ACT2 was a tough one, especially as I live in a relatively affluent country where farmers are looked after by the government and homeless are people are rare enough that the voluntary organisations already do a pretty good job of looking after them. (
The Tzu Chi Foundation sends aid worldwide.)
I could just join or send money, but it seems like a cop-out. So I sat down and thought about where the problem originates and looked into the 'meat' of the stories about solutions. The solution eventually came into my head as I was walking in the park, watching the gardeners tending the new life they were bringing into the world.
Food starts life as seeds, and all of the long-term solutions to the problem of food-shortages eventually come back to growing more food in one way or another. How can I have an opinion on that if I have never participated in the process myself?
Of course, living in a 5th floor apartment with no garden, I'm not really equipped to actually grow my own food in any meaningful quanity. I can make empty gestures like buying some carrot seeds and a window box, but it seems that a better idea is to learn to understand the wh*** process - to become a gardner, someone who understands all the factors that make different plants flourish, to grow things that I can't eat alongside things that might be 'useful', to learn to manage a (very small) ecosystem of my own rather than just trying to extract what I want in the shortest possible time.
So I went to the supermarket, bought a bag of soil, some pots and seeds, and spent the afternoon struggling to put it all together. It's the closest I can come to no-till farming!
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