Pollution Is Stealing Your Future (5 Universal Lessons From Your Backyard About Waste Management)
The neighbor’s grass is always greener, because it’s full of bullshit.
They compost the manure and feed it back to the soil, instead of spraying pesticides and herbicides, introducing micro-plastics into their soil, or any other type of waste that breaks the life net. Waste that is poorly managed creates pollution, which rips off future yields and robs current production potential. You may have inadvertently polluted and poorly managed your waste because the current mainstream culture promotes this behavior without explicitly exposing the negative effects of using certain products.
How to manage waste and prevent pollution according to permaculture - your waste is a resource.
In this edition, in 6 minutes or less:
#1 Why avoiding pollution matters in a backyard home-garden - 5 universal lessons.
#2 Avoiding pollution in your backyard translates to avoiding it in the world.
#3 Recycle waste that is inorganic and compost waste that is organic.
Why avoiding pollution matters in a backyard home-garden - 5 universal lessons.
- If you pollute your house, you can’t live there.
- If you pollute your backyard, you won’t let your children play there.
- If you pollute your garden beds, you can’t grow food there.
- If you accumulate waste at your place, you will soon lack space to live there.
- The pollution will make the place ugly and unsanitary.
It is about more than just conservation and recycling, it is about wholesome living spaces and fostering the future - for us and all the other species on the planet. Pollution is not only the destruction of future yields, but also the hindering of current production potential. The change starts at home because that’s where we get the insight fastest.
Pollution is a liability.
Avoiding pollution in your backyard translates to avoiding it in the world.
The modern agriculture way of thinking is the same as consumerism. Buy, use it, and throw it away mindlessly.
That behavior translates to using something that is poison, and to throwing away waste unconsciously. Applying poison mindlessly is using anything that destroys nature’s assets, like a school of fish, soil life, beehives, predatory insects, or fresh air. While throwing away waste mindlessly is getting rid of something in a way that it just stays there, clogging Earth’s systems that could be used by other beings or recycled, like not composting organic material, leaving plastic everywhere, or dumping batteries, for example. All of that generates pollution that can be both poisonous and disruptive. Bill Mollison gives us a method for a solution:
“If the needs of an element in a design are not met by the system itself, it creates work for you. If the products of an element are not utilized by another element of the system, it creates waste. Extra work and waste are signs that a design is not finished.”
That is right.
Recycle waste that is inorganic and compost waste that is organic.
Organic is everything that once lived.
If it lived once, it can live again - when it is composted.
- Do selective waste collection at home.
- Reuse what makes sense.
- Send recyclable stuff like glass, metals, and plastic to recycling centers.
- Compost organic material at home. The best method for hassle-free composting is the 18-day hot compost pile. As a side effect, it produces fertile soil, and with just one more step, you can produce seedling soil that you can use to start seeds.
- Repeat.
By consciously managing your house waste and composting, you are literally helping nature spin its carbon and minerals pathway cycles.
You just establish, by conscious design, a fast carbon pathway. The amount of soil and fertility you can create with this simple habit is huge — so much so that a 1m³ compost pile is enough to fertilize 100m² of garden beds and start thousands of seeds. The gardener who builds soil builds lasting abundance.
After I started composting my organic waste in an apartment (with composting worms - more on that in a future newsletter), it made it obvious to me how composting organic waste is an asset, while having to throw away inorganic waste is a liability.
Selective waste collection is part of an intergenerational abundance flywheel.
Help spin nature’s flywheel in your house and backyard.
You will enjoy a better place to live, and harvest more produce from your garden. From your home, you will set a precedent, and you may influence your neighborhood and maybe your country. If everybody does it, we can influence the world.
It starts at home - avoid pollution and create soil by composting organic waste.
Your grass will always be greener than your neighbor's.
