Our Nature, A Triptych Volumes I-III: Our Nature, a Triptych

By Charlie Hopper

As people and a planet, we face more problems than ever. We have the resources and knowledge to solve them all. First, we have to find the will. Our Nature, a Triptych contains all three volumes: Growing, Growing the Renaissance, and Cogito Regenerative. These books are an exploration of who are as a people, how we have grown into who we are, and what we must do to be the best humans we can be. If you want to get excited about regenerating our communities, land and people, this book is for you. You won't just know what "Regeneration" means when you finish them. You will feel it. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlie Hopper
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201301057

Charlie Hopper

Charlie Hopper has over 30 years of successful landscape, community, and ecosystem design, emphasizing human, natural, and planetary regeneration. Charlie has a vast portfolio of built, digital, and living systems and designs helping people and places thrive throughout the Midwest, Southern, and Eastern parts of the United States. His work has been published in numerous print and online publications, books, and television shows. Charlie has spent his life planting trees for others to sit under. For the last five years, he has organized entrepreneurs, leaders, and communities to regenerate Kansas City, Missouri's Blue River Valley, the Heartland, and our country. With entrepreneurial success in private, government, and nonprofit sectors, Charlie's understandings of how things work and grow are experiential, vast, and in-depth. Learn more about Charlie at http://cogitoregen.com

Book preview

Volume I: Growing

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Introduction

It seems like everyone has something to say about food, the environment, and the economy these days. Hundreds of books on the topics have hit the market over the last few years. TED talks and social media platforms are full of people espousing their truths about the food we eat and the people that bring it to us. Everyone has a better way to do things, and they also have a reason anyone not doing it their way is somehow evil or at least ignorant. Whether someone is growing the food, eating the food, selling the food, or making a living talking about it, everyone has their preferences, whether you like it or not.  

Just like our news channels, everyone is talking from one side of the table or the other, but no one seems to be listening and providing an objective platform for discovery. All that seems to matter is who can yell the loudest and say it the most often. The only place you won’t hear anyone talk about where our food comes from and how it is grown is our food channels and cooking shows. They focus on the easiest recipes, how to throw parties, how HUGE the food is, how loud or rude the hosts can be or who is cutting whose throat. The discord that has invaded our media, politics, and the internet has now invaded our dinner table. We used to come to the table as a family for dinner. Today, it is just another place to regurgitate what is fed to us by the media as we eat what the highest bidder provides us. The marketers and interest groups exist to drive a giant wedge of processed all-natural free-range inhumane organic GMO cheese between us. With all of these people talking about our food, no one seems to want to hear what anyone else has to say, eat or grow. Everyone is so busy advocating that few are communicating. Even fewer are growing.

With all of these people talking, most saying the same things repeatedly, why would anyone want to read or write another book on food, the environment, and the economy? For the last 30 years, I have spent my life learning how to grow plants, food, people, communities, and economies. Most of the time, I thought I was teaching people how to grow these. At times I was. Other times, I now realize I was just telling them what to do, just like the people telling us how to farm and eat. When I am at my best, I don’t tell people what to do or even how to do it. Instead,  I listen to my clients, constituents, communities, and economy and show them how Nature would do what they were trying to do. Most importantly, I try to help them understand how they are part of and unfold in Nature. I was communicating, not just talking, and both of us were growing.

This book will explore the evolution I have undergone as a person working and growing in agriculture and community and economic development. It will explore how Nature changes and plants, animals, and people evolve with it. The history of our societies, food systems, and agriculture is full of examples of the changes and growing pains we are experiencing today. Throughout history, we have come to these moments of discord. Nature has repeatedly brought us closer together and shown us how to change and evolve as a society without losing our identities.

Everyone is busy advocating from their side of the table. It has never been more important to step back and look at how we grow ourselves and the things we eat.  After 25 years of growing in the private sector, the last five years of my life in public service forced me to look at things from the outside, not just through my own eyes. Once you take that step back and look at yourself and everyone else’s role in Nature, you will realize a book like this is something that a person would want to do. It is something I had to do. Only by looking at ourselves, opening our minds to others, and respecting where we all come from can we understand the world and our role in it. This book is not the answer to all of the world’s problems. It is to get us to ask the questions needed to solve them. It is a book about growing.

Germination

My first memory in life involves food, plants, and family, three things that have helped form me in just about every way. My parents said that I was too young to have this memory. When I recounted it to family over the years, they told me there was no way to make it up. I remember the mashed potatoes and brown gravy I was fed and the gaudy grayish-brown macramé plant holder above my head. The plant holder, shaped like an owl, had an airplane plant sprawling out of its head. Its big orange marble eyes stared down at me through the draping tendrils and leaves of green and white stripes. The plant leaves were much more colorful than the brown and white mush intended to give me sustenance. I am sure the point of the potatoes was actually to fill my mouth and keep me from making noise so the adults could eat a meal in peace. Sustenance was more likely to come from the raw milk they weaned me on from the local dairy.

It was the seventies. The colorful silk psychedelic patterns of the ’60s had given way to polyester's drab brown and orange plaids. The exciting kitchens and baths of pink and green tiles turned like leaves to harvest gold and avocado green, reminiscent of an avocado browning. No one would know because avocados were not regular in stores yet.  Of course, there was always wood paneling because we needed more brown in our palette. The fresh green beans of grandma’s garden had given way to the sleek and trendy cans of Del Monte, and the intrigue and imagination associated with the Jolly Green Giant was still just a sprout in some food imaginer’s mind. We hadn’t completely given up culinarily with Best Choice of Always Save yet.

Grandma and Grandpa Foley still packed away vegetables in the summer and stored them in a walk-in treasure chest deep underground behind the house. Great Grandma Hopper (known to all of us as Ethel) was more of an aristocrat and had a basement for her mason jars. But not Grandma Hopper. After grandpa died, she modernized and moved into the one-story ranch with a deep freeze. She did not need a basement, canning, or root cellars. Without grandpa to cook for, she was more than content with beans from a can, fruit salad in syrup, and hams in a can with a lid that rolled back like a can of sardines. She still fried a mean fried chicken and made some excellent gravy, but only twice a year when the family was all there. When it came to hams, the only thing done by hand was the decorating with canned pineapple and maraschino cherries. It was not out of a lack of care but more out of loneliness. She had remarried, but this one worked in the coal mine. Unless we were there, she ate many meals alone. All the leftovers came with memories of when she was not alone.

When Christmas rolled around, the family all drove home. It seemed everyone in my parent’s generation had migrated at least five hours from home. We were eight hours away. At the Hopper Christmas, grandma would whip up the potatoes and roll out the fried chicken to celebrate the journey. She even took the time to hunt down a fresh chicken from the local butcher. She also made a great salad and always had carrots, celery, and radishes on hand. They weren’t local, but they were pretty luxurious for Southern Illinois in December with 12 inches of snow on the ground. The green beans came from a can and were casseroled to hide the mush factor. The obligatory fruit salad was upgraded and added to a Jell-O mold. Finally, when we moved to the living room for the Christmas Eve exchange, the light-up Santa was in the window. The fake tree was flocked in artificial snow, and the glowing electric logs in the fireplace lit up the festivities, giving off warmth as unnatural as Grandma’s love for my mother.

The Hopper family had owned the local grocery store until the 1960s. During the great depression, my father had all the food a family could need, even bubble gum, when the government rationed it during World War II. After the war, my grandfather came home and worked on a brick laying crew, building roads while Grandma helped out in the store. While grandma took these luxuries as a sign of privilege and embraced it in her modernization, my father used this as an opportunity to learn to cherish the little things. Even if they weren’t hurting, he grew up with kids who were, and they knew how to savor that piece of chocolate, a burst of a bubble, and an occasional soda. He also spent lots of time with Ethel in the garden while Grandma Hopper worked in the store.

Ethel knew what it was like to suffer, and even in the 1970’s she still stashed hundred-dollar bills between the plates in the China cabinet out of fear the banks would crash again. Grandpa and Great Grandpa Hopper passed away before I was born. In her modernizing way, Grandma turned the store into a restaurant, which Ethel never took to. For Ethel, cooking was a family affair and not something to be shared with the general public. Ethel just stayed in the garden, and whenever we visited, Dad was always right there with her.

Across town at the Foley house, things were different. Grandpa was the third generation to take over the family saw mill. Mom was one of five children. Instead of four grandchildren, there were always dozens of cousins, uncles and aunts, great uncles and aunts, and children and grandchildren trailing into the first, second, and thirds. The saw mill business wasn’t as glamorous as the restaurant or grocery industry, but it was still lucrative in the 1970s. Over the generations, the mill had grown into one of the largest in the area. The mill specialized in lumber such as cherry, walnut, and rare oaks. T.A. Foley Lumber Company shipped all over the Midwest. Still, Grandpa had many mouths to feed, and Grandma Foley spent a lot of time in the kitchen, either cooking or canning. When he wasn’t working, grandpa could be found in the garden if it wasn't raining. If it was raining, Grandpa was in his woodshop. Once the sun fell, he was in his chair with one of many Bibles in his lap. If at all possible, one of his grandkids was hanging onto his beard.

When it came time to eat, the table was always full, but with the Foleys, it seemed there was never a trip to the store, at least not until the 1980s. The meat and milk came from a butcher, and everything else came from the root cellar and garden in the back yard. The table was always overflowing with freshly baked rolls, corn, beans, beets, and jellies. They all tasted fresh as the pop that came from the jar when opened.

On Christmas morning, the tree was as real as the logs roaring in the fireplace. Grandpa’s hand-carved wooden nativity with blades turned by the heat of candles below filled the role of light-up Santa. The only sign of food from beyond the county line were grapefruits, oranges, apples, and nuts that grandma bought from the local FFA. The grapefruits were for Grandpa’s breakfast and carefully carved in halves and only allowed to be salted because sugar would hide the fruit's natural taste. The remaining items would fill stockings, and Grandma hid them until Christmas morning. Only Santa could make it to Florida and back with all that stuff in one trip.

As for our parents, they took the lead of most in their generation. They ran from the farmland as fast they could, just as their parents told them to. It is not as though they lived on the farm. Their parents saw everyone leaving the farm and knew it wouldn’t be long before the same would happen to the town. Anyone who lives in the Heartland knows towns and villages live and die with the farms. Grandma Hopper already felt it in the restaurant. Once she remarried, the restaurant closed down, and Grandma Hopper became Grandma Kelsheimer when she married a security guard who drove two hours every day to find work in a coal mine.

At the same time, Grandpa Foley watched his brother leave the sawmill for the construction industry, another hour away. As the farms strived to till every inch of land, the mill ran out of logs to cut. The labor ran to the coal mines in Indiana. With the rise of chain hardware stores, board stores, as grandpa called them, the mill honed in on specialty lumber for boats and custom boards from mostly urban trees. This pivot would add some value to their market and buy another ten years for the mill.

When Dad left town in the early 1960s, he went to Chicago. He worked hard and got scholarships to the University of Chicago. After his bachelor’s degree, Dad returned to his hometown for a stint to teach history at the local middle school. Even then, he saw what was happening and knew he couldn’t stay. So Dad went back for a couple more degrees and finished his Ph.D. During his Masters, he took out an insurance policy and also studied at the Culinary Institute. He learned quickly that the restaurant life wasn’t as conducive to gardening as a teacher’s hours. Regardless, the experience reinforced his love of food, how to bring out the best in it, and the place from where it came. That same love he passed on to me.

Back to the macramé owl, in 1970, my parents settled in Northwest Missouri after a brief stint in Upper Iowa to a town very similar to the one where they grew up. However, this town had a college, Northwest Missouri State University. In the early 1970’s it was predominately a teaching, liberal arts, and farm school, mainly serving the locals in the region. The town still thrived off the farms. The local packing plant was cherished, the elevators thrived, and the trains moved north to south and east to west a few times a day.

Downtown’s economy thrived with clothing stores, boutiques, movie theatres, barber and beauty shops, donut shops, pharmacies, and even hardware stores serving the community. Sears, Penny’s, and Montgomery Ward were all still on the square, and the Mall in Saint Joseph had just opened with them all as anchor tenants. We even had a pharmacy with a soda fountain. There were many more businesses in the surrounding blocks. All of them were vying for a view of the beautiful county courthouse in the middle of the square.

While growing up, the town had five local grocery stores and one more giant regional chain grocery. Even into the 1980s, as the farms started to consolidate, Maryville still looked much like the little town where my parents grew up. The only difference was that the college kept some people in Maryville and provided jobs off the farm to help some farmers hang onto their land.

As my parents'’ hometown and their family legacies started to fade, so did their marriage. In 1976 they called it quits before getting divorced was even cool. My brother and I stayed with mom for some time. Dad continued to teach in those years but went back and forth to Chicago to pick up a second Ph.D. in philosophy. Mom made her way through a couple of jobs and did what she could to keep us going. As those jobs dried up with the businesses around the square, things started to fall apart, and by the early 1980’s we were both living with Dad, and Mom moved back to her hometown. Looking back, the rough times we went through seemed precursors for what was to come to the farms and towns around us, jobs drying up, families falling apart, and everyone moving away.

My parents moved to town before I was born. As long as I lived there, I thought Maryville would stay as healthy as the college. I was wrong. Some would say I grew up in a college town. They are wrong. In reality, I grew up in a farm town that has a college. As faculty brats, we represented a small, privileged and liberal minority in a population of conservative townies whose families settled there and grown their livelihoods from the land. As the farms dried up in the next decade, it wouldn’t take long for that dynamic to reverse.

Even with all this change, one thing remained constant in our lives, the garden. Before the divorce, we always had about a half-acre vegetable garden on a plot we rented outside of town. Once I was born, Dad became an avid rose gardener, and his passion grew as our properties did. By the time I had reached middle school, we had over 1,000 roses and traveled all over the Midwest, showing them at competitions in our 1976 Dodge Tradesman Supervan. I think Dad took to roses because collecting them reminded him of the books. Each carries a history of breeding and the cultural context of time. He still kept a small vegetable garden, but I think he deferred to roses as an excuse to keep supporting the local groceries and farmers at the roadside stands during summer.

Growing up in a household of men, we all learned to cook (and iron) at an early age, and in a broken family growing a new life, the kitchen and dinner table became the hearth of our home and center of our development growing up. Being a college professor and living right across the street from campus, Dad was always home to make dinner. We all even came home for lunch during summer, no matter where we were working. Dinner was a three-hour affair. The first airings of All Things Considered and Fresh Air, we prepared and cooked dinner. The second airings we ate as a family. Finally, we cleaned up and digested the day’s activities during the third airing. By that point, we had considered everything and needed fresh air in the garden.

Being raised by a philosopher, a day didn’t go by we didn’t discuss our days’ activities and what was going on in the world, grown-ups and children alike. We always explored the minutest of details in the most metaphysical ways and wrapped them around analogies of food, gardening, and often music. We didn’t have lots of money. Dad was a teacher, after all, but we lived richly and always strived to grow our wealth in understanding and relationships.  As we became teenagers and my brother started attending the university, no matter how busy we were, Dad always made dinner and sat down to eat with us, even if we didn’t get home until after 9:00.

Food and gardening brought us together and kept us together through thick and thin. It wasn’t just something for subsistence or nourishment. The garden and the kitchen brought us security, created our sense of home, grew our family and even our minds. In the kitchen, we would explore things together and feed off each other. In the garden, we would reconcile what we learned from each other about science, Nature, and even the nature of people.

When we got into the zone and started working on our projects in the garden, we all grew our different kinds of minds. There is nothing like taking what you have learned and applying it to the Earth, observing how Nature reacts and operates on its own, then using that to fertilize the soil of your mind. These connections move beyond sustenance to the self-perpetuation of growth. Relationships like this grow in our food, gardens, people, and Nature. This phenomenon is what we call life.

Meanwhile, outside the garden and house, we were all starting to grow our own lives. My brother grew away from the garden on his journey. Dad grew to even more heights in the world of academe. I was still a kid but developing interests. I had delved into music and even more so into speech and debate. I loved to research and learn, create the perfect case for both sides of every issue, and work it all out in my mind in the garden. As I pruned to the appropriate leaf joint, dug the perfect hole, or groomed the blossoms for competition, I dissected and grew my thoughts simultaneously.

When I was twelve, I started working at the local nursery, Earl May. There I could hone my thoughts, skills, and understanding in other peoples’ yards and minds. At Earl May, much like a doctor’s office, people brought us problems. We researched and diagnosed them and prescribed solutions in bottles or bags that we sold. We first found the root of the problem by listening to the people and their garden. What started as a part-time job helping out on weekends quickly grew to thirty hours a week and full-time in summers.

I was a natural at work. When I was there, it allowed my youthful mind to go hundreds of miles an hour with a sense of purpose, direction, and limitless opportunities for exploration along the way. There were two types of people in the nursery: people who treat and tend things and people who grow things. Either you are a grower, or you were a controller. Inevitably those two worlds of thought always collide. When Mother Nature decides you are getting too cocky, she always does what she wants to prove you wrong.

Just as I was changing, so was the industry. In the 70s, nurseries existed to create shade and grow food. They were more like farm and garden stores. In the 80s, they became more focused on landscaping, ornamentals, and selling the service of growing for someone else, or at a minimum, selling them a solution in a bag. In the 90s, many became lifestyle stores, and pets and seasonal decorations became Earl May’s largest departments. Nursery stock was their smallest. The customers often seemed more intent on creating a scene or image than actually growing a home. Much like my Grandma before me, this modernization seemed glitzy and glowed like that light-up Santa that I still break out forty years later.

By this time, Maryville had started to change. Farms were consolidating even faster. The local packing plant was dying due to the growth of feedlots and giant slaughterhouses along the Missouri River. Industrial consolidation brought us regional groceries, and the local grocery stores and packing plant began to close. Without the packing plant, the smaller farms (five hundred acres or less in our area) didn’t have any way to get a premium for their cattle and hogs. Very few farms could make it on grains alone, especially if they didn’t have bottomland. As grain margins continued to drop in our drive to provide the cheapest food in the world, more people had to leave the farm for work if they were going to keep their land.

There were a few factories in town, and the college was growing to provide jobs off the farm. With fewer people on the farm, no one was there to tend the livestock every day. As a result, the land was cleared and tilled to be cared for by tractors, not people. The farm could barely support the family at this point and definitely couldn’t provide for the children if they wanted to come back and grow a family. In our drive to feed the world, suddenly, we find ourselves in a situation where we can barely afford to feed ourselves.

The first casualties on the square were the hardware store and the soda fountain. The women’s stores followed suit and then the men’s. The western wear store stayed longer as we still needed good boots and jeans. It was the last of the retail stores on the square to go. It happened a couple of years after I left town. The donut shop next door lasted the longest. People still needed a place to reminisce about the good old days over a cup of coffee. The five local grocery stores consolidated into two chains, right next to each other on the edge of town. One was a local chain that tried to keep going. That one was finally gone by the 90s.

Some things that couldn’t make it downtown moved to the edge of town. The Penny’s is still there today, surrounded by an array of crappy chain restaurants that didn’t exist when I was a kid. They feed the parents of college students as they migrate in and out of town with each semester or football game. A Walmart came to town in the 1980s. Everyone liked to blame it for the fall of the downtown. In reality, it didn’t come until well after half of the square was empty. Pamida and Kmart came first. They were Walmart’s real competition. Once they were gone, Walmart just seemed to grow as needed to pick off the low-hanging fruit around the square. Walmart didn’t even add groceries or nursery stock until the late 1990s. I guess it was a late bloomer. As for downtown, the county government and social services expanded to fill the storefronts and meet the ever-growing needs of an ever more impoverished community.

Without the locals to support it, the college had to adapt too. It became more of a business school and focused on trades instead of liberal arts. It marketed degrees as though they were jobs, put computers in every room, closed the retail dairy, and moved the herd farther away as not to offend the students from Des Moines and Omaha that would eventually funnel into the Kansas City job market. Much like the food system, they try to provide the cheapest and safest product money can buy. The administration eliminated foreign language studies. Sciences, the arts, and the humanities were all marginalized. The Humanities and Agriculture consolidated into the smallest building on campus. More space is devoted to people talking about doing things in the economy than to the faculty who grow the people to do them. As our service economy dwarfs our manufacturing in the marketplace, it does in Academe as well.

My dad saw this coming. As great as his gift of love for food and garden was his love of knowledge and Academe. When it was time for me to run away from town, he wanted me to pick a liberal arts college but never let me know. I wanted to be a lawyer or a politician and was yet to develop the ethics to prevent the first or bad habits to preventing the latter. I looked at debate schools, one in the South that was similar to the campus I grew up with, and looked at a Jesuit school in the city. If I was going to leave the town that I did love, no matter how much I said I didn’t, I wanted to experience something completely different. I had never been much for religion, but I was one for education, and as I toured Kansas City, I was impressed by the culture. When I arrived at Rockhurst, I also fell in love with the land.

When I toured the campus, it wasn’t the city that hooked me. It was the trees, the grass, and the old stone buildings. We had an old family friend that taught there, Dr. Kovich. So when I met with the faculty, they talked to me like I was one of them. The priests spoke to me like gardeners, farmers, and my parents, like an adult. I had worked with churches and the abbey at the nursery, and I always felt like they were trying to fix or save me.

The Jesuits were different. They weren’t interested in what I thought, but instead if I could. They seemed to be growing minds, not filling them, much like the farmers and gardeners I liked best at the nursery. The Jesuits were growing food for the brain, a family, and a sense of home, not just selling me a service. They spoke to me not of what I would get out of the place but of what I would give back to the communities that would make me. The school also had a good name in the community. If I were going to leave the preverbal farm, a school like this would help me most, and I would feel at home there.

At my father’s bequest, I fully immersed myself in college for the first semester and did not take a job. For the first time since I was twelve, I did not work. Rockhurst was exciting. We explored the city, met new people, explored new thoughts, and these guys threw great parties. At Christmas and during breaks, I still ran home to help at the nursery. There were always big projects that needed doing. Earl May had not hired my replacement yet, but I had moved on inside. I was working more for the party funds than the reward of the work. I had agreed to work one last summer at the nursery. I needed the money, and I was required to stay on campus if I was in school, so I didn’t have a place to stay over the summer anyway. When I went home that summer, it was different. When I wasn’t working, I was hanging out on campus and had left the town behind. Maryville was also different now, and so was I. As I look back, it seems I worked so much in high school I didn’t notice that the town I knew was leaving me before I left it.

Teenagers in small towns do not spend a lot of time there. They are either out exploring the rivers, cruising country roads, coveting the best fishing spot ever (which all of them are), or running off to the nearest bigger town or city to be cool. You take the things around you for granted and don’t notice when they leave until you leave and come back to discover they are gone.

The town was kind of like the square. When you live through the exodus, you don’t always notice what is leaving if you still have what you need. There may be fewer places to get what you want, but fewer people need it. The people left first, and then the stores left.  You don’t notice this while you are there. Until you go away and have more, you don’t see what you didn’t have until you come back and notice what you thought was there wasn’t. It is all relative. What Einstein wrote of distances, light, and energy is also true for economies and communities. The only difference is economies and communities are spheres and not lines, so it is harder to see when they are interrupted.

There is an old saying that the middle of nowhere is the center of everywhere. I guess this is true of anywhere, big town or small. It is the same as we globalize our economy and world view. Wherever you have less, more space occurs in your sphere of everywhere. If wherever you are is the center of your universe, it is good to remember that the center of the actual universe is a never-ending black hole where everything goes and comes from, but nothing remains. In our never-ending drive to be and have everything, we need to be careful not to end up with nothing.

It is good to have a home. Without a home, it is hard to have a relation, perspective, or identity. Our homes and economies may overlap, but they don’t have to become each other. When working with agriculture, communities, Nature, and economies, ecology is the thing that ties it all together, the life amongst them. I often struggle with terms as sometimes I think they separate us from the reality of what we are talking about, but ecology is one of the genuinely great terms. It is rooted in the Greek word for HOME. Ecology is the science of growing home.

Until you move from one home to another, it is hard to understand the meaning of home. This is especially true in today’s world when the home is less often the focus of our discussions than a person’s position or relations in the outer world. When we do this, it is easy to lose sight of our home and its health. Most people view their status by their relationship to things outside of their home rather than by their home health. When we do this, it is often to escape the realities of our home, but in essence, we are just expanding the boundaries of our home to the point we have forgotten where the center is, and it becomes a black hole. When our home ceases to be the center of our relations, our homes and economies fall apart.

One of the most common examples of this is the economy. In traditional thinking, the economists of Academe like to equate the economy's health with trade volume and the product increase or decrease resulting from that trade. They do not account for the consumption required to support the transaction. Healthy production is pushed by the supply, resources, and growth and pulled by their demand. Traditional economic policy focuses on how much we can get out of our resources and from those we sell them to.  We define success by consumption or spending, not by balancing supply and demand to grow the home. Nor does it consider the consumption required to produce and pay for what we consume because that requires an admission of cost. The problem with current economic thought is that we cannot escape home no matter how hard we try.

Once you start moving toward it, the gravitational pull of the black hole can get too strong to escape. If you ask someone how the stock market is doing, at some point in any given month or year at the worst, the answer will always be that it is the highest it has ever been. This is inevitable because the population of consumers and traders will continuously be increasing for the foreseeable future. If you ask that same person how the economy is doing, they will list a litany of their woes and struggles. The academic economy forgets to account for the whole economy, the resources, community, ecology, and home. Instead, financiers value the transactions or the economics and forget to take care of the home.

The word Economy also comes from a Greek root, but instead of the word for home, it is the word for house. We often forget about our home and focus too much on our house. Our house is merely the boundary of our immediate family ecology, the physical walls that contain our home. How it looks is not necessarily indicative of the life inside. In essence, our home can be more significant than our house. We are reminded of this every time we go home for the holidays or find ourselves at home with friends or at the altar. Keeping our house in order is about defining and maintaining the sphere of our economy and community. Keeping our home healthy is about growing our ecology, which requires balancing the reach of our home to include enough resources and a broad enough community to support the ecology.

The house or economy is the sphere or the whole. Economics is the exchange between the resources, community, and ecology that comprise the economy. We can still interact with people in other economies. However, it needs to be for the sake of enhancing both economies, not to support one at the expense of the other. In doing so, we become part of one economy. When it is more for the benefit of one, the one on the losing side has to expand to a broader economy to support itself and the first one. This is a deficit spending cycle and sucks everyone in like the black hole. Suddenly our homes and economies expand to include others with who we have no direct relation. We lose our sense of place, identity, and home. Our everywhere changes. Our center becomes everywhere. The house expands beyond our home. Without our sense of home, we lose our sense of responsibility.

In Nature and ecology, this phenomenon happens all the time. It is called migration. Birds and animals move from place to place. When they are where they are, they are home and respect that house's boundaries, ecology, and home accordingly. When they move out of instinct (not intention), they leave that home behind and seamlessly move into new ecologies because birds and animals have no memories. They live in a broad economy and have a big house, but very few species other than humans develop a home. Instead, they have temporary nests or dens that they form and move to instinctually and seasonally as part of the sustenance of their whole economy. Their growth or decline as a species is not a matter of will but of condition. Without memory, their place of perspective or home can only amount to where they are because they are not self-aware.

When we settle into a new home, we have to grow new roots, the connections that grow our resources. The strength of our roots determines our limitations when building our house and raising our home. Plants and animals can only move where ample resources already exist. When we move, we have to create or find a total economy that consists of the community, resources, ecology, and economics (transactions between them) that allow us to live and grow. The community, resources, and ecology are the three realms of any economy, especially human economies. We may locate our home in a house, but the boundaries of our house and home include the community and resources that are required to support a healthy ecology in them.

If any one of these realms has economics that overpowers the others or doesn’t grow all three, it is bound to result in you eventually moving or expanding your boundaries to get what you need. Often you extend so far that you lose the sense of place you thought of as home. This is the life of the eternal commuter, pulling in his garage at night to sleep, only to pull into another garage an hour away to work. They often spend their meals eating alone or separately in their car. It is no less a house and home than those on a farm or in a small town, but they have grown so big and so large they spend all time chasing new economics instead of fostering economic models that grow the whole. People like to talk of dream houses, but that is all they are. You have to grow or build a home, which requires a community, resources, and ecology that go far beyond the boundaries of a house.

Branching Out

The time had come to branch out. I was still in college, but after one summer back, the home I knew was no longer home. I was starting to grow a new one. My home had grown, and my old house was no longer the center of my world and economy. The small liberal arts college that had lured me away with talk of giving back made me realize there was no going back. It was time to make this new place home my home. When a plant uses all the energy in its seed in the garden, it has to grow leaves and branch out to gather enough energy from the sun to grow roots. The initial seed remains in the new plant, but the plant grows beyond its original home. I was outgrowing my seed, and it was time to branch out.

Something happened to me in the city. Seeing new things and experiencing things without the filters of what I thought I knew made me realize it was time to start absorbing again and stop trying to control what was going on. Being back in the garden for one last summer made me realize I had outgrown the garden where I grew up. It also made me realize that something in me stopped growing when I wasn’t in the garden. The garden was part of my ecology. Somewhere along the line, I had forgotten that.

I had become so effective at charting my course I forgot to experience what I was passing by along the way. I forgot how to be in a place or with a person, to let them come over me, to let them teach me, to be in them and them in me the way Nature overcomes you in the woods. Beauty transcends in the garden. The flavor of great food explodes in your mouth as love erupts amongst people. Without the disruptions of Nature, I became so analytical that I forgot how to experience anything else. The greatest gifts that Dad ever gave me are the kitchen and garden, and I didn’t realize it until it was gone. In the garden, we were growing souls.

I knew I had to be in college. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to express the things I am now. I also knew that college alone wouldn’t be enough if I wanted to preserve my passion and soul. I was well on the way to my chosen career as a lawyer or politician. I was taking all the proper classes to pursue my goals. By the end of my sophomore year, I needed nothing but electives to fill my time until graduation. The political science major was in the preverbal bag. Indeed, I was earning the job I was paying for with my tuition. Now I just needed to fill my time with something besides alcohol for three years.

I wasn’t back at school a week before I was bored stiff. With all the parties and all my new friends, I was getting plenty of stimulation, but not the immersion I found in the garden. Something didn’t feel right. I left my van at home that semester, as it was too costly at eight miles to the gallon. I needed a job. In college, I could explore my thoughts, like in the garden but with different plants. However, I still needed someplace to apply my thoughts. So one day, I hopped on the bus and started going south.

It wasn’t long before I went by a nursery, and I got off at the next stop. There was one problem. This was not the nursery I thought I was looking for. I had never seen a place like this.  First of all, it was an entire city block long and covered two sides of the street. It was in one of the most populated areas of town. Most nurseries are tucked just outside of town. It also had a single location. Maryville’s Earl May was small in comparison, and it was new and one out of fifty sites in the largest chain in the country. This nursery was also old and in the ghetto, just like my little school.

The most apparent difference was that this place is divided, literally and figuratively, in one of the most symbolic coincidences of my life. On one side of the street, one brother runs the garden center. Everything on this side is shiny and new. It is where they keep all the