Learning to Live Well with What We Have

   As I continue to move through this practical and experiential reflection on sustainable agriculture, some facets of “sustainability” have become increasingly highlighted for me. I’ve found that our conceptualization of what it means to be sustainable, in agriculture and life as a whole, must be significantly broader than the basic sense of doing something in a way that allows it to continue indefinitely. My time at Ladang (Malaysian Care’s farm) has taught me both the practicality, and especially the fun and joy of using what you have around you, or more generally to live simply and with what God has blessed you. As I see it, as do many brilliant people of our time like Wendell Berry, our modern culture has bred us to assume that we must rely on “experts” or “specialists” to make and to do the things we want or need. As Berry puts it, we have become people who leave our lives in the hands of experts so that the only things we must do are make money and entertain ourselves. This modern “specialist system,” he claims “fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself/[herself].” [1]
          For many of us, when we think of something we want or need, our first reaction is to think of the best place to buy it, the best or perhaps most adequate but cheap brand that makes it, or the best person (“expert”) who can do it for us. Still, I want to give a much-needed shout out to people like my dad and grandfathers who are quite “handy” and like to do things for themselves. Unfortunately, however, I think such practical and “handy” skills are becoming rarer and rarer in younger generations. I hope I can be one who fights to carry on this “tradition” of “handiness” in our younger generations! What if, however, as is the case for some Orang Asli communities here, there weren’t any supermarkets, hardware stores, or Wal-Marts to which we could hop in our cars and go buy things? What if there wasn’t an expert we could call to come help us? Even more so, what if we didn’t have the money to buy something, even if we had a serious need? In setting sustainability as a central standard for how we live, I’m learning that we need to become more creatively resourceful and skillful in using what we have around us, significantly lessening the amount of cash and material inputs that we require into not just our systems of agriculture, but our society and our lives, personally and communally.
            Let me walk through a few situations in which I have found myself here in the jungle, and how my friends and I have found simple, free :), and fun ways to address them. The other day, I was helping May Fong, our agriculturalist and my housemate, continue designing and building a diverse herb garden. The first issue, which she had solved before I came, was how to protect her fragile herbs when the staff would go around cutting the grass with weed whackers in the garden area. Although its far from revolutionary, I know, she used old tires to plant all the herbs in so they wouldn’t be cut by the weed whackers. Now, as we were replanting everything, she wanted to figure out a way to help stifle weed growth around the herbs and their tires, as weeds like “lalang,” a weed with a very invasive root system, had taken over everything before. Instead of buying manufactured weed mats, spraying some chemical, or some other modern technology, we took advantage of the blessings God has given us here in this land. We took our jeep down to the creek that runs along our property and filled the back with sand from the riverbed, then went back and spread it a few inches thick all around the herb-filled tires. Again, we could have bought sand, but why not use what’s around us, what’s free? The hope of using this riverbed sand, which doesn’t have any weed seeds in it naturally, is to both stifle weeds from growing, and to be a place to grow another type of herb that has very shallow roots and grows well in sandy soil. Later, we will add some vermicompost (organic material eaten and “pooped” out by worms) that we have made on the farm to help stimulate the herbs’ growth. And not only did it serve in these multifunctional ways, but the whole process brought me to a beautiful, tucked away part of the creek I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, was a time for good conversation and fellowship, and a great workout on top of it all!
            Another fun example, and one I’m quite proud of (as a joke 🙂 ), deals with an unfortunate mishap with my sandals. Now, let me first explain that these sandals are a prime specimen of Malaysian quality, a 50 Ringgit (that’s about $17) special, which I bought because I wanted something sturdier than flip flops and easier to clean (and not have to worry about ruining) than shoes. They sure looked sturdier than flip flops, and proved to be for my first few days… then the mud of the Malaysian jungle caused the sole and the material on which the foot sits to separate, on both sandals. I guess you get what you pay for, as we say. Nevertheless, I wasn’t about to let poor Malaysian quality get the best of my 50 Ringgit investment. One day, May Fong told me how she can make decently strong string from drying out strips of banana tree trunk. Of course I wanted to learn how to make it, and then I put my creative, and thrifty, hat on, and though I would try repairing my sandals with the banana strings. Now, I can still rock my sweet Malaysian sandals and have banana strings dangling off the sides, all tied around them. At $17, buying another pair wouldn’t have been a huge deal, but this ingenious repair is obviously way cooler and more economical, let alone a killer fashion statement. Maybe I’ll have to bring some banana string back to the US with me and start a new trend on some sandals there!
            Speaking of bananas, I’ve been astonished to see how we can use literally every part of the tree. Besides eating the fruit, (which, by the way, tastes so much better when its organic and from your front your yard and not doused with chemicals and shipped from Central America to us in the States), the reddish flower that grows at the end of each bunch makes a nice flavor addition to some veggie and rice dishes. Also, and even better, May Fong showed me how to strip away all the segments of trunk and extract the juicy white core, which she stir fries in a delicious side dish with soy sauce, oyster sauce, and (maybe) some garlic and onions. Besides all these versatile food uses, and my banana strings, the banana trunk is so moist and full of nutrients (we all know bananas are high in potassium, right J), that we can use it for various types of organic fertilizer applications: it is excellent for vermicompost systems which need very wet soil, and we’ve even old trunks along the sides of sweet potato beds I made. On these same beds, we used the long, broad banana leaves to cover the beds, helping to keep moisture in, and our dogs who love to dig, out! Lastly, the banana root systems actually sprout up many new trees around the main one(s) that are producing fruit, and these naturally occurring seedlings can be dug up and replanted somewhere else to encourage more growth and to cultivate different areas of one’s land. So think: if we can employ this many uses (and more) for just one plant, and God’s abundant blessings can fill our land with dozens, or hundreds of different species of plants, and don’t forget animals and insects, then if we are diligent and creative enough with how we care for and use our land, its basically like having a natural, sustainable, self-renewing, and free Wal-Mart in our backyard!
            There are so many more stories and fun tidbits I’d love to share, but I think I’ll save them… I gotta have something to share with you all when I get home and you want to hear more about my trip! In these and so many other memorable examples, I’ve been getting a tantalizing taste of the wonderful, abundant, and joyous life that God always has waiting for us when we have the courage to entrust ourselves and our needs to directly to God and the rich ecosystems of life God has given us. In my last reflection, I pondered the question of how we should define the good life… In reflecting on the naturally occurring and renewable treasures that await us in the world, with no need of being manufactured, processed, and price-tagged, my vision of the good life is starting to require a lot less money, name brands, and shopping malls, and will produce much less waste. It finds so much “more” in having less “stuff,” by relying more on what we have already been given and allowing much of it to sustainably renew itself naturally. Thus, the “more” here is really about more people being able to enjoy God’s blessings as they are shared in a community that is deeply rooted, literally, in its local ecosystem, which it nurtures and loves as part of the “whole” that comprises their bio-community. To live well, I’m learning, is more about finding true satisfaction in having enough, and cherishing every piece of that “enough,” than accumulating so much stuff that neither we, nor anyone else, can ever fully cherish as it sits locked away in drawers, closets, garages, barns, and on plots of land we rarely use. Living well needs to take into account a wellness of having enough that can be shared by all people, all creatures, all creation, and all future generations. This type of good life is the succulent fruit of an agriculture, life, and economy whose outputs are its inputs, which are as locally self-sustainable as possible, which put the value of all people’s well-being above the value of a few people’s (corporations) profits, and which value the health and love of a community over and against a “need” to develop or improve its standard of living. Let us be a generation that fights to preserves life in all of the beauty and goodness God has created around us and within us, rather than continuing the pattern of manufacturing and processing it all towards a state of catastrophic collapse.