Inspiration
What Can One Person Do?
Karen’s story, as written by Elizabeth Sawin of the
Sustainability Institute, takes place in a Palo Alto neighborhood. The
story beautifully illustrates that change can begin with our homes and
yards – one yard can become a community garden and a source of
food, creativity, and involvement.
One person – one ordinary person – can do quite a lot if she sets her mind to it. If you want proof, just ask my friend Karen Harwell, or better yet, visit her Dana Meadows Children’s Garden. Once it was an ordinary house and yard on an ordinary street in a small California city, but today it is a humming, buzzing, quacking swirl of life and fragrance and color, and a haven for the neighborhood children.
One sixth of an acre – with a four-bedroom house sitting in the center of it – is not a lot of land, but every square inch of exposed soil is part of Karen’s experiment. Every inch is alive with complexity and interconnection. Duck manure fertilizes lemon trees. Honeybees pollinate the avocado blossoms. Mint plants grow in the shade of a wisteria. And all of it is one answer to: ”what can one person do?”
One person can:
Plant 18 semi-dwarf fruit trees - avocados, grapefruits, cherries, pears, lemons, apples, figs.
Build a pen and fill it with four ducks. Build a tiny pond, for the ducks to swim in. Install a hive of honey-bees behind the duck pond.
Invite the kids over to build wooden flats for seeds when spring arrives. The next weekend have them back to plant seeds in the flats that they built. As the season progresses, transplant the children’s seedlings and water and weed and harvest. Do it alone or, if one wanders by, with a child.
Listen to the kids as they pass through the garden on their way home from school, fresh picked cherries in their hands. (You mean you can come here whenever you want? Without asking?)
Come home to find a note from an eight-year-old neighbor stuck to the door (I think the cantaloupe is ready to pick.)
Come home to find a message on the answering machine (I ate the last two plums from the tree. They were soooo good. There must be something to this organic business.)
Show the world that moving towards sustainability isn’t a chore or a sacrifice or deprivation but a dance of delight, a chance to connect, a way to come to life.
That’s what one person can do (at least for now; she is not finished yet.) One person can create something beautiful, something life-giving. Picture thousands of us, like Karen, answering “what can one person do” with whatever beauty is wanting to come out of us. Now, picture ten-thousand people!
Elizabeth R. Sawin and the Our Climate Ourselves Program of Sustainability Institute, Hartland Vermont.
