Transcription of Earth Calling #152
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast Show #152: “Earth Calling,” airing for the first time on Sunday, August 10, 2014.
Summer is in full bloom, and the earth reminds us daily of the bounty that we Mainers enjoy. Today we speak with Ted Carter and Ellen Gunter, authors of Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century; and Roger Doiron, founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International.
Join our conversations, and learn how we can maintain and foster our relationship with the world in which we live. Thank you for joining us.
A topic that I find quite important for all of us, but especially for myself and my family, is the environment and the earth on which we live, and with which we live really. Today we have two individuals who I think feel similarly, and probably even more strongly that I do, which is saying a lot. Today we have Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes; he is a landscape designer and contractor, and also Ellen Gunter who is a journalist and environmental activist. Ted and Ellen co-wrote Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century, which was released on Earth Day this year. Thanks so much for coming in and being with us today.
Ellen: Our pleasure.
Dr. Lisa: I want to read … there’s so much in your book which is wonderful, and I think it’s a great update for people who know. Ted has been a long-time supporter of our radio show and has come on a guest several times. The first time way, way back was to talk about the first iteration of this book.
This book is so different and so wonderful and alive, and reading it is like taking a breath of fresh air. One of the quotes that I read this morning was by Thomas Barry, “Our moments of grace are moments of transformation.” There is something very graceful about this book. It’s a pause. Is that part of your intention in writing this?
Ted: The two of us, Ellen and myself, we are a good team because Ell is a fantastic writer and a journalist … and environmental activity and a spiritual director. I think that she puts a lot of heart and soul into her writing, and it definitely is … it’s a call to action is what this book is. We really want people to get ignited and start to go to town on this because time is of the essence.
I don’t know if I’m answering your question exactly properly, but this is really a call to action. It’s in the Sacred Activism Series of Random House, and it’s really important that we do that.
Ellen: We love that quote because what he’s talking about there are the moments of dawn and dusk, and those are the moments where you see the morning birthing, and you see the day ending. They are so brief, and they are so regular. We can count on them happening every day, buy everything in life is a transformation. Earth is all about cycles.
On many levels this book is about transformation. It’s about what we’re undergoing right now on the earth. It is transforming, and in a lot of terrible ways.
Each of us has a role to fulfill, a job to do. This is going to require a transformation of sorts from all of us.
Dr. Lisa: Reading this book is … it’s not easy. It’s not easy to hear about the things that are going on, going on right now, and have been going on very recently, and have been going on for decades, possibly centuries. It’s not easy to know that this is what we’ve been doing.
Let me read a little passage from the intro. This is something that you wrote, Ellen. “Ted once reminded me of a trip he had made to visit a Yaqui shaman friend of ours named Lench Archuleta with whom he had studied nature and earth spirituality in the Arizona desert. One afternoon we sat on a bluff overlooking what appeared to be a distant dust storm. It wasn’t. The bulldozers, cutting deep swaths, were making space for yet another subdivision.”
“As we watched, Lench told me his tribe had a name for us. They call us termite people” because we are eating the earth’s flesh, and by doing that we are literally eating our future, our world. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a form of madness, of suicide.'”
That hit home for me, that what we’re doing is eating into the core of where we’re living.
Ellen: Rachel Carson talked about this in Silent Spring. She called it biocide, ecocide. That was in 1962. Her big platform was DDT. Silent Spring refers, of course, to the fact that there were no birds singing because the preponderance of DDT After World War 2 was basically not just killing the insects that were bothering plants and troubling home gardeners, but it was killing the birds who were eating the berries and whatnot as part of the earth cycle.
She basically was warning us about a world we live in now, and she was right. We celebrate her now as being the person who really started waking us up, but this is obviously a very long process. That was 50 years ago. It’s time to move to the next level, I think, and it is hard to recognize. It is hard to own this.
Dr. Lisa: She paid for it herself. She ended up dying of cancer, and they thought largely that there was a chemical contribution to that cancer. It’s not easy to be the voice of conscience.
You have a quote from Bill Moyers. “The most important credential of all is a conscience that cannot be purchased or silenced.” To be that voice is tricky and hard, but important … so important.
Ellen: It is. You really find out who your friends are, I guess. There are lots of people that … in my family and friend hierarchy who just can’t walk with us on this. That’s okay. You really have to find a peace with it because, if it’s something that’s really driving your soul, you can’t say no to it.
We like to say that writing, Earth Calling is our calling. This is what we were called to do. I think there’s a quote somewhere at the beginning that if you’re called on a journey, if you decide to take a spiritual journey, then it’s okay to not do it; but if you do it, there’s no turning back. It’s a one-way street.
Ted and I, I think we are of one mind on this, that there is no direction except forward. We can’t help ourselves. This is what we have to do.
Dr. Lisa: How did you come to meet each other?: I know we talked about this when your wrote the first book, Ted, but give me a little bit of background on how the two of you came to be working on this.
Ted: As usual, things happen altogether at the same time. It was about ten years ago that I was starting to go out to the desert to work with Lench Archuleta, the shaman that you had read about. He was getting me to see nature and the earth differently, and I met Ellen in that same time period.
We had been going to Chicago … I went nine times a year, actually, to set up stage and to work with Carolyn Myss. Ellen was a classmate of mine, and she would do a narrative after we were done. It was just incredibly written, beautifully written, and very descriptive. I just said, “Whoa. If I ever write a book, I’d love to have her work with me on a book.”
Sure enough, when I started reading a lot of the information about what was happening to our planet and the world, and it was making me very sad, a very dear friend of our says, “Do the thing that breaks your heart.” I was very … this broke my heart.
Ell came up for her birthday in 2007 and I said to her, “Would you write a book with me?” and she said, “Sure.” It was going to be a handbook, a little pamphlet.
Ellen: Sixteen pages.
Ted: Little did we know it would be almost 300 pages for the first book.
She is a great … There’s a friend of ours out in California, and he says, “There’s friends that we know that we can climb hills with, and then there’s some friends that we can climb mountains with. Ellen is somebody you climb mountains with.”
Dr. Lisa: Ellen, I really enjoyed the weaving of the work of Carolyn Myss … not just Carolyn Myss, but really ayurvedic medicine, about the chakras, and talking about what different chakras mean. I know this is something that’s become part of our communal lexicon, but at the time you started doing this, if you’re talking about chakras people are looking at you a little funny.
Ellen: This is a multi-thousand-year-old tradition. I think it was begun by the Hindus and picked by other cultures.
The chakras … of course, Carolyn is where I’d heard about these, and I’d had an awareness about it because I studied tai chi for 20 years. You get energy, you get prana, and it’s prana of tai chi and yoga and the chakra system. It’s all the same thing.
I had an awareness of them, but when we started studying with Carolyn she relates it to your spiritual journey. She talks about how, in Anatomy of the Spirit, that you can really track … you have a spiritual anatomy, and that these chakras are basically the foundation of that.
In the first book we wrote about how the first chakra is our tribal connection. If you do yoga, and you sit down in a lotus position, your tailbone is the closest thing to the earth. That’s your first chakra.
When Ted and I first started Reunion, we said, “Our first chakra is broken. We have no connection to the earth anymore.” That’s one of the things that’s wrong. We don’t appreciate it. We don’t see it. We don’t hear it. We don’t get how … We can’t survive. We are the earth.
The Bible, to use one particular kind of mythology, which a lot of us were brought up with, when creation was begun with a handful of dirt … ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all that stuff. We have that built into our culture, that we are the earth.
Just to extend the metaphor a little bit, what Ted and I talk about a lot in here is … We put the chakras in there because there is a very physical spiritual connection here. Your heart is what makes you feel compassion … your fourth chakra, your heart chakra.
Your sixth is your head. It’s your brain. It’s both your cognitive brain and your intuitive brain. You can cognitively get the data, and your heart is going, “Oh, my God. This is really killing me,” but the fifth chakra, your speech, your mouth, this is where you make choice. That’s where the action part is.
That’s how we tie all these things together in the book, by saying … it’s like Goethe said, “Knowing is great, and being willing is great, but you just do.” You have to put your feet on the ground and do something. That’s what we’re trying to do with Earth Calling.
Dr. Lisa: A big chunk of the book is reviewing what has been going on. I think many people are now aware of climate change. I think it’s less controversial. I think it’s more widely accepted that this is an actual thing, but I’m not sure the people understand that some of the things that have been used as examples, they’re things that have repeated themselves.
You talked essentially what are dust bowls in China now because of the irrigation system changes. We were experiencing dust bowl issues in the United States a century ago.
Ellen: The dust bowl was really … I don’t know if you saw Ken Burns … if anybody listening has been … probably saw the dust bowl show. One of the reasons the dust bowl happened was that Oklahoma was not ever meant to be used for the crops that it was used for. It was prairie grass, which has very different root systems.
The Oklahoma land rush in … whenever that was, the lateral 1800s or something. It was the last part of the country that needed to be settled, and then brought everybody in. Of course, they started farming and cattle ranching. They changed the ecosystem of the state so that when … They had several years where it was very bountiful, but then all of that nutrition in the soil ran out, and it could no longer sustain that.
When you don’t listen and pay attention to what the earth system requires, then you have something like a dust bowl.
You’re right. There are cycles. The dust bowls and the incredible amount of pollution in China is due to the desertification of a lot of their plains areas, a lot of their breadbaskets disappearing because of overuse, because their water supplies are dwindling, because they have such a monstrous population they’re trying to support with food.
Yeah, these things have happened historically. One of the things that’s different now is that it’s all happening at once, and it is a repeatable cycle that we cannot get out of. We have the heat. We have the drought. We have the floods. We have the wildfires. They are now part of our lives because we haven’t maintained a balance with the earth.
Dr. Lisa: Ted, I know you have something to say about this.
Ted: It’s all about balance, really, and Carolyn has told me that … Last year I went out, I go out to work on her gardens every year, and I said to her, “Boy, nature has always taught me about great abundance,” but she said, “Ted, first you have to have balance; then you can have abundance.”
We see that in our health. We see that in our way of life. When we’re out of balance, we’re out of sync. What’s happening, what’s so absolutely tragic what’s happening right now, is that at the perfect moment when the worms should be available for the birds to eat for their offspring and everything like that, the seasons are all screwed up, so you can’t get to those … It’s off sync, so that they can’t be nourished in time to feed their young.
We’re having die-offs in animal populations and bird populations that are part of an imbalance that we have set forth in nature. What we’re doing to nature Is not natural. This is not natural. It’s very unnatural.
What we’re doing as human beings, as earthlings, is also equally as unnatural. It’s not natural to be this way. I think greed and a lot of self-interest drives this, and we have to keep that in check, and we have to call ourselves home and say, “What are we doing here? Are we all going to let this beautiful ecosystem fall into this great abyss, or are we going to do something about it?”
I can’t sit back and not do anything anymore. I can’t do it.
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Dr. Lisa: We’re definitely going to talk about what you can do, because that’s a very big part of this book, so I want to go into that. Also, I know that as somebody who has really wanted to do good things in life, it has been overwhelming for me at times, and I know for people around me, to see that you’ve no sooner dealt with Hurricane Katrina than you have another natural disaster over here.
I read the Barbara Kingsolver book about the Monarch butterflies, and then it actually comes to be. You feel as much as you’re composting and trying to walk instead of drive and doing your thing, not eating as much meat and not using as much water, it still feels so overwhelming.
How do you reconnect with what keeps you moving forward in a purposeful and mindful way?
Ted: Lisa, you are a spark. Think of yourself as a spark to ignite the passion in other people. Your actions, they may seem very inconsequential, but you influence other people, and you’re in a place to influence people through your radio station, through everything that you do.
Remember that. You throw the pebble in the water and it ripples. You’re touching a million other people, especially people …
The poor and disenfranchised aren’t going to be able to do anything; they’re too busy surviving. It’s the people like us that are really connected and that are running in this economy that can really do something. We have the resource, we have the influence, and we should be taking this and stewarding this great opportunity that we have, and this great blessing we have, in a way that really sparks something in others.
Ellen: What you’re talking about is network. This radio station, this broadcast, reaching out is networking, as Ted said. You influence one person, and you don’t know where that goes. It doesn’t just happen now. It doesn’t just influence somebody now. That happens into perpetuity. This broadcast will be affecting people for a thousand years if we’re still around, just because of the nature of influence and because how memory works with our species, and the collective unconscious and a whole bunch of other things.
To get the first part of your question, yes, everybody … it’s frustrating. “What can I do? How can I act?” That’s really what the action piece is about. Everybody is different. However many people are listening to this, every one of you has a different calling. Yes, we designed the book so that you could figure that out.
First you reconnect. You resensitize yourself to nature … but then join a network. Get involved with other people. That’s where that alchemy of action comes in. That’s where it generates and it is completely out of control. I’ve seen this time and again.
I’m a big activist with the Keystone XL Pipeline, and that started out with 1253 people getting arrested over a period of two weeks. Now it reignited the environmental movement. There is no way … It’s bled over into the fracking movement. It’s all over the world now. You never know what your one action is going to do in the long term.
Get into a network, join out of these organizations. The infrastructures are all set up already. That’s that alchemy that begins.
Dr. Lisa: You quoted, as you’re talking about stepping into your soul’s journey, Teilhard de Chardin, “It would seem that our time is calling us to awaken from our benumbed and bewitched to a wonder at and reverence for the astonishing, miraculous, and mysterious creation of which we are a part.”
I think this is important. I think that first we have to start with that wonderment. We have to start with that reconnection, to get out there and really feel this in some way, so that it’s not just something that we’re dealing with on an intellectual level.
Ellen: Exactly. It’s that heart connection. We get it cognitively. We can get it intuitively. That compassionate heart is what is awakened when you’re in nature.
I like to tell people, “Go out and sit outside.” Nobody goes to Times Square to relax. They go out into nature. Your state is emblematic of that. You are the one. You are a magnet for this.
People are drawn here because it’s so beautiful. It’s so peaceful. It regenerates people. It heals them. It’s an amazing place to be.
Go sit outside and take some deep breaths. When you sigh, that’s when your cognitive side is giving way to your intuitive side, that genius that is innate in us.
Matthew Fox says … he’s a modern-day mystic, and he says, “We are starved for awe.” We are starved for it. We want to be blown away by something besides video games and FX on movies. We want to see what’s really there. That’s part of our connection. That’s what nature gives us. Nature is built in awe.
Dr. Lisa: You also quote two individuals, or two stories of individuals who listened to themselves and went on and did things that, I think, have become quite amazing. You spoke about Rudolf Steiner and the biodynamics movement, and also about Findhorn. Anybody who has … these are names that come over and over and over again, and yet these two groups of individuals, the Caddys at Findhorn and Rudolf Steiner, they were considered a little bit …
Ellen: Loony.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah. Why was it important to share these stories in Earth Calling?
Ted: I have a Steiner garden, I have a Rudolf Steiner gardener, a biodynamic garden, at my home. I work with … Ben Steele has been in here at the studio, and we’ve talked about the Rudolf Steiner journey. Of course, Steiner was a savant, an incredible human being that comes around once every hundred years, these people. I think that we have to be the Caddys and the Steiners. All of us, we are a little bit different.
One thing that really hit home to me was a friend of mine said, “Ted, you’re an eccentric man. Do you know what that means?” I said, “That means I’m different.” He said, “No. That means you live outside the circle.” I said, “Do you know what … that people outside the circle do?” I said, “No.” He said, “They change the world. How can you live inside the circle and change the world?”
Then he was giving me a lesson that I needed to hear, because I was trying to conform again; but I didn’t want to conform again. That’s not who I am. I’ve always operated outside the circle.
It takes a lot of courage to do that, but it’s the place, if you really want to do things in your life that really make a difference, you have to go out there and make it happen.
Ellen: That’s just who you are. You can’t help yourself. I’ve known you for 10-12 years now, and that’s who you are.
When we were doing the first book, we went out to Northern California because Ted had met somebody doing … You were working with the Pfeifer Institute or … I forget which one … which is where you learned about biodynamics and why you would want to do it.
He hooked up with this guy who was part of a French wine family, and he had left this … I don’t know which one it was. It doesn’t matter. He had left his family’s estate and cashed out, and he said, “I just want to find out how I can grow wine grapes without using pesticides and fertilizer. That’s so unnatural.”
Long story short, he ended up taking biodynamics and became a practitioner, a master practitioner.
We met him in Northern California in the wine country, and he took us on a tour of one of the vineyards that he takes care of, which was winning awards. You eat these grapes and you just … buzz. They’re so fantastic.
We’re up on a hill overlooking his biodynamic vineyard and all the preps and all the stuff that are part of that discipline. I’m looking around and I said, “All of these are …” because you have to have biodynamic certification. You have to maintain that to be able to call yourself a bio-D practitioner … product.
I’m looking around at all these beautiful vineyards around him, and I said, “So they are all biodynamic.” I’m not going to imitate his French accent, but he said, “No. That’s conventional,” which means pesticides and fertilizers, “That one’s conventional. That’s conventional.” I said, “You’re surrounded by conventional agriculture? How do you maintain your certification? All that stuff blows over here.” He grinned at us and he shrugged and he said, “Because it’s up to the earth.”
Ted and I went, “What?” That was out big lightning moment. What he was saying was we have the capacity to work with the earth, to make agreements with the earth. The agreement you make with biodynamics is you never use pesticides and fertilizer. You use the preps that are part of the discipline of doing bio-
D, and Ted could talk a lot more intelligently about that. You can find out more about it just by Googling biodynamics.
This is what they were using in Findhorn, and nobody really knew what that was. The point is that when you work in concert, when you are in partnership, when you are connected to nature and you make this promise, then this is what happens.
Ted’s garden is crazy. I send bio-D preps to friends and they go, “I have a lemon tree that I’ve had for 18 years, and now it’s putting out …” They’ve never even had lemons on it before. I said, “You can never use … This is your agreement. You make this agreement.”
People think it sounds crazy. I will promise you, it is incredible. It’s just incredible it doesn’t matter if you believe it. Just do it.
Dr. Lisa: In Findhorn you gave the example of enormous broccolis that were …
Ellen: There were 50-pound broccolis they had to haul out with a truck.
Dr. Lisa: This was in Scotland, I believe, on very rocky coast with not very much soil, but it was just the way that it was cared for.
Ellen: [Gorson Brew 0:29:34] is what they call it. It was sand. It looked like there was no nutritional value in it. They grew this insane garden, and people came from all over the place … I forget … from horticultural societies. They did analysis of the soil, and it was completely rich in everything that was needed, because they worked in concert with nature.
Dr. Lisa: This gets me to, I think, a really important question, and that is: how do people … this is Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21st Century. This is a call to action. You want people to work in concert with nature, with themselves, their lives, their earth. Where do people start?
Ellen: It’s spring. Thank God. Finally. I live in Chicago. We’re having a very late spring right now. One of first things I would say is: what’s available to you right now? What’s available is gardens. Begin to garden. We recommend that you get heirloom seeds. We have a whole thing in there, as you know, on GMOs. We’re very much opposed to those. They’re not natural, no matter what they say.
We were asked that question the other day, and yes, just go out and start putting your hands in the earth. Start there. Start there, and do some potted plants. If you don’t have a garden, then go work in a garden. Go to the farmers’ markets. Find the seed purveyors there.
Once you start investigating, a whole world opens up to you. This is not weird and it’s not specialized. It is becoming the norm. Everybody is getting this. Eat local. Buy local. Find out where your meat comes from. As Ted said, if it says it’s grass fed, does that mean it’s being grown in Brazil on what used to be rainforest? You don’t want to support that, and you don’t know what they’re doing to the grass before the cattle are eating it.
I think our book is a really good prep. We spent a year before we wrote Reunion. We spent a year doing nothing but reading and researching, and we finally got to the point where we kept reading the same thing. No matter what the source, we were finding the same sorts of opinions and ideas and data and statistics and long-term tests. We said, “Okay, it’s time to start writing. We have maxed the information for now.”
We read dozens of books, thousands of articles, hundreds of blogs. We’d research and research, and we never took any resource as first [blush 0:32:04]. We’d always investigate it.
There is so much to do, and you can start as simple as sticking your hands in the earth, getting an organic tomato plant and growing some tomatoes for yourself.
Ted: Also I’m going to interject about children. If you’re a young mother, you’re a young father, get your children involved. This is stewardship. My mom and dad, from when we had our little suburban home in Chicago, they were out landscaping on the weekends. I was mowing the neighbor’s lawn. We were outside all the time.
Put the computers away. Put the cell phones away. Put all that technology away, and go out and play in nature, and participate in what this beautiful earth is all about.
Ellen: Well said.
Dr. Lisa: Ellen, we’re fortunate that you flew in to be with us here in Maine. I know that you are flying out again, back, very soon. You’re going back to Chicago.
Ellen: I am, back to Oak Park.
Dr. Lisa: Ted, I know you’re extremely busy as well. It’s a very busy time of year for you. The fact that you both took the time to be with us in the studio and have taken the time to write this book, Earth Calling, it says a lot to me. How do people find out about Earth Calling, and how do people …
Ellen: It’s distributed by Random House, so the easiest thing to do is to go to Amazon or go to Barnes and Noble. I know there are a few bookstores around Portland that are starting to carry it. You can request it, and they will order it for you. It’s widely available. It’s also a Kindle, so you can go onto Amazon, and in three minutes it’ll be on your Kindle or your iPad or whatever.
Ted: I’m going to give Longfellow Books a plug because they have been very supportive of this book and I’m going to be doing a reading for them. I love Longfellow Books, so … that’s what I want to say.
Dr. Lisa: We love Longfellow Books here in Portland, too. People who live in the Greater Portland area, Longfellow Books is a great place to go for Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 20th Century, and to read more about the work that Ellen Gunter and Ted Carter have been doing.
Thank you again for everything that you’re doing and for all that you will continue to do.
Ted: Thank you very much.
Ellen: Thank you, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci:
Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk, and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days, I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky, and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe, but when I do I feel energized because, in those moments, I am able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow.
Sometimes those are the “aha” moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we are doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can, in fact, come true.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need. BoothMaine.com.
Announcer: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is brought to you by the following generous sponsors: Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of Remax Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With Remax Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at OurHeritage.com.
Ad: About three years ago I watched a very interesting TEDx talk by a local man who is doing good things in the area of local foods, and in fact, personalizing and localizing the food supply. Today we’re speaking with Roger Doiron, the founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based nonprofit network of over 30,000 individuals from 120 countries. He is taking a hands-on approach to re-localizing the food supply.
Thanks so much for coming in and talking to us today.
Roger: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: Roger, I was inspired by your TEDx talk, which I believe was held … well, I know it was held right up the street here in Portland. It made gardening seem to accessible. You said that I believe you saved several thousand dollars by planting your own garden and eating your own organic food in your house. It made it seem like something that any of us could do.
Roger: That’s really my life’s work. I’m trying to help more people to grow at least a little bit of their own food.
You’re right. It is accessible. It’s not rocket science. It’s a question of putting a seed in the soil at the right time and giving it a little bit of care, and then cultivating that plant once it starts to poke its nose through the earth.
It doesn’t have to be complicated, and it can be done with very little space. If you happen to have a little bit more space, you can actually grow quite a bit of food and save quite a bit of money.
Dr. Lisa: There was a big effort that dealt with quite a big space, actually, with President Obama and his wife several years ago when he was inaugurated for the first time. You had a part in that.
Roger: I think I did have a little bit of a hand in that. I continue to give 99.9% of the credit to the First Lady, Michelle Obama, because she’s the one who actually stepped up and said, “Let’s plant this.” My organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, had run a campaign called, “Eat the View,” which was a social media campaign to really build support and enthusiasm for the idea of having a kitchen garden planted at the White House once again.
It proved to be successful. We got a lot of attention. I think primarily we got a lot of people excited that we could actually get this garden planted.
Dr. Lisa: This seems to be something that more and more people are interested in. I’m seeing more chickens in people’s back yards. I’m seeing more beehives in their gardens. For a while, though, we gave away the power. We let somebody else create our food for us. How did that happen?
Roger: That’s one of the things that I was addressing in my TEDx talk which was titled, “A Subversive Plot.” What I said was that I think that gardening is a subversive activity in the sense that, by growing a little bit of your own food, you’re doing something that’s socially subversive in the sense that you’re taking some power into your own hands, and you’re also, at the same time, automatically taking that power away from some other forces in the world which I think tend to be these bigger forces like multinational companies that have been enabled by our political system, but also by ourselves.
We need to own our own actions. We’ve allowed the Monsantos and the Krafts and the Coca-Colas to not only find their ways into our supermarket shelves but also into our schools and places like that.
I think we’ve gone astray over the years. It’s been more of a slow train wreck as opposed to just a violent car crash, but the fact is we really are on our way back. We’re in the midst, I think, of a full-blown local foods revolution right now, and that’s where I’m putting my energy.
Dr. Lisa: Are you originally from Maine?
Roger: I was born in Chicago, so I’m not officially a real Mainer, but I moved here when I was about two years old, so I’m pretty close.
Dr. Lisa: You have experience with attempting to grow things here in Maine for quite a long time.
Roger: I did grow up in a family that had a garden, so I’m pretty tuned into the seasons here and what works and what can’t, but I’m also one of those people who doesn’t take no for an answer that nicely, in the sense that I’m continuing to try my artichokes every year. I think over the past three years I’ve had three artichokes, but I think that’s part of the fun for me, is just to push the envelope a little bit and to see what we can get out of our soil and our seasons here in Maine.
What you ultimately find out is that we can get a lot.
Dr. Lisa: You and your wife have three boys?
Roger: That’s correct.
Dr. Lisa: How do they help you out with gardening in your household?
Roger: They help quite a bit with the eating. They’re ages 14, 16, and 22. They have been actively involved over the years with all the different stages, just because I thought it was important to give them that education as well as their more formal academic education, just to know where does food come from, and to feel some empowerment in knowing that they could actually grow a potato if they wanted to, or they know the life cycle of a bean. They know that it doesn’t come prechopped in your plate. You have to do some work actually after the harvest, too.
They know their stuff pretty well. In fact, my two youngest sons ran a farm stand from our front yard not last summer but the summer before, just because they were too young to get a real summer job. I said, “Why don’t you just have a go at it and see what happens?”
I don’t think they’re going to go on to become professional farmers, but I think they really learned the value of a dollar, and learned the value of hard work, and understood also how to run a small business. It’s not just this type of thing where you show up with your freshly-cut salad greens, and suddenly the market is there. You have to actually get out there and let people know that you’ve got something for them.
They’ve been involved in … I’m trying to keep them involved, but they’re getting into their teens now, and they’re very active in their own little things, too.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, I had that experience when my family tried to have a community garden plot. My son was far more interested in Little League than he was in weeding, but it was nice because whatever small amount of touch he was able to have with the garden, he appreciated it, and his younger sisters did, too. As long as we didn’t get too stringent about requirements for the garden, it felt like it worked okay.
Roger: I think that makes really good sense. It’s meant to be a pleasure. I also have to pull myself back a little bit and remind myself, “This is supposed to be fun.” Don’t set yourself up in such a way where it becomes another task, because that takes the joy out of it.
I think you’re right. For children in particular, you need to teach them the value of work, that it’s not going to happen on its own, but you also have to keep it light and keep it fun.
Dr. Lisa: Your background is not just with local foods and with gardening. You also have a background in journalism, in activism, in business, and I think international relations as well. How did you pull all of these together and create this 30,000-member organization, Kitchen Gardeners International?
Roger: It and I am a work in progress in that I’m still trying to pull it together. I think I’ve landed where I’m supposed to be in the sense that I did study international relations and diplomacy, and got a master’s degree in that, so I think I’m an ambassador for the garden world now, just trying to spread the good news about what kitchen gardens can do.
To answer your question, it was a lot of hard work, basically, but a labor of love in the sense that I really enjoy what I’m doing. I’m lucky to be able to do what I’m doing where I’m doing it and to see the results not necessarily on a daily basis, because there are a lot of days where you work in the void without necessarily getting the feedback, but with the work that we’re doing in particular right now I think we really are changing a lot of people’s lives.
We’re really trying to focus on, instead of the campaigns that we did for the garden at the White House, we also did some campaigns to protect the right to garden in one’s front yard, which got a lot of national attention and some international attention.
Our focus now really is helping other people who would like to grow their own food to do so, especially working via schools and through community gardens and churches, prisons, libraries, all of the above, by providing mini-grants to those organizations so that they can grow gardens.
Dr. Lisa: You also have a wealth of information on your website that is very practical. If people ask questions about, “How do you store seeds?” and having poked around there, I think that’s very helpful. I think there’s a barrier. If you haven’t grown up gardening, there’s a barrier between somehow putting how own fingers in the soil, getting to that place.
Roger: I think you’re right. That’s part of the enabling that I’m referring to in the sense that we’re providing some money and some seeds and supplies to people to help them plant gardens across the country and around the world; but there really is this missing piece, which is the education piece, too.
As I think you know very well, here in the United States, here in Maine even, we’re one, two, in some cases maybe three generations removed from growing a substantial part of our own food.
We need to think about the social structures that we have in place to allow people to get back to that. If you’re lucky, you grew up in a family where you had a parent or maybe a grandparent who could teach you some of those things, but there are a lot of people who aren’t so fortunate.
We have to set up other ways to pass on that know-how, whether it’s a website or whether it’s writing an article for a magazine, or becoming involved in a local garden club, or reaching across the white picket fence to your neighbor and saying, “I see that you’re having a go at raspberries this year. How is that going? Is there something that I can help you with?
Dr. Lisa: There’s also something very healing, in addition to healing the person physically by eating locally-grown organic food, which is, of course, good for the body. I’ve noticed on … I believe it’s your blog, people are writing in and saying, “I was a soldier in the war, and I’ve come back, and I’ve done this gardening. It somehow is a salve to my wounds,” really.
Roger: That was project that we helped fund in New Orleans. I think it’s actually on a marine base. It was, once again, through this program called “Sow it forward.” That’s the type of story that I find so refreshing, and makes you want to get up again and go for it the next day. You do see that people really are getting a lot more than simply vegetables out of kitchen gardens. For some, like that marine, who had done two tours of duty, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, that garden really is very important for him. It’s about getting back to a better place in his life.
We’ve also given out grants to prisons, and the stories coming out of those places, I think, are just as powerful, where people are realizing that their life, for whatever reason, went off on the wrong track, and maybe they did some harm to others through their lives, but the garden was a way of reconnecting with themselves, reconnecting with the earth, and trying to get things right in their lives.
I think we … I, at least, feel like I sometimes need to remind myself of that. I love food, so I always think of the garden in terms of food, but the garden can be much more than just food.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. I know that when I … there was always a woman that would put flowers out by the side of the road, and I would go running by them. The flowers were free, so she’d say, “Free flowers,” and I’d go running down the road with my bouquet of flowers. It made my day. It made my week. It made my year. To know that here’s some who’s, out of the goodness of her heart, cultivated these beautiful things that were going to end up on my table. Even though I’m not as much of a gardener, it was this little bit of beauty that really touched my day.
Roger: Beauty and … it sounds like generosity, too. I think that’s one of the things that I particularly enjoy about the work that I’m able to do. I just realize that there are so many people out there who are doing this because they know it’s the right thing to do, either for themselves or their families or their communities, and I sometimes refer to them as, “garden angels.” I think they’re fluttering amongst us. They’re volunteering at their school with a school garden project, or they’re planting an extra row for a food pantry.
If you feel like you’ve really had a terrible day, or you’re feeling really down about the state of world affairs, maybe go visit a community garden or visit a school garden. I suspect that you’ll find some new joy after that.
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Dr. Lisa: I remember reading something that … I can’t remember the name of the book, but it was about asparagus, and it was about how it’s a three-year cycle, something like that, to get to an actual asparagus stalk that you can put in your mouth and eat.
There’s some patience that is required [crosstalk 00:51:56].
Roger: There is a lot of patience with asparagus. We’ve moved asparagus out of our garden plan, but I remember when we did put it in. If you’re heard of the international movement called Slow Food, asparagus should be the poster child for that in the sense that it does take three years; but after you’ve got your bed going, it can last a long time. It’s one of those things where it does pay off in the long term.
Dr. Lisa: There are other things that are still growing, that people started the process with years and years ago. We interviewed somebody on the show who really enjoyed doing work with apples, Heirloom apples. In Maine we seem to have a lot of different varieties that have been planted quite a long time ago that we are able to access now.
Roger: There’s a lot happening with apples in Maine. We’ve had it all going on for a long time, but I’m very enthusiastic about some the new things in terms of people starting to make cider, hard cider. I think there’s a whole economy that can be built around some of these things.
Apples are one of those great investments. I think there was another quote about the best time to plant an apple tree was probably ten years ago, but the second best time is today.
Put the effort in, and five years from now you’re going to have a great harvest, and it’s going to keep on going if you put the work in to prune your tree and things like that.
Dr. Lisa: I think I remember seeing something on either your website or your blog about Alice Waters.
Roger: Yeah, she’s one of my heroes.
Dr. Lisa: She’s one of my heroes, too. I think of her as being someone much like yourself who really has had to work at this thing for a long time, really needed to start planting that garden and start talking about local foods so far before anybody else was really thinking about it.
Roger: She’s been at it for a long time, and she’s very charismatic and very persevering. Actually, I give another talk these days called, “Gardening Our Way Back to the Future,” where I go through some of the milestones over the past century. I have a lot of pictures and that, and I found this one picture from 1970 of Alice Waters waiting tables at her own restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley.
I knew that she was this towering figure in the American food system, but it really touched me to see her as a young woman in 1970, obviously very idealistic and full of good energy, but putting the work in, putting the work in of doing the very unglamorous work of waiting a table, but doing it probably also because she loved it and she wanted to see what was going to be the reaction once the customers started biting into her creation.
Dr. Lisa: It seems like, for you, this is also a labor of love.
Roger: Very much so. I love gardening, and I love that I can get paid for doing what I think is good work and the right work. It’s one of those maybe that wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago or 20 years ago here in Maine, because you would have needed to be in a much bigger city, maybe next to some bigger foundations and philanthropies and things like that. Now, because of the internet, you’re able to do all kinds of things and build your support base pretty much anywhere you want to.
I do consider myself really lucky to do the work that I’m doing, where I’m doing it.
Dr. Lisa: Roger, how can people find out about Kitchen Gardeners International and the other work that you are doing?
Roger: You mentioned that we have a website, kgi.org, and it’s a website that has a lot of bells and whistles built into it in terms of social networking tools, so that people can add a blog post or a photo or a recipe. We also get involved in the social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We have a very big Facebook population, so people who are really Facebook people should check us out there and join the conversation.
We encourage people to share their know-how as well, because, while I might know a thing or two about growing a tomato in Scarborough, my knowledge isn’t necessarily going to transfer over to somebody who wants to do the same thing somewhere down in the Deep South. Somewhere among our 30,000+ people, we’ll have somebody who can probably help you out.
Dr. Lisa: Roger, it’s been a pleasure to have you in today. I told you before we started that you have been on our list of people we want to talk to on our radio show from the very beginning, so I’m thrilled that you took the time to be with us.
We’ve been speaking with Roger Doiron, the founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International. I encourage anyone who’s listening to go back and find your TEDx talk. It’s quite interesting and amusing. Also to look at your website and perhaps take a few steps in the direction of doing their own gardening.
Roger: It’s a pleasure to be with you. Thank you, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show #152, “Earth Calling.” Our guests have included Ted Carter, Ellen Gunter, and Roger Doiron. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit doctorlisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our eNewsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Get Twitter updates by following me as doctorlisa, and see my daily running photos as bountiful1 on Instagram.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Earth Calling” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.