Koanga Institute

All this is blowing my mind. Learning about Good magazine and all the million inspiring connections and thoughts in there, the earthy growth from worm farming over time, spiritual growth of community I've gotten from being part of the Kohanga Reo, recently finding the book on native Cherokee teaching (referred from my friend Wayne from taking the bus) about "touching" life, and now just looking at the Koanga Gardens website. I feel like I am trying to grow and open up, but am very closed compared to what I could be. Very unearthy, but trying to let it in.

(Links posted here, and also on the sidebar.)

Koanga Gardens Centre for Sustainable Living (and they sell plants and seeds in their original variety):
http://www.koanga.co.nz/

The original institute, started by Kay Baxter:
http://www.koanga.org.nz/

Good magazine made me want to cry when I first found it, and with Koanga Gardens I am having the same feeling. They run courses for self-sustainability and eco-villages, and are fighting this fight.


Here is a little blog from my tiny world, of just having learned to worm farm!

Small Thoughts on Controlling Nature

One of the main reasons I wanted to start this blogs is that I am one of those people that is always thinking about life, and I wanted to record these observations that one makes from life experience.

I am only going to be able to remember these thoughts if I write them down as I think them.

"Man-made"
The desire men have to control nature is foolish, to take ownership of human invention, and to have an ego about the things we build or create. It is rooted in our animal self which drives our behaviour. How can we determine that what we create is better than nature, or more foolish still, independent of nature? We are a product of nature ourselves, grown and born from the womb. We are not separate, and any pattern we use or utilize-- any power we utilize, is a power of nature.

Advertising

My young son Luke watching TV passively


I just ran into a great quote that expresses what I always felt about advertising:

"Societies need to consider the powerful impact of advertising on young children, for whom all information has an educational and formative impact. Children constitute an important market for consumer products, but society has a responsibility to educate them, not exploit them."

--United Nations Development Program

This was quoted in a paper called "See Change: Learning and education for sustainability" [Jan 2004 by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment], which I had picked up at the Kaipatiki ecological project a long time ago but hadn't had the focus to read it until now. Packing away thing, I opened it up, thinking of this, and saw this quote. The material in it is perfect for what I need to learn right now. It is further study in depth on all the issues that concern my mind, every waking moment. Advertising, people's awareness, this sleep humanity is in right now-- compared to how we have been in the past. It is so lovely to see something spelled out which previously felt like a secret underlying truth which no-one else saw.

The full report is at here.

And here is the cut-and-pasted section on Marketing and Advertising-- how it shapes our psyches (especially young psyches). It is my personal view that we need to create a wall or protective barrier by conscious choice, and help our children learn how to do so as well-- as in turning off the tv most of the time. Here is the fabulous report chunk (with only the footnote numbers deleted due to their decontextualization on my blog):




5.4 Marketing and advertising

Marketing explicitly aims to influence people. It involves planning the conception, pricing, promotion and spread of goods, services and ideas. It is often used by businesses to create awareness of, and desire for, their brands and products. However, marketing techniques are also used by many non-commercial organisations and government agencies to sell their messages to the public. Tools of marketing include market research, advertising and public relations.

Market research is used to understand the needs, wants, desires and values of people. Marketers often claim that they are merely finding out what people want and matching this with what they have to offer.

This is because most marketing is based on the assumption that it exists “(1) to discover the needs and wants of prospective customers and (2) to satisfy them”. In reality, many organisations also begin with what they want to sell and try to develop a market to suit.

A major part of marketing is advertising. Advertisements come in many different forms, “from the tiniest classified newspaper advertisement to a TV spot, from a small leaflet to a massive outdoor sign, from a message on the Internet to a letter delivered to one’s door, or a sponsored cultural or sporting event”.

Advertisers assert that they are providing information to consumers to enable
them to make informed decisions. Simple forms of advertising, such as classifieds, may meet this goal. But the most pervasive forms of modern advertising, especially those used on television, aim to influence and persuade people instead of informing them. Advertisers often play on people’s emotions to build connections between products, brands and people (see also section 6.5).

Advertising long ago discarded the practice of selling a product on the merits of its useful features. Modern marketing builds symbolic associations between the product and the psychological states of potential consumers, sometimes targeting known feelings ... and sometimes creating a sense of inadequacy in order to remedy it with the product.

Advertisements do not make people buy things, but they are incredibly influential in shaping human behaviour. Marketers use techniques that they have learned from psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology to shape consumer preferences. In doing so, they often help to socialise people as willing and wanting consumers. As an example, think about the marketing of four wheel drive ‘sports utility vehicles’ (SUVs) in New Zealand. These vehicles were initially used almost exclusively by farmers and commercial operators such as builders. Marketing has been used to successfully sell them as ‘urban safari vehicles’, playing on symbolic associations that have been fostered and developed in people. It is not their useful features that are marketed. Who wants to buy a vehicle that is generally more dangerous, polluting, difficult to park, and more expensive to run than the average car? It is their image as masculine and adventurous off-roading objects of desire that is marketed, even though they seldom leave the sanctuary of urban streets. The irony is that the beauty of New Zealand’s environment is often used to market these vehicles. There are countless shots on television screens and in the print media of SUVs doing damage to dunes, streams and riverbeds. Similarly, images of New Zealand’s 'clean and green’ environment are often used by many businesses to brand and sell their products to the world.

Increasingly, advertisers are targeting children to shape consumption preferences early in life and to take advantage of the growing amount of money that people are spending on children. For example, American children between four and 12 years old spend over $24 billion in direct purchases and influence another $188 billion in family household purchases. An average ten-year old in America has now been socialised to learn 300-400 different brands. In Britain, characters from a Japanese card trading game called Pokemon are far more recognisable to the average eight-year-old than animals and plants. There are therefore growing concerns about the impacts of advertising and marketing on children. Societies need to consider the powerful impact of advertising on young children, for whom all information has an educational and formative impact. Children constitute an important market for consumer products, but society has a responsibility to educate them, not exploit them.
– United Nations Development Programme

To reduce children’s exposure to marketing, countries such as Denmark, Greece, Belgium restrict advertising to children. Sweden and Norway totally ban it.

The Swedish government believes that “children have the right to safe zones” and that advertising can compromise their safety and well-being. This sentiment is strongly supported by the majority of people in Sweden, as well as by their national association for advertising agencies.

Marketing and advertising to children is permitted in New Zealand, although there are voluntary codes of practice in the advertising industry to moderate some of its effects. While there is little research on this issue, a recent survey suggests that there are major concerns among parents about the levels of advertising to children on television. Among those surveyed, there were strong feelings that television encourages children to want products they do not need. There was also a strong sentiment that advertising should not be regulated by the same people who sell products to children.

The current framework for advertising in New Zealand is mostly based on self-regulation by industry. This framework, and how it relates to the environment, is
examined in a background paper to this report.45 There is a code of practice for product claims related to the environment, but there is no code for how the environment is portrayed in advertisements. There is also a lack of consideration
given to the effects that saturation advertising can have on people. This is despite the fact that advertising expenditure in New Zealand, as a proportion of GDP, is one of the highest in the world. New Zealand ranked third in the world for advertising expenditure in 1996, and the amount of money spent on advertising has steadily increased since then. In 2002 it reached $1.5 billion per year and in 2003 it was predicted to exceed $1.7 billion. What sort of culture is all this advertising helping to create?

As noted above, advertising is just one tool of marketing. Marketers use a variety of techniques, such as product placements in movies and using celebrities and role models to shape consumer desires. Public relations skills are also used by businesses, government agencies and non-governmental organisations to ‘spin’ their stories and manage their images in the media. Public relations usually involves intensifying (playing up) some messages and downplaying others that could be detrimental to an organisation’s reputation. There is a growing awareness among the public about the ‘greenwashing’ that many organisations use to shape their environmental image. This may undermine the effectiveness of some public relations skills, while contributing to a fundamental lack of trust in big business and government to be open and honest about sustainability.

It is important to keep in mind that marketing techniques are not just used by commercial enterprises. For example, government is showing a growing willingness to use social marketing to achieve outcomes related to sustainability (see section 4.1). It has also been suggested that ‘demarketing’ can be used to encourage people to reduce their consumption of some goods or services.

There is a major potential to market the messages of sustainability, although it is important to consider that social marketing is very expensive. It is also important to question how effective government agencies can be at getting their messages across when people are already swamped by so many other marketing messages in the commercial media. In some areas, such as road safety, there is good evidence that social marketing can be very effective.

However, social marketing campaigns need to be carefully researched, planned and organised as well as well-financed to capture people’s attention, and to avoid switching people off.

ENDQUOTE

As you can see from the photo of Luke above, and know from personal experience of course, watching TV is a very passive experience. I would just like to add one more note to the wonderfully well researched think-piece above-- as I learned in university communications studies, Marshall MacLuhan's "medium is the message" theory-- perhaps the actual message is less important in forming an impression on our minds than the technology of the message. My personal intuition confirms this as well, in the case of television, I can feel the harm to my children is more the passivity of watching tv than what is actually on TV. They aren't doing something, living, doing something challenging-- they are passively being entertained; and that's a message that should more often than not-- be avoided.

Keeping your knife-edge sharp

My first sharp knife
I've had some knives my father gave me for the past 5 years.

He was always a believer in keeping knives razor sharp. He bought good knives with good steel that would hold an edge, and would grind them by hand regularly with a block stone, and also a leather stroppy thing for the finest edge. I grew up with our knives always kept razor sharp, and you had to be careful after he had just sharpened them or you would cut yourself. Knives were respected in our house, always wiped off and put back on the knife rack and thrown in to be washed with the dishes. When I grew up and moved out, and realized how differently everyone lived, and the discipline that my parents had that not everyone had, I saw that most people didn't sharpen their knives. They kept many cheap tin knives in the cutlery drawer, and cutting anything was a frustrating struggle.

Anyways, back to my knives. They became dull. I didn't have the discipline yet to sharpen them regularly, but I respected them, and held onto them, and bought a stone block. Over time before my life became less chaotic I lost the small one, my husband ruined the big one, but I managed to save one of my father's gifts and the sharpening block. Just recently, I decided to sharpen my putty knife with the block while renovating. Then, if finally happened! I was sick of not being able to cut into a squash for dinner, and I actually sat down, and started grinding the edge of my last good knife. I had finally arrived at a state where I left perfectionism behind enough (waiting for the perfect time to do something perfectly had kept me from achieving so often), and also had grown enough personal discipline to just do things.

Starting small with my own knife

I looked closely at the edge as I went along. I remembered how he had taught me to do it (I just hadn't had very much practice) about the degree of the angle. It was exciting to actually achieve a sharp edge like my father's after doing it for a few minutes. I also had fond memories of him sitting in the kitchen, and grinding knives, so I enjoyed doing the same thing, so far now from home. I also had the understanding now of how early man had made their first sharp edge from stone from watching the Human Journey documentary, which I could connect to this current activity-- I really respected the ability to maintain my own tool.

We can't go backwards guys! We've come so far, for so long, to get our sharp edge, to go back due to laziness to use factory turned-out dull crappy tools our whole lives.

Now I am going to keep my one knife sharp for a start, and over time, buy more good knives. And I hope my habits will leave a strong impression in my children, as my father's did in me.

By the way, that squash cut like a dream.

P.S. (Added Feb 2011.) Something else, it really works to actually keep looking at the edge to see how sharp it is. There is basically a hill on either side of the point, and you are sanding away, or grinding it away, to create the point. You have to wear away the bump until you've met on both sides. You can sand at a more flat angle as you go.

The whole "looking" and sensing thing - is something that our ancestors did, all the time. Now I am more connected than before, that is what I do, and now I can do it as well as I want. Sensing your materials...

My dad also smears vegetable oil on his cutting boards and cures them in the sun to create a food-friendly varnish.

3 Steps

STEP 1. Baby Steps

You may not be able to find the time to change your the new habits right away (e.g. becoming environmentally sustainable. Just make little progresses, grasping onto each on for dear life, until you get stronger to keep moving forward. When you are strong, and we underestimate ourselves, it will be easy! We are learning new skills.

A first great step in becoming more responsible to the earth, or your environment, is to start taking cloth bags. You'll be amazed by how often they are used, when you stop taking them. And even this is really hard at first!

Right now I am holding on for dear life for motivation to make a small change - to get my lazy self to make yogourt instead of buying it. I know how to do it—- my Dad even made me a version of his homemade using a lightbulb in a metal container setup to keep heat going, but for now I buy yogourt in bulk size, and in a cardboard millk-type carton, and flavour it myself and pour it into reusable lunch containers. That's something! And then it will be easier to go to the yogourt-making habit.



STEP 2. Know History

History makes you stronger: knowing that people once lived differently, and how strong we can be.

I grew up with a mother that loved history. She also researched my ancestors' stories, and told us stories as she discovered them. It was very special and positive - I knew what I was capable of as a person because I knew my own people had been strong.

It also helps to be aware of our place in history. It puts our selfish modern world into perspective.


STEP 3. You will be blessed.
I discovered after having a terribly difficult time-- and I would recommend it to anyone, you really learn alot-- that it is really important to Listen to the world around you. But not just with your ears, with your spirit.

Listen to what you really know in your heart is true, even if it's hard to accept at the time. (Because, sometimes we know the true direction is uphill, at first.) But something neat is-- that we can ask ourselves if we are doing in our life what we believe in, if we are going the right way, and we will hear the answer. Am I really happy doing this? Or, is this relationship working?

In the end all these little steps turn into blessings. The steps weren't made for this reason, but of course, you will have more strength and discipline from it that will be for your benefit. Also, you will gain a creative and resourcefulness edge, as you connect to the materials, and the world, around you. For real.

Huge worms found in our little piece of earth!

Worms are cool.

That's what I was thinking yesterday, feeling ill after working on the computer, rushing around the house or out, eating, resting, doing chores but still feeling weak. I finally had to get out and do something earthy.

I was going to walk to the dairy to get some cell phone time, rush, rush, acquire, acquire, but got tripped up by a weed on the way. My neighbour-- we share this house, three units of a building, she was really good and pulled the weeds out of a part of our garden, a wedge shaped part on the side of our driveway. I saw a weed she had missed. Then, my fingers in the dirt trying to get it out, I had to go get a stick or something to get the roots out. When I got the root out and had a metal tool in my hand which was useful, I noticed that none of the roots of the weeds had been pulled out. I could feel that the roots needed to be pulled. The earth drew me in, and after a bit, I was pulled in by the earth, and pulling out roots, churning up the dirt, and freeing it from this horrible plastic layer some misguided soul had put in years ago. I was lifting and pulling up a root-twined layer of earth like a carpet, as the plastic had made a barrier, roots in the ground white below-- somehow got most of it out, and then churned it all up, free to breathe. AND I found these ginormous earthworms, 10 inches long and very fat, that lived large enough to churn through that soil. My little children had come home from school, and right into the house to the TV. But for once I wasn't needing that sickly babysitter, and I forced them to come out with me, little children, similar to the white starved roots that I found under my plastic layer. COME! I yelled. COME LOOK! Dubious, they eventually came, and they loved it. Soon Troy was holding 5 huge earthworms. Luke was too scared, he kept saying

"look, a worm"

"a worm"...with with the voice of the young child whose mouth is new to making those sounds. He was frightened to touch them, once calling them "-nake baby" (he can't say s's). But fascinated to watch them as I kept finding them and throwing them over to him to see.

It was great. I felt really well after that.

Worm trying to crawl back into the soil, a good symbol for us!

The Human Journey - Australian TV series (Beyond Productions)

In New Zealand: "Government plays down plans to mine DOC (Department of Conservation) land." (Click on link to read the article.) Coal mining no less! We just got a new government in (National), who are trying to make a quick buck, same thinking as the last few thousand "enlightened" years of our history.

In less recent news, Indonesia's forests are disappearing to meet the world's demand for palm oil-- as the forests are converted to palm oil farms at an alarming rate. These forests are the habitat for the orangutan, who are rapidly becoming extinct. (To read more about this, click
here.

What’s wrong with the world (what is part of the unhealthy imbalance) is people’s expectations are too high—to live without skill, in comfort, in ease— equals being wasteful with resources. There is a social stigma against roughing it nowadays—you are respected for being someone who has harnessed so many resources that you don’t have to slave away like a labourer. But in my rise of awareness, I now respect people more who are careful, fastidious, and skillful with resources. They do use things for as long as possible. Far from being a poor, desperate act, this is the act of love and respect for the resources of Mother Earth. If we listen, with our spirits, we will behave more in this way. (I have an image that remains now of the old Asian martial arts teacher, shuffling around, being careful, not-wasteful, but very wise. The ancient East was a very intuitively strong culture.) I now see the people that rush around in fancy cars and lit up houses as wasteful and brash—they are not listening or being careful in the world around them.

Palm Oil, a cheap oil that destroys rainforest used in almost every single common brand of soap, soap product and cosmetics, is a destructive process—orangutans will be gone very soon if we don’t do a 180 degree shift. We need to not always go for the cheapest solution out there that will make us the most money, despite it consuming and destroying the earth! We need to not be greedy. Intuitive people and cultures know, every action has a consequence. Since we have been ignoring these laws of nature for awhile in the belief that they no longer apply to us (we have gone beyond the need to do so with all our technology), we are coming to the time where we will experience the result of our behaviour of many centuries, all at once. Lucky us! Ah well, the sooner we change all we can, the more we will not leave the same legacy to our kids kids.

Photos: The Human Journey (TV series), Beyond Productions

I woke up this morning in a chilly bedroom, under many warm bed coverings, having recently watched a documentary piecing together the path and experiences of early people. I instantly got an empathy with them actually waking up in a cold cave each morning. Then they had to wake up and find food, armed only with rough stones which had been broken to a sharp point. From there on we had to conquer our world. But how many amazing experiences must they have had that were not recorded. Don’t just picture vague stereotyped cavemen, picture real people like you and I, exactly like you and I, with their emerging consciousness that we have today, staying together, doing things together, exploring and discovering things together. Perhaps one day they found an amazing caches of food, or had amazing run-ins with animals—there is so much we will never know of their experiences. I wish I did know.



The Human Journey:

Apparently, our ancestors left Africa 130,000 years ago, and displaced the Neanderthaal people-- another people who had evolved from an earlier strand and left Africa much earlier. (According to a great documentary that aired on Australian TV called "The Human Journey" by Beyond Productions.) They weren't that much more primitive than us at the time, they spoke and planned as well-- we made a mistake when we first found their bones and thought they were stooped and ape-like (the individual Neanderthaal whose bones the French scientist found actually had arthritis, and so our perception became misinformed.) We both lived at the same time, and in South Western France we made use of the many overhanging limestone cliffs for shelter. An important difference in the way of life between us and the Neanderthaal people was that they kept the same home base, not venturing as far to hunt for food-- their main prey was auroch, a sort of wild cow. We were nomadic! We made shelter and camp where the best food sources were, such as wild game (reindeer), and spawning salmon. That way we kept both old and young alive far better-- the group.

The elders were the keepers of tribal knowledge, which they passed on to the next generation. Nomadic life expanded their view of the world, and this in turn, opened up their minds.

They came to know and understand each new landscape, its plant and animal species. They learned to plan ahead and anticipate possibilities, as well as problems. Constant change encouraged flexibility and innovation.

--The Human Journey, Beyond Productions



We used our imaginations and began to do things in new ways, making amazingly sharp stone tools, trading for better stone from far away and using better techniques, and gaining a great finesse with the raw material. We used fiber, resin and sinue to attach them to wooden spears. And you know the end of the story. We grew able to think consciously. In the end, we were able to adapt to every environmental niche on the earth. Now our biggest danger is ourselves.

That history gives me inspiration to pull beyond this specialized existence we lead today. It just gives me perspective, I guess. As travelling widens the mind as we realize that different groups of people can have different values, learning about history gives me support and a perspective about choosing my lifestyle.

These are some observations I have had about my culture, in the here and now, and I do think it's important we rethink how we live, and choose to live as green and tough as we possible can. The blessings are in the responsibility to the environment, but also we become tougher and more spiritually aware as we do this. It's great.


Observation #1: Good Enough.
Good enough---- people need to accept something that is good enough. As a mother around other mothers, with our very important standards, where we teach and help each other—I have run into many mothers with extremely high standards. The sort of standards that could only be reached with modern innovations—including a high level of wastefulness (energy and physical waste). Clothes have to be washed the minute they are worn, the moisture in sandwiches preserved by plastic film wrap 5 times around, disposables are mandatory. Houses are plastered with cleaning chemicals. Cloth nappies and reusable lunch wrappers are considered “not good enough for baby”. Well, tell me this, vigilant mother. How good of a world do you want for your baby to live in?Our habits have to not lay waste to the world, or what is the point

Our standards for performance are raised so that we act as though we can’t possibly suffer something that doesn’t work as well as modern, more wasteful solutions do—such as plastic wrap vs. a plastic or cloth container, or paper bag. The food might not stay perfectly fresh, but pretty damn fresh. It’s good enough. Cloth nappies aren’t as convenient as cloth, but they work well enough, and the waste created by disposables is silly. We have to let our children experience a little dirt, and pain, and get tough. It's good for us, and good for our world.



Observation #2: Never Easy

One of the illusions we follow is that life can become easier. Life can never become easier, because the easier our lifestyle is, the weaker we get. That’s how strength works. When we do something more challenging, we get tougher. So life will never be full of ease, because we are as strong as our challenges. We aren’t going to get strong, then put on cruise control (get weaker), and then have to climb up again.

Incidentally, this is connected to the principle of human nature where we assume our labour saving devices will mean we will work less, when really what happens is we then go try to do more. The person who started this dream didn’t realize that it was in our nature never “to be satisfied.”

Dreams are motivational. Since when was it actually good for us to get what we want?A young child wants to grow up. A young person wants to achieve the world and to look perfect. The siren call of our dreams helps us—when we have the power to get exactly what we want, it is from an older instinctual drive from when we didn’t have the power we have now...

We crave security, lots of food, security in every way, but now that we can actually have it, are we proud of ourselves? And isn’t it totally hilarious that we lead a lifestyle where we drive around in cars, sit in front of computers all day, and then we have to go to a gym to keep our brains and bodies healthy? Perhaps better to get out a shovel and dig a garden to grow our veggies, and bike to work.

We can control our environment all we want, but we can’t change the way we were built. God forbid we start messing with the wiring with genetic engineering, I don’t trust humanity as a whole to keep alive goldfish...

I know this is a very long blog entry. There is something floating around in the back of my mind that I feel is important. Something about the way we've evolved, and succeeded, and about why we are not succeeding now. What is our downfall? Humanity as a group is no longer showing good long-term survival skills. (We are suddenly not choosing to live in a way that can go on for long, laying waste to, and consuming our environment.)

When we grew strong, to be the humans we still are today, we lived in small groups, and were able to flex and adapt to the land around us. We explored and tried things, and communicated what we found. I feel like our large, sedentary structure has led to herd mentality. People believe the larger group's sense that everything is alright when it's not. Our organization and tools totally change the way our culture is, who has the power to distribute knowledge, who makes decisions. Our decisions are no longer in the hands of a small group or real humans who can share the same spirit and understand each other, and follow reality. Our reality is created overtop the natural world, and our experience with the natural world is controlled. I believe that the people who kept going out and hiking, camping, roughing it, working gardens, are able to keep a relationship spiritually with the "real world". And ever since I was a funny little girl, strolling along, never getting to school as I noticed every leaf along the way, I felt from the trees, and from hikes in the 100% natural wild Canadian mountains with my father, that this world is crying out for our help.