Rethinking Lifestyle

This is the first in a series of articles prepared by Gary Martens focusing on the individual lifestyle of people who have chosen not to live conventionally and are seeking to make a difference. Gary draws our attention to the values of international figures, but also writes about our neighbors.

I believe we all search for a connection to the land. It is a primeval drive that is left over from our ancestors who had direct and obvious connections to the land. Their lives depended on how well their own crops and livestock fared.

Our connection to the land is less direct because globally over 54% of the population live in urban areas (World Health Organization, 2014). In Canada the trend is the same with 81% of people living in urban areas in 2011. This is a dramatic change from early in Canada’s history when only 19% lived in urban areas in 1871, up to 54% in 1941, and 76% by 1976 (Statistics Canada census).

We express our desire to connect to the land by various means. Some of us drive pickup trucks, some of us love to go hunting while other spend some time camping either in winter or summer. Many of us who live in urban areas love to work in our yards, growing some of our own vegetables, fruit, herbs and spices in our home gardens as well as beautifying our space with trees, shrubs and flowers.

Some of us even operate small farms in urban or near urban areas. In southeastern Manitoba this seems to be a preferred lifestyle for many of us including the many recent immigrants who revel in the opportunity to own a small acreage and raise some livestock and have large gardens.

There are people that advocate removing livestock and people from designated places that we now call parks so that we can maintain a few wild places so that we can commune with nature; that is nurture our pure connection to the land.

Alan Savory, a wild life biologist working in Zimbabwe, in attempting to restore wild places, advocated removing mammals, specifically elephants and humans from a huge degraded land area. He learned by observation that the land area that was vacated became more degraded. Through what he called, “the saddest and greatest blunder of my life” he learned that people and livestock are an essential part of the landscape. They need to be managed properly, though, in order not to degrade their land. Alan Savory, who now lives and works from New Mexico, learned to manage cattle by simulating the bison grazing patterns of early North America. By doing this he was able to improve the soil over time and restore the most degraded landscapes.

For us to continue to enjoy our connection to the land we could learn from Alan Savory that people who love the land will tend to manage it so that it does not degrade but improves over time.