enough oil for us all to drive SUVs and Hummers; therefore, driving large vehicles isn't living sustainably. (One could ask whether driving any gasoline-powered vehicle is really sustainable, but that's a topic for an entirely different article.)

Organic Gardening

At its simplest, organic gardening means growing plants without using chemical fertilizers and without using pesticides or herbicides. It can also encompass things like rotating crops so the soil doesn't get depleted, planting nitrogen-producing crops like beans and peanuts in with nitrogen-consuming crops like corn, and choosing varieties suited to local growing conditions; not planting things that need daily watering in areas that regularly get month-long droughts, for example.

Self-Sufficiency

Not relying on the system. Could you survive, at your current standard of living, if the electric and gas companies suddenly shut down, the supermarkets closed, and the entire American economy went belly-up? The person who is self-sufficient could. This is my favorite part of our life philosophy, and the part we're working hardest at attaining. We don't grow all our own food yet, but we grow a good part of it. We don't produce our own energy yet, but we're saving for a solar collector. It's delightful to see how much we can make (and make do!) for ourselves.

What Does Sustainable Living Look Like to Us?

All of these terms are going to mean slightly different things to different people. So what do they mean to us? What are we doing that gives us the right to claim all these lovely-sounding words? What will our place and our way of life look like when we can finally look around and say, "We're self-sufficient"?

Where We Are

We've already got organic gardening down pat. We use no chemical pesticides or herbicides, and the only fertilizer we use comes from mucking out our chicken coops. (It works wonderfully well, I might add.) Our garden is still small, though, and even with the miracle of chicken manure fertilizer, we're only producing about two out of fourteen meals per week. (I know, I know. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and all that, but we just never seem to get around to it....) We have chickens, nine hens and three roosters (in three separate flocks), who give us about 2 or 3 eggs per day, not to mention the brown gold to put on our garden.

Where We Hope to Be

Rome wasn't built in a day, as I'm constantly having to remind myself. But there are so many things we want to do! We hope to have a working photovoltaic system/solar collector soon, and to produce most of our own food, too, obviously excluding things like rice and flour and sugar and other things that just aren't practical to grow in a small garden.

2007: Our Sabbath Year

In the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelites that every seventh year was to be a sabbath for the land; they were to let it lie fallow, and not plant any crops on it for that year. Now, we know that the Old Testament laws no longer apply to us as regards salvation, but I think you'll find that the God who made the universe knows better than anyone else what to do in order to keep it healthy. We give our land it's seventh-year Sabbath, not because we have to, but because it's good for it.

As a related item of note, this Sabbath year (which started August 9, 2006, for anyone who's interested) will be our second seventh year on the land. Who would have thought, fourteen years ago, that this family who had never spent more than two or three years in any one spot (I think our average was probably about ten months!) would be blessed with a piece of land of their own and would stay there fourteen years-- and counting!