Just sitting around my grandparents’ house, I heard stories about milking cows, feeding chickens in a movable chicken tractor in the backyard, and making a blanket rather than buying one. I was also reminded of the essential habits that many older people have of resourcefulness and ingenuity. 

To give an example of this resourcefulness, my girlfriend Jess and I made fresh mozzarella and then decided that we wanted to make a pizza with it. Our first thought was to go to the grocery store to get some dough and tomato sauce. We told my grandmother and she said she could make some pizza dough, which she did even though she didn’t have all of the right ingredients. She didn’t have any tomato sauce either, but she put some diced tomatoes in a food processor, added some spices and there was tomato sauce! We cooked some sausage from my pigs and had one of the best pizzas I’ve ever eaten. 

What could have been a wasteful trip to the grocery store with lots of packaging and fuel spent in the process was, in the end, an environmentally friendly meal that turned out better than we could have expected.

Solar panels and hyper efficient cars are all good and well.  But the future of agriculture and the future of the ecosystem depend more on listening to our grandparents’ stories and learning their lessons than it does on slick inventions that buy into the industrial mind that originally got the ball of destruction really rolling.