Note from Kathie: You do not have to be a Mother Theresa, a Martin Luther King Jr., a Gandhi, or a Nelson Mandela to make the world a better place and help preserve the planet. To inspire you, we will continue with our series of portraits on less well known people around the country, maybe right in your backyard, who are portraits in moral engagement. Here is one.
Guest Author Teddy Malley
I move along my own path, striving to honor the Earth and the future generations of all beings who would call it home. I live off grid, run my truck on waste vegetable oil, plant gardens and orchards, and in general try to figure out how to not give my money to the fossil fuel companies and not pay federal taxes.
I see it this way: We can hope for the people in power to listen and do the right thing or we can all work together to learn how to live without being completely dependent on them. If we don’t give them our money, they will not have any power.
This position is simple, but it is also incredibly complex, as it means that we need to majorly re-vamp our ways of providing for our basic needs like food, water, and shelter. That is what independence and dependence really boil down to.
As Permaculture guru Bill Mollison once said “The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack…”
Bill McKibben does an excellent job of pointing out where we are headed in a culture madly bent on growth and super short on maintenance. This tends to be just as true on an individual level as a cultural one. Learning to take care of stuff and not lose it, break it, or throw it away is one of the things I find most challenging in my own quest to take responsibility for my own life.
For me, I like to think mostly about what I can do as an individual and not worry too much about Donald Trump. It is every little decision that each and every person on the planet makes every day that will determine our fate. A REALLY great book – The Message from Forever– by Marlo Morgan, has helped me to stay positive in what has been in many ways a trying year.
It is time for all of us to step up and learn to do for ourselves or we are going to be in for a major let down when we learn how expendable we are in the minds of those in power. God bless the child that’s got its own.
Teddy Malley bio:
I had my first garden as an environmental science student at the University of Vermont. Beginner’s luck with that garden led me to a self-designed major in “Permaculture Community Building” at UMASS Amherst. There I started a student-run community garden called the Gardenshare Project, where students are now harvesting fruit from trees we planted over a decade ago and continue to work the gardens. I am now pursuing my dreams of Permaculture Community Building and Homesteading in Carson, NM, where I live off grid in a passive solar strawbale house and try to live and grow food in the high mountain desert from water catchment of our 12″ annual rainfall.
