Dan Jason's Message for 2008
Dear customers and friends, old and new,
Global climate change is always in the news these days. Many more people are starting to realize that we've overdone it with our disrespect for Mother Earth.
The coming social and environmental challenges are unpredictable. Who would have imagined that we on the wet west coast would ever have severe water problems as we did at the end of 2006?
What seems certain is that people, communities and bioregions will need to become more self-reliant. It may no longer be easy or even possible to have access to food and bottled water from somewhere far away.
The good news is that we can focus on the good news. The knowledge of how to grow sustainably already exists. It can be tapped into and enhanced in myriad ways. Around the world people are feeling and thinking that it is time to create the world we want rather than to fight the world we don't want. We all, each and every one of us, have bought into the destruction of the earth that has resulted in global climate change. We can stop buying into it.
When you save seeds, you realize with each harvest how magnanimous nature is in gifting us with the opportunity of multiplying her goodness. A single amaranth plant can yield over a quarter of a million seeds. One tomato plant could easily become several million plants in two years.
If we had the collective will, we could moderate the extremities of weather occurring everywhere. We need to replant our earth garden with the diversity that is so innately hers. We need to nourish ourselves by nourishing and celebrating the carrying capacity of each place instead of insanely transporting food thousands of miles. We need to grow billions of trees to recreate a stabilized climate best suited for our own creative growth and well-being.
We can turn wasteland into farmland and deserts into forests. We can make the earth a place where no one suffers for a lack of healthy food, pure water or clean air.
Especially now, we can do anything we want if we really want it.