Basic Instincts

I always wonder what it is about New York City that makes its denizens do such wonderful and zany things that remind us to think outside the box and implications thereof...

Case I: First is the case of an individual who decided to take the locavore movement to its logical end/extreme. Instead of adhering to principles and eating only what is grown within a few miles of the house and hence in the process reduce 'food miles' and its consequent effects on the larger environment, this individual decided to go the full Monty and planned on subsistence farming in his own backyard in Brooklyn. Yes, all 800 square feet of arable land that he had behind his home. The results are masterfully (and with hints of satire) described in this New York article here. They include smelly chicken and rabbits running around in the yard, a freak tornado (yes, a tornado grew in Brooklyn - see here) that lays waste the whole setup and his marriage in the soil...

Some amusing excerpts below..

"Because it was March already, it was too late to plant wheat, which has a winter growing season. Okay, no bread. As for dairy: It is illegal to have a cow or a goat in New York City, but I figured I could at least hide a goat in the garage. Was it worth the risk? Cheese would be nice, but have you ever put goat’s milk in your coffee? Black seemed the way to go. Finally, cooking oil: I didn’t have enough garden space for all the plants I’d need to produce vegetable oil, so I’d have to make do with animal fat of some kind. A pig, maybe? Duck fat was another good possibility…"

On his experiments with raising rabbits...

"Rabbits, by comparison, seemed like a breeze. Ideally, you want to eat very young rabbits, when their meat is tender, and as we all know, the species multiplies like mad. According to the pro-bunny-eating propagandists, a single doe can produce 1,000 times her body weight in edible offspring per year. Also, rabbits do okay in small cages, which meant I could stack them up efficiently in the barn. After a bit of research, I learned that the perfect breed is the Flemish Giant...
Immediately, complications set in. The rabbits kept themselves cool in the summer heat by kicking over their water dishes. The wet conditions invited flies to lay eggs, which turned into maggots, which attached themselves to the does. I lost a doe and the kids’ buck to hideous infestations that I care not to describe further or ever think of again."

Case II: This is the story of a 'no-impact man' who describes himself on his blog as a guilty liberal who after snapping, turns off the power to his apartment, decides to eat organic, does not use any traces of plastic and composts the stuff that comes out of his family’s backside (all this with taking his baby daughter and his worldly wife along for the ride...).

No TV, no fridge, no air conditioning, no shampoo, no toilet paper (though we do not want to know the specifics here), lots of candles, reusing trash, buying second hand goods, and of course reducing the amount of water used by the average American family from 100 gallons down to their goal of 7 gallons per day...

All power needs were served by a solar panel (which was barely enough) and news came in via a solar powered crank up radio (the kind that you would gift a tree hugger without ever thinking that they would actually go ahead and use it). Of course the toughest part of the experiment seems to be hand washing clothes (did not tell you - no washing machines either).

Now even if most people would take both of these experiments in a ‘these environo guys are plain crazy’ vein, it does pay a bit to reflect on the message... Only then do we slowly understand how large a portion of our daily lives are lived by being constantly plugged into the vast grid of externalities that we really have no control of…

It also underscores the fragility of our everyday situations and how much we take this vast system for granted. It also makes us stop and think about the larger connections to nature and our footprint on the world at large.

These individuals make that possible for us - however zany their trials might be...