This past summer, a housemate of mine lent me a book called Wild Fermentation, written by Sandor Ellix Katz and published by the Chelsea Green Publishing Company of White River Junction. It’s at once a recipe book, a history book, and a manifesto, all centered on the various microbial food-making processes known collectively as fermentation. Reading it was a revelation for me. Food and food preparation suddenly had a whole new dimension that I’d barely considered before.

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I spent the month of February, in of 2007, learning to farm organically. I was, almost literally, in la-la land. My hosts Suzanne and Alvaro moved there with their six children after fleeing Chile for political reasons in the 1960’s. The “town” of Lalla, located in a dry area east of the “city” of Launceston, is just an old railroad stop.  Strathewan, the name of the remote Tasmanian farm where I worked, receives mail in “Lalla”-land. This is the epitome of rural Tasmania. But however surreal Strathewan provided a remarkable lesson in advancing sustainability.

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Note from the editors: This article was originally published in The Green Magazine back in fall of 2006, when the Focus the Nation event was more than a year off. It was prescient then, and has never been more timely than it is now. Sustainable Dartmouth, the College’s umbrella environmentalist organization, is currently brainstorming and planning ways for Dartmouth to get involved with Focus the Nation. To get involved, blitz SD.

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Even though images in the pool seem so blurry, grasp the main thing” – Rilke

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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, tells the story of how societies in the past disappeared because they over-exploited their environment. Written by Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond, Collapse is a pertinent, probing discussion not only of how societies have failed, but in what ways a society such as our own, and individuals within it, may avoid comparable failure and subsequent near-or-total extinction.

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The Green Magazine has once again taken over the pages of the Dartmouth Free Press, an infrequent ritual designed to bring a little-known but critical magazine into the Dartmouth limelight. In this issue, a former Green Magazine editor-in-chief discusses how she was converted from a debutante into a crunchy activist. Other Green Magazine contributors discuss their experiences on organic farms, and the fun they’ve had learning to ferment their own food. And while there are some articles in this issue that underscore the precarious state of the world, and the need for immediate, drastic changes to our lifestyles, the real point of this issue is that environmental living is fulfilling. The crunchy folk are doing what they love and living better than any I-banker ever could.

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