We have the resources!!!

Morning temp: 51F
Afternoon high: 70F
Tonight's projected low: 45F
Humidity:67%
Moon: Waxing, 14%
Mostly cloudy with an East wind at 12 mph.

1. I'm still up on Lookout Mountain visiting family, though I'll be home late tonight. M says that our golden and sweet potatoes arrived yesterday afternoon. We'll plant them first thing this weekend. They're going in somewhat late this year, since we forgot to order them and then two weeks ago began to wonder why they hadn't arrived. Oops. Of course, the lawn's growing again, and we have a great many plantlings indoors awaiting a garden transplanting. So, it will be a weekend of activity!

2. On my drive up here, I took the back roads as opposed to the highway, and I noticed how much potential garden space many homes have available, whether in the form of modest front lawns, back yards, or side plots. This means that, if we really wanted to do it, a great many of us could grow enough food to feed our families and share with others. But don't you need a lot of land to grow enough food to live on? No. Bio-intensive gardening, which utilizes raised beds about 4' wide and 5' in length, allows plants of all kinds to be planted very closely together. Experts tell us that a family of four can eat full-time out of four of these beds, or 100 square feet. But won't a sustained mass-gardening movement deplete our soils and use up our water supply? That depends on how we garden. Composting our grass cuttings, leaves and left over fruits, vegetables and eggshells from our kitchens would produce, for each homestead every year, several hundred pounds of humus (i.e., a completely organic, top-shelf soil additive) that could be immediately and continually added to our soils. Hence, we would be radically and consistently improving our soils. Have you ever noticed how many eggshells a Waffle House or IHOP uses in just a single morning? If we mulch our Bio-intensive beds them with leaves, straw, or even cardboard, and water the soil directly, we would use less water than is typically expended on watering lawns. But what about the winter time, how will we eat then? As with all things, there are safe, sound, reliable solutions, such as building a small greenhouse or small wooden "hot houses" around the base of garden beds.

On a far larger but logically parallel level, the most recent bi-partisan Congressional estimates of the war in Iraq set the total price at $2.2 trillion, all said and done. Interestingly, similar estimates suggest that an investment of this same magnitude would be more than enough to switch the entire American infrastructure over to solar and wind-based power! Like the potential garden space I see everywhere, I find this highly optimistic because, while $2.2 trillion seems an unimaginable number to me personally, clearly we as a nation have access to this kind of money (after all, it's funding the war as we speak). So, when the day finally comes and we're serious about funding safe, sustainable, democratic forms of power production, we have the resources and technology to do so, immediately. I suspect similar arguments could be made about education, health care, and who knows what else.