What you do quietly in your own little world can reverberate across time and space to manifest in unexpected ways. Since 2005 when I became intensely peak oil aware, acutely freaked out by the retrograde direction of the economy and real world job dynamics. I hooked into permaculture and later the transition town movement (in my own small way) and started our backyard homesteading I didnt realize how it would impact today. One of my biggest anxieties was how to possibly provide a college education to my kids when we live paycheck to paycheck with zero job security (science can be like that, surprise). I wondered what use a college and grad education could do them when it hasnt been fulfilling or lucrative for me. As we tended our organic garden and our dairy goats - helped them be healthy, get pregnant, deliver babies, milked the does, drank raw milk, made raw chevre and yogurt and kefir, as we raised chickens for eggs and home butchered meat and homehatched chicks, as we did all these things I talked about the world to my kids, told them about climate change, the deeply immoral politics of the GOP and their owners, the dangers that came to the fore in 2011 with Fukushima, the importance of growing our own food and knowing how to do it and how teach it... the kids listened. Now - completely unexpectedly that whole experience has made my oldest child very attractive to colleges - especially ones that reflect just those values - and its looking possible that we will be able to get her packed off to college. Its an intensely dark experience for a person like me (raised in a middle class background where one is EXPECTED to go to college and I did, through to the Ph.D. and beyond) to be completely unable to afford to send the kids to college. 2 more kids to go. I think its possible I will be unleashing 3 scientists into an uncertain world but they WILL go there with their eyes open about a job insecure world, a world that needs their dedication and energy to face rapidly collapsing global ecosystems.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 13:17:42 +0000
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