Gazing at the winter wonderland outside my window, I want to congratulate Mother Nature for doing what she's "supposed" to be doing at this time of the year — replenishing our water table — but the fact is that she really hasn't been doing such a great a job of it. This, in late January, is only our second little snowfall and the drought conditions of last fall will still be there to greet us at spring planting time unless we get some serious precipitation sometime soon. So please, bring on the snow!

On the other hand, the snow makes it very difficult or impossible to complete some tasks which must be completed very soon. I had wanted to move the greenhouse from right in front of the barn to a spot above the A section of the Church Field beds so that, as soon as we raise the funds to do so, we could build another, larger, greenhouse right next to it, above the B section of beds. This fall, I figured we had a good crew of interns who could complete the project before they moved on, but it didn't quite work out that way — they're long gone and there's only a skeleton of a greenhouse in place, an open trench awaiting water and power lines and ground that is frozen and snow covered. We need to be planting seeds in trays by about February 20th, inside a greenhouse, so a break in the snow would be appreciated so that we can bring the greenhouse to an operational state. Karline is my only helper at this time, or, more accurately, Karline, with her three years of experience here and her ability to keep plugging away under conditions that would frustrate newer workers, is the only person making any progress at all in the garden at this point. I'm spending most of my time indoors, recruiting shareholders and interns, searching for a farm manager, writing funding proposals with Louise and pursuing the many different projects that advance our mission.

So, you might ask, just what is our mission? Well, the mission of Maysie's Farm Conservation Center is "to improve public understanding of the importance of conservation and ecological thinking." While that's certainly a very broad mission, I feel its breadth is justified by the breadth of the subject area. Conservation is a very broad topic and reaches into all aspects of our lives, from the food we eat to the energy we use to the waste we produce. Every lifestyle choice we make (and most are made without realizing that we have a choice) has an impact on other organisms in our ecosystem and thus on the stability of the ecosystem itself. The cumulative effect of all our individual impacts is something that our ecosystem is not prepared to handle, because in the billions of years that it has been evolving, our ecosystem has never before been assaulted by such a large population of such a high impact species as we humans today represent.

I expect you all already understand that the single greatest issue affecting the ecological health of the planet (or of the microcosm we call Chester County) is the unprecedented explosion in the number of humans living here, but to reinforce that understanding, let's look at the statistics one more time. The world population of humans has been growing since the first humans appeared several million years ago, but experts estimate that it was not until around 1830 that the global population reached one billion people. But then we reached two billion around 1930, and three billion around 1960, and four billion in 1975, five billion in 1987 and six billion in October of 1999. This has never happened before. It's happening right now, in our lifetimes, for the first time.

Ten or even fifteen years ago, I was able to claim that the world population had already doubled in my lifetime alone, from around two and a half billion to over five billion, and that it was expected to double again, to ten billion by the time I reached eighty years of age (which won't be tomorrow or the next day, but which will be soon enough). And I would ask, "What are we going to do with another five billion people?" How crowded will it become in our lifetimes? How intense will the competition be within this expanding population for the resources that are available on this planet in only limited quantities? How will the other systems with which we share this world be impacted by this extreme, rapid and unprecedented change?

The solution to this dilemma is not just better technology (such as converting to sustainable agriculture and solar power, though these are necessary steps), and it's not just conservation of our resources (though that is vitally important), and it's not even just controlling the growth of our population (though that must be done, and as quickly as possible); the solution requires a "paradigm shift," a widespread change in our attitudes so that these other changes can realistically take place. We must adopt an attitude of reconciliation towards the other species of the world and towards the other members of our own species. To quote an earlier newsletter, "as individuals, as nations, as a species, we must adopt a more humble self image." We must understand that we are all a part of nature, not something standing apart from it or above it; that we're all in it together.

That sounds simple enough, simplistic even, but, given the realities of our everyday lives, it's not so simple. Our mission at Maysie's Farm Conservation Center is to work towards that paradigm shift, to improve public understanding of the importance, the urgency, of conservation and ecological thinking and to encourage the changes in every aspect of our lives that a livable future demands. Since we at Maysie's Farm are neither equipped nor inclined to commit to the number one issue of population control, we have focused on the number two issue facing our exploding population: the production and distribution of food. We work towards our mission by demonstrating and advocating organic food production, local food production and the development of community around food production — these ideas that CSAs so effectively exemplify. So, we hope that as you consume our food, which should benefit your personal health, our farms ecological health and our local area's community health, you will also absorb some of our educational efforts, which should ultimately benefit the planet's health. We're all part of the problem. Let's at least try to be part of the solution as well.

I hope to see you at our Midwinter Membership Meeting on Saturday, February 16th, and if good weather and sufficient personnel haven't come together by then, maybe some of you could spare a small amount of time to help cover the greenhouse. That would be a nice solution to that little problem.