In the past, I have endeavored on many attempts at restoring the environment and reducing the impact we have on it. My initial venture into nonprofit work involved lots of environmental conservation efforts including immersive work through the California Conservation Corps’ Backcountry trail program.
Being surrounded by the natural community of plants and animals is inspiring in the sense that it makes me want to steward it’s beautiful balanced state. But I also grew up in a major city, so I am accustomed to living in the urban landscape where a tree is often surrounded by concrete, and turf is really the only plants being nurtured.
Over the last decade, I have dabbled with recycling textiles to prevent filling landfills with old clothes. I made reusable shopping bags from old pants. I made men’s shirts and hats from old curtains and sheets. It was my effort at preserving nature indirectly through deliberate actions upstream. I didn’t end the problem of textiles filling landfills, but I chipped at it.
Now that I am farming, I feel like I have entered a strange new space of negotiation with the natural world. There is the fact that I am cultivating life in the growing and stewarding of plants. There is also the fact that plastic plays a bigger part in that than I ever realized. I’m not here to condemn the uses of plastic in farming, I’m just saying I am surprised by how much plastic is used.
Some of the plastic can be reused and some of it is intended as single use. Cover for the ground, skin for the high tunnels, coating for the raised beds, and drip tape irrigation lines are the most common types of plastic I see. Efforts to reuse the plastic are always made, but sometimes a hole is too big or a piece is just too brittle and has to be discarded. The plastic is not in a form that could be recycled by conventional means.
However, Julian Brown and his Plastoline, which is 110 octane gasoline made completely from used plastic, makes me think there is a way to recycle the plastic that is used back into fuel that could also be used on the same farm. Plastic is not the permanent invasive material it was considered to be in the past. Innovators, like Brown, are finding ways to transform it into other usable materials or finding ways to make usable plastics from starches that significantly reduce plastic half life. The solutions are there, but change is slow.
What slows progressive change most is limiting beliefs. Right now farming, environmental conservation, and a ton of other modern systems, are being guided by people with limiting beliefs. The future can be what we want it to be, but we have to escape the limiting beliefs of believing the solutions of the past are the only solutions for the future. The world is full of microplastics and single-use plastics, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can fix that, but first we have to escape limiting beliefs.
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