Posted via email from Matt Mitchell’s posterous

The purpose of this quest is to see the world as it once was. To experience its growth and life as it would be without human intervention. Seek out an old-growth forest, or the nearest thing you can come by in your area. With great care to keep from getting lost, go as far away from the beaten path as you comfortably can.

The only thing that matters is that you have gone into the heart of a still-wild place.

List of old-growth forests:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old_growth_forests

A fireplace reminds me of home

Wood fire burning is greener than most other heating options
Besides saving money, another reason I want to switch is because it’s more environmentally friendly than most other options. Air Emissions from Residential Heating: The Wood Heating Option Put into Environmental Perspective, a paper delivered to the 1998 Air and Waste Management Association conference concluded that “wood combustion has the lowest greenhouse gas and acid precipitation impacts per unit of heat delivered among the energy options.”

Firewood as a sustainable resource
Another reason I want to switch is because of the availability of wood. In my travels I often find trees downed in yards or across roads or just laying in the woods. I have yet to find a felled tree that an owner wouldn’t be happy to be rid of, especially when I would cut it up and haul it away for free. This may not always be the case, mind you, but for now it is. I could heat my home with what I find laying on the ground for free, and that is a whole lot cheaper than electricity anywhere. Even if there wasn’t plenty of wood laying around waiting to be cut up and hauled off, when a forest is managed properly it is an infinitely sustainable resource for firewood.

Safety
There are some safety issues to consider. I have a friend whose house burned down about five years ago. The fire started in his chimney. According to him, he didn’t know how often he should have his chimney cleaned and waited too long to have it done. The soot buildup inside the chimney caught fire and his house was burned flat in an hour. But if you have a professional chimney sweep install your fireplace and have it cleaned regularly, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to enjoy wood heat forever.

See also: woodheat.org
Image by Kazy79

• Simplifies her/his life
• Improves her/his life
• Improves her/his relationship with Earth

This is a brief explanation of my family’s situation as it stands and what led to our current SQ, as well as how we’re working toward maximizing our SQ.

The situation as it was
We bought our dream home 3 years ago. We live in a 2600 sq ft house on six acres of property. The acreage is long and  narrow and the house is roughly in the middle of it. The house was ten years old when we bought it. We have two sons who are (as of today) 5 and 3 yrs old. Our problems are modern problems, shared by many and many people throughout the world:

• Electricity for our first year in our home cost us double what we’d been paying in our previous home.
• We thought about planting a garden but didn’t (even though that was one of the reasons I cast my vote to buy this house in the first place–I wanted a small farm). Things were just too hectic at the time. It turned out that during our first summer here (that would be the summer of ‘07) a drought crippled most of the South, so if we had’ve grown a garden just trying to keep it watered would have tapped our monthly budget dry anyway.
• The majority of our food was pre-packaged, processed garbage.
• 90% of the time my lunches at work involved a drive through a fast food joint.

I suppose I don’t have to give many more details. I’m sure you get the point: I was a new dad in a new home with limited resources just trying to get by from paycheck to paycheck. My cholesterol ballooned, along with my blood pressure, I began carrying around  extra weight that I wasn’t used to (I maxed out at 16 stone on my 6′3″ frame), and I developed sleep apnea. Suddenly my propensity to environmentalism and conservationism weren’t just things which could help the world around me, I realized my own body needed a little of that attention too.

So I took inventory of my life.  I looked at what I had and realized that in fact I had it pretty good. And if I could convince my family to make some small adjustments then I thought we would be okay.

1. We could make this large lot into the small farm of my dreams.
2. We could live harmoniously with the Earth.
3. We could raise healthier children, and be healthier ourselves, too.

It turned out that my wife wanted many of the same things I did, so the convincing wasn’t so hard at all. Having a small farm became our family’s responsibility to itself. So we began developing a plan, and along the way I started calling the process our [re]evolution. Now, everything we do in our attempt to live better and improve our relationship with the environment is just one more step in the [re]evolution of our family. And this website, [re]evolver, is the story of that process.

The situation as it stands
The inventory of our lives as they are is not entirely bad, but there’s a lot we can do to improve. Currently we are a household which has:

• shunned HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup).
• ceased eating fast food and begun cooking healthy family meals from scratch.
• changed out all our lightbulbs to CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs).
• planted an herb garden.
• planted peach trees.
• transplanted numerous trees which were about to be destroyed, incl. some oak and yellow poplar.
• instituted our own recycling program.

So we’ve got a foundation to build upon. And in this blog I’ll keep you up to date on our efforts as we embark upon them, as we try to get healthier, wealthier and wiser all at the same time.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
One day soon the field they’re plowing in the picture above will be supplying my family with vegetables. I’m planning to plant my own garden this season, but I have a full-time job and don’t have the spare time to dedicate to raising all our food myself. The CSA program could supply our family with vibrant, wholesome, organic, seasonal and local food. The cost of this program is $50 weekly for a full portion or $30 weekly for a half portion. The list of food he grows is impressive, and the website includes recipes for those of us who have no idea what to do with Swiss chard.

See also: Find your own CSA.

Garden
I don’t have a tiller, but Ispoke with my neighbor last week who has a tractor and he’s agreed to disc a small area for me. When the threat of frost is over, I’ll start planting. My intentions at this point are to grow food which I’ll preserve after harvest.

Chickens
I have been given an ancient chicken coop. It’s falling in and surrounded by a forest, but I’m going to recycle it for use as my own chicken coop. Once I’ve disassembled it and rebuilt it on my property, I’ll add a fence and a few hens and at least one rooster. I have ordered Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens, which I’m told is the definitive book on the subject.

Water conservation
I found a place which has some 55gal plastic barrels for sale for $5 each. I’m going to buy a few of them and attach them to my downspouts for watering my gardens and fruit trees.

Fireplace
Our home has electric heat. As a backup the previous owners (who were also the builders) installed an un-vented gas-log fireplace. But when they built the house they designed it to be built with a wood-burning fireplace installed, so there is a chimney. It has a hearth and it has the chimney cap. It only needs a flue and a wood-burning firebox installed in place of the un-vented gas-log insert. So I’m checking prices on fireboxes…

• See also: Why I am switching to wood.

Clearing invasive species
Chinese privet hedge = the bane of my existence. There are worse things to have, like kudzu, for instance, but privet hedge is bad enough. Especially when it takes over a forest like it has on my land. To eradicate it I’ll have to get a chainsaw. I am soon to buy a chainsaw to assist me in my efforts.

Wolves grow a new coat and gather into their packs, approaching winter with an almost-jubilant expectation. They get tired of living off of mice and voles. They want to kick up some snow… they look forward to the running of the caribou. But chipmunks are gatherers. They spend warm-weather months hoarding food and, when the cold finally comes, they hunker down amidst their wealth and sleep.

People are like that too. We make sure we’ve got firewood and food and then we hunker down for the long, dark, cold wait. Our stocks dwindle. The days grow longer and shadows grow shorter and we find ourselves curled up beneath blankets at dusk, hoping to hurry the calendar along. When we sense we’ve made the turn, when we know we’re past the winter solstice, we begin grasping for the vernal equinox with an eagerness that rivals a wolf’s desire for winter. And when spring finally rolls back ’round we get busy tilling and planting, getting fresh greenstuff back into our diets as quickly as we can.

I am long-removed from those harried times of humanity. And yet, as the vernal approaches, I find the same eager electricity sizzling in my fingertips. It’s an urgency of spirit that’s ingrained in our species, it’s coded in our DNA. In the spring I will build a chicken coop and till the soil and dig water lines and run electrical circuits to a shed that’s only ever been dark. In reality, modern conveniences have done away with those needs. But I’m still left with the inclination.

I know now that I can have bananas year-round because they truck them up from somewhere tropical and damn the effect on the environment. If I’m willing to do without taste, I can have tomatoes, too, any time I want them. I just have to plunk over the change. I don’t even know what winter vegetables are any more. I understand that there was a time when it was essential that I know, as a human, what would grow and at what time of year to grow it in. The modern age has made convenience so necessary, however, that we’re losing touch with those things that we once relied upon for survival. What do we do if those conveniences go away? Is that even possible?

This year I’m amending my approach to spring only slightly: in addition to enjoying the season I’m also going to consider the coming autumn. I will no longer take the passage of winter lightly. I’m going to meet the beast head on, with supplies to survive regardless of whether I need them or not. Because someday I might.

Photograph by [re]evolver staff photographer Hampton Taylor.

No flavor enhancers. No preservatives. No artificial sweeteners. Just pure, wholesome (preferably local), foods. You know you’ve been wanting to do this anyway, right? Well. Now you have an excuse. Your quest is this: Stop eating unhealthy, unnatural food, and start eating whole foods for at least 30 days. Mark it on a calendar if you have to.

You can also use this rule of thumb for manufactured foods: nothing with more than three ingredients. You could live for a month and never eat the same thing twice just by shopping in the canned foods aisle. Never mind that there’s an entire produce and meat department you can also choose your food from. Here’s a nice rule to follow for this month if you’re shopping at a grocer: buy food only that is shelved on the perimeter aisle. That’s where most of your natural foods are located. Your best bet though is to ditch the grocer altogether and start shopping at a farmer’s market.

And what do you aim to gain from this experiment? Well, health, for one. One month eating like this can reshape your body and health and put your cholesterol and blood pressure back in line. One month can make a remarkable difference, try it and you’ll see.

And, as an added bonus, it’d be nice for you to realize that whole food isn’t as difficult to prepare as some might think. Some people think that food fresh out of the ground is gross (they do!!), but we know that’s not the truth, right? Give me a tomato with a little dirt on the side that’s free of pesticides and I’ll wipe it off with my thumb and eat it in three bites or less, head reeling at the wonder of how sublimely wonderful a fresh, ripe tomato tastes. That’s another thing this quest can teach you: Tomatoes you buy at the store are not ripe. They are picked green and allowed to “ripen” in transit. If you think a supermarket tomato is the best it gets, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Supermarket tomatoes might look red, but they are as green as can be.

So. What can you eat? Simple. Just follow these simple rules:

• Eat nothing that is man made. Eat only whole foods (and this includes condiments!). Nuts, fruits, vegetables, grains and seeds in their unprocessed, natural form.
• Animal whole foods are fish, eggs, shellfish, fowl. Larger animals count too: venison, beef, pork, etc.
• Drink nothing but water, coffee, 100% fruit juice, wine or tea. Yes, whiskey and beer are probably all natural, too.
• Meat does qualify as a natural food, but beware of steroids hormones fed to the animals while they were alive.
• High fructose corn syrup, though made from corn, is not considered a natural food.
• When cooking whole foods, don’t use unhealthy fat to cook them in. Use olive oil (which is heavy) or sesame oil (light) or something in between.
• Always choose organic: if it’s not labeled organic, a vegetable might have pesticide residue on it. Milk may have steroids or hormones in it. Stay organic whenever you can.
• Can’t stand the thought of going without butter? Make your own.

Photo credit: mutantMandias

This quest is about reconnecting with Mother Earth in a way that people rarely do any more. It’s not unusual for people to dig holes, but these days it is unusual for us to dig a hole and actually pay attention to what we’re doing. Digging is usually, like everything else, a means to an end. We dig a hole to plant a seed or a tree or to set a post, but rarely do we put our hands in the earth just to experience Earth.

In this quest, the digging is the end means, so take your time and do it right. Use a tool or don’t, either way, but don’t use gloves. Get your hands down in the soil and smell it, feel its texture and temperature. Investigate its nuances, its roots, seeds, creatures. Is it rocky or sandy? Is it red or is it rich and black? What does it smell like? What’s its personality?

Take the opportunity, if you like, to plant a seed. An acorn would be a good idea to mark the occasion and provide a constant remembrance of your experience with Earth. Or set a post with a birdhouse on top of it, or just cover the hole back in. Whatever you choose to do, do it for the experience and for knowing that without this wondrous cocktail of growth and decay we wouldn’t exist at all.

1. Pick out a collection of items that you own and that have some value to you.
2. Place them in a container.
3. Now: take it somewhere and bury it.

The container you choose can be anything from a cigar box to a Tupperware container, although in this case the more magical, the more rustic the container looks, the better. Caution: Do not include anything of any real value, nor any questionable items that you might be embarrassed to have found. But you certainly want to include items which, if by happenstance your treasure was found, would not easily be discarded.

When you bury it, choose a location where it will not be discovered by accident, and not on any property that you, your family, or any of your friends own. That’s where it gets tricky. You must bury the treasure in an isolated area, on public land, and do so in such a way as will not be harmful to the environment surrounding it. I can’t suggest you bury your treasure chest on private property, but I wouldn’t tell anyone if you did. The key is for your treasure to go undiscovered, to never be found, until you return for it (Hint: At some point in the future, you may be directed to return for it). Wherever you bury it, make sure you don’t get arrested or shot, unless you’re just itching to have some really cool new scars to show off.

As for the depth of the hole you must dig…it really doesn’t matter. Dig as deep or shallow as you want to, so long as the container is completely concealed underneath the ground. You might want to push some ground cover over the freshly turned dirt to make it less noticeable.

Once you’ve buried it, draw a map to remind you how to get back to it. Be very specific–use a lot of detail. Feel free to use a map printed from any mapping software, but add notes and key landmarks to guide you back to the exact location, perhaps even counting paces from landmarks in specified directions. Even though it’s fine to use mapping software, however, it is very much preferable to draw it entirely yourself. However you craft your map, be absolutely certain that one day you’ll be able to lead yourself, or someone else (wink wink) back the exact spot.

As a precaution, it would be a good idea to mark the spot with a GPS device if you have one, but it’s not required. The most important aspect of this quest is to craft a really excellent map, and to surrender control of some moderately valuable belongings.

Be sure to keep the map in a safe place.

What kind of items should you include? Well, items like:

• A favorite book (although if you include a book you might want to put it in a Ziploc).
• A craft item that you created yourself.
• Something you found in the woods: A feather, claw, antler or arrowhead. Even a pretty rock.
• A scrapbook.
• Anything collectible.
• Make the chest as large or as small as you like, and include as many items or as few as you like. You decide.

This is a good quest to do in unison with the Dig quest. Two for one!

Once your chest is ready, take a picture of it so we can see what it looks like! You can put a link to the pic in the comments below.

Image credit: ToNToN CoPT

1. Badminton
2. Baseball
3. Basketball
4. Bicycling
5. Bocce
6. Bowling
7. Boxing
8. Canning
9. Canoeing
10. Chopping wood
11. Climb a tree
12. Cornholing
13. Dancing
14. Dodgeball
15. Dogsledding
16. Field bowling
17. Field hockey
18. Fishing
19. Football
20. Frisbee
21. Gardening
22. Golf
23. Hiking
24. Hockey
25. Horseshoes
26. Hula hoop
27. Hunting
28. Ice skating
29. Jump rope
30. Kayaking
31. Kickball
32. Kite flying
33. Lacrosse
34. Laser Tag
35. Martial Arts
36. Paintball
37. Ping-pong
38. Pitch -n- catch
39. Rappelling
40. Rock climbing
41. Roller blading
42. Sailing
43. Skateboarding
44. Skating
45. Skiing
46. Soccer
47. Softball
48. Swimming
49. Tag
50. Tennis
51. Trampoline
52. Unicycling
53. Volleyball
54. Walking
55. Wii games

Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments.

Image by dOOMZ. This article first appeared in Unabashed.