The Connections Between Us

There is a fine line between enthusiasm and rudeness, and I have definitely skirted it in getting myself invited to WWOOF at Tui Community. Though the Christmas holidays fall in the middle of the summer here, the locals still like to take time out to be with their families, so this ecovillage is closed to both WWOOFers and visitors until the 25^th of January. Luckily for me, araLynn, the visitor coordinator, is much more polite than I, so my repeated entreaties eventually gained me a bed in the visitor lodge. Just as I was feeling very fortunate to be invited (and also a little sheepish at having been so insistent), I had to call them back to ask whether I could bring a friend, because I’m no longer traveling solo.

A lot has happened in the last two weeks, so I had better catch you up. I left Treehugger Organics on Boxing Day for the city of Dunedin, where I spent two days stocking up on essentials like cheese and propane before heading up to Queenstown to hike the Rees-Dart Track. The weather cycled from gloriously hot and sunny on the first day to freezing downpour on New Year’s Eve, back to fine, back to pouring, and finally nice again for my walk out, a week after my start. I met some excellent folks, saw all kinds of native birds (including two rare New Zealand falcons and a kea), and completely overused my knees. It was great.

Once back in Queenstown, the plan was to meet up with Kat, drive the West Coast from south to north and end up in Golden Bay, where Tui is located. By the sort of bizarre coincidence that only happens when all your friends are nomads, Jonathan, one of my new tramping buddies, knew Kat from college. The four of us, including his friend Eric, spent a perfect day rock climbing in Queenstown before the big drive. For the next five days Katrina and I took in the tourist sights, including the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers, the pancake rocks at Punakaiki, and a whole lot of weka and fur seals. We camped on a beach in the rain, walked through a limestone karst landscape, and swam in the green Buller River. We even got to drive all the way to the northernmost tip of the South Island, a great curving expanse of sand called Farewell Spit. We felt recharged, ready to stop spending every evening looking for a place to pitch our tents, ready to dig back into the dirt.

Which is a good thing, because after a hurried arrival and a late night, our first job is road maintenance. More specifically, grading a dirt road with mattock and shovel. It’s grueling work, energetic, and hard on the hands and body. To make matters worse, it’s a hot, sunny day in Golden Bay, and we area sweating immediately. Exactly why was I so eager to get here, anyway?

Ever since I spent three months at the Findhorn Foundation Ecovillage in Scotland, I’ve been quite keen to visit other intentional communities. Partly it’s that I need something to contrast that experience against, and no matter how much I read about Twin Oaks, Dancing Rabbit and Ithaca, it’s impossible to get a genuine understanding of any community until you spend some time there. Though there are lots of similarities, every community does things differently, and I’m fascinated by the little bits of social technology that are helping real people get along in groups. Mostly, though, I’ve come to Tui because I feel like I was born with an open space in my heart. Findhorn plugged that hole right up, and from the day I left there I’ve been seeking to fill it again, if only for a little while.

Tui immediately reminds me of Findhorn in a thousand small particulars, from the funkiness of the half-finished cob mailbox to the abundance of the path-side gardens, the loose colorful clothing to the lived-in feeling of the community house. It’s not that any one thing is the same, or even very similar, but rather that the whole place radiates a familiar feeling of having been built with quiet passion one brick at a time and then heavily used with appreciation and love for many years. Like at Findhorn, members have employed their artistic talents to create a beautiful and inspiring place (one house has a roof sculpted into a dragon), and like at Findhorn, Kat and I are welcomed with smiles and enthusiasm.

The ecosystem and physical environment are extremely inviting, as well. Tui sits about a hundred meters up the road from the northern entrance to Abel Tasman National Park, a place that is famous beyond the shores of New Zealand for its beauty, wildlife and excellent hiking (or tramping, as it’s called here). It’s a ten-minute walk from the community house to the beach at Wainui Bay, a very wide, very shallow blue-green inlet that gets as warm as bath water when the tide seeps in over several kilometers of hot sand. The climate is mild enough to permit tropical trees like grapefruit and loquat, the ground never freezes even in July, and the only impediment to an overabundant garden is sandy soils combined with occasional water scarcity. Keith, our supervisor on half of our working days, has constructed a series of raised beds in his yard that overflow with everything from highbush blueberry and strawberry to corn, tomatoes, greens and tree fruit. I feel a little pang of jealousy for the gardeners who are fortunate enough to live here.

Not that it’s only the gardeners who benefit from this lovely place. Tui is 25 years old, making it a grandparent among intentional communities. Only the hardiest of those creatures hatched during the gentle hippie climate of the 70’s have flourished and grown in the meantime, while most of the original communes have faded away. Just a few of Tui’s founders are still around, but plenty of new ones have shown up in the meantime; the community currently averages about 35 members, including a handful of young kids, and there is a waiting list of determined folks seeking long-term membership.

This makes Tui about one tenth the size of Findhorn, and I find that the dynamic is quite different. While my three months at Findhorn was long enough for me to learn to recognize by sight many of the people there, I couldn’t possibly get to know everyone, or even shake every hand. I thought the smaller size might make Tui more accessible, and I did get to know a dozen or so of the members through daily jobs, community meals and other avenues. Still, after a stay of 11 days, there were members I never even saw. My friend Gary, a fellow WWOOFer and three-time Tui visitor, mentioned that the community seemed more insular and less welcoming now than in the past. I think it’s a size that feels especially vulnerable to the relentless flow of visitors (like me) who are just dying to come have a look. Any smaller, and the visitors are mostly friends of members, so strangers land gently among members. If the group is much larger, the general chaos becomes routine; in Findhorn the permanent residents seemed to feel less wearied by new faces, and therefore more able to jump forward to meet them.

Though it may have more trouble with the tensions caused by visitors, a group of 35 is a much more manageable size for decision making. Katrina and I were lucky enough to be allowed to attend a weekly meeting, wherein about 20 members gathered to discuss community issues like one child’s special need for patience, hosting a field day for the fire department, and whether to cut a tree in the upper section of the property. Consensus can be difficult even with a small group, and one particular Tui adaptation to streamline the process involves colored cards. When a member is speaking, other members can hold up a green card to silently signal agreement, a yellow to ask a question, or a red if they have a serious objection. This helps facilitator handle members’ input better, and lets people give their opinions without interrupting the speaker more than necessary, reducing everyone’s frustration with long meetings. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to observe this process as it is supposed to operate, as no one could locate the cards. Even a well-designed social system isn’t foolproof!

Even with great tools like input cards, it’s not easy to get along in a group. We witnessed enough of what is commonly known in community circles as “process” for Kat to sicken of hearing the word. For instance, there is an open question at Tui about how to interact with the thousands of people per year who drive right past the community’s front door to access Abel Tasman. Running a café catering to trampers would bring income into the community and provide jobs for members, but it would also expose the community to a lot more through-traffic, reducing the feeling of insulation from the outside world that many members value.

The community already collaborates on several business ventures; Tui Bee Balms employs six members to make environmentally-friendly skin salves and bug repellants, while periodic workshops such as the Permaculture Design Certification course require lots of member energy on a less regular basis. Because the community is in an isolated rural area, there are few nearby job opportunities, and community businesses support some people to live at Tui who would otherwise not be able to. Another business would increase the community’s economic security, even as it reduced their physical safety.

Support, I think, is the crux of the matter. This includes the sort of emotional support and understanding one parent received at the community meeting when he spoke about his young son’s behavioral difficulties, and the pain it is causing his child, his family and himself. It includes the support of knowing that your neighbors are also your friends, that they share your values, and that they will watch out for you. It certainly includes the support Katrina and I have been giving each other as we share our (admittedly mobile) two-woman household, cooking together, cleaning and laundering together, making all our decisions together, and collaborating in work and in play. Getting empathy, a quiet neighborhood and a little help with the dishes makes life a lot easier and friendlier, and it’s a heart-rending thing that so many of us live without these things. In spite of the value we put on indulging our individuality, we really do need these kinds of ‘soft’ support, and it is a worthy life’s work for all of us to figure out how to get them.

Even more important, though, is getting back the ‘hard’ support that small, tight-knit communities used to provide. I’m not just talking about a peaceful setting, but the true peace of mind that results from knowing that though the weather may turn cold and foul, this small group is committed to each other. The world may change beyond recognition in the years to come, but the tough decisions will be made together. The global economy may dismember itself spectacularly into a thousand thrashing severed limbs, but the group can make sure that every member is fed and housed, because though we all have different strengths and weaknesses, there is muscle and ingenuity enough between us to provide for us all. As my friend Craig from Findhorn frequently says, “The abundance is in the connections between us.”

Tui, like all intentional communities, is a work in progress. They are busily going through the process, striving to agree when they can, compromise when they can’t, and support each other as well as possible. By developing their economic potential along with their social interconnectedness, they are laying the groundwork to continue to grow and thrive for another 25 years, and beyond. I hope any community I am fortunate enough to become a part of can do as well.

The Ethic or the Egg?

Like every conscious person, I face a thousand questions every day. Where can I find meaning in my life? What can I do to make a real difference in the world? How did a city girl from Alaska end up in rural New Zealand with a chicken down her shirt? And what, above all, shall I have for breakfast? Though it seems mundane, that last conundrum is the most significant, precisely because its solution has the power to answer the other three. Especially the one about the chicken.

Though they’ve been managing this almost-oceanfront property for several years, Nath and Steph Davis have only recently purchased Treehugger Organics, and are in the process of shifting away from mixed veggies toward small fruits and garlic. The produce is sold along with other organic products through their tiny on-site shop.

This arrangement is practically the holy grail for small farmers, because it means they cut out middle men such as wholesale buyers, processors, advertizers, shipping companies and grocery stores. I’m not sure what the numbers are like in this country, but in the U.S. farmers get an average of only 19 cents of every consumer dollar spent on food, and for some items it is much less (processed potato chips like Ruffles, for example, yield only 2 cents per dollar). Farmers who can connect directly with their customers get a fairer slice, but shops like Treehugger’s are a rare sight in the U.S. since big-business organics dealers like Wholefoods appeared on the scene.

Treehugger also boasts a free-range flock of about 40 layers and 20 or so maturing pullets, including the lucky chicken who is now making little chicken noises from inside my bra. Or rather, the very unlucky chicken who had the misfortune to be hatched to an inexperienced mother several days ago. My fellow WWOOFer Katrina Salmons was headed out for the morning feeding when she saw a nervous red hen and her four tiny chicks wandering outside the pen.

“Free range” isn’t supposed to mean wandering at will through the raspberry patch, where any passing predator can have a go at helpless chickies. Kat and Nath eventually managed to get them back into the pen, albeit with much distressed clucking by both the chickens and the people. All seemed well until I went out to fill the watering cans, and found the little family had scattered again. We caught one chick in the pen and two just outside of it, putting them safely in the breeder box. Mom and the other baby were in the nearby woods, circling a nest containing broken shells and a dozen unhatched eggs.

“Never mind the chick, the mom’s more important,” said Katrina, so we went after her with a trout net. We hoped that with mom in the box the other three chicks would be kept warm, and the fourth would likely hear her clucking and turn up. The snag in our brilliant plan was Mom’s unclipped wings. We chased her around and around a snarl of deadwood under the trees, clucking and screeching all the while like a mad thing (the chicken, not us. Well, maybe we screeched a little bit). Katrina finally cornered her, but with an explosion of flapping she escaped, and flew to a high perch. While looking for the baby, who was nowhere to be seen, I got tangled in a bundle of old wire and fell gracelessly on my butt. Flustered, frustrated and mildly bruised, we gave up and went to pick strawberries.

When we came to collect eggs that afternoon, the missing chick was just beside the box, gasping and spasming. Baby birds have a difficult time regulating their body temperature, and this one had gotten very cold while his mom was bawk-bawking her silly brains out halfway up a pine. The heat lamp seemed to revive him, but though his siblings have grown in the two days since the dramatic capture, he has not. Today the unpredictable South Island climate turned cold and rainy, and I found my baby bawk splay-legged and squint-eyed, unresponsive on the straw. That’s when I stuck him in my shirt to warm up.

This was not the action of a hopeless softie. I’ve been respectfully sending salmon to the fishy hereafter by means of any convenient blunt object since the age of three, and I’ve even slaughtered cute cuddly meat rabbits. The eggs I had for breakfast may have been fertilized, and the spinach that went in the omelet most certainly was (when I picked it, I saw the maturing seed heads at the top of the flower spike). You may gather that I consider myself a contemplative eater; I do not grieve over every embryonic spinach, but I am not insensitive to the right of other organisms to live. I abhor commercial meat production methods and other types of animal exploitation, and I think about the ethics of eating every time I take a bite. Most people consider animals to be entitled to more rights than plants, but whether I am consuming a side of beef or just a handful of lettuce, I am swallowing something’s future. Even a lettuce values its future.

My baby bawk has no more hope for a future than a fertilized egg, and probably somewhat less. Weak chicks become weak layers, and a small farm with very limited resources can’t afford to feed weak layers. If he is, as I suspect, a rooster, he’s destined for the pot anyway, since a flock can only have one alpha male. I won’t feel bad if my baby bawk meets either of these fates, because in natural systems weak genes are better kept out of the pool. The immature are also fairer game, because the transfer of energy up the trophic levels is more efficient when fewer of the ecosystem’s precious resources have been invested in an individual. Think of it this way: the younger the deer that meets the wolf’s jaws, the fewer the blades of grass that are sacrificed. And as Katrina said, moms really are more important, because successful breeding females represent the community’s best return for the resources it has invested. Cultural morals that require every being to have a “fair shot” or a “good run” actually constitute ecological waste, a crime which is usually punished by quick deletion from the collective gene bank.

Therefore, a chicken down the shirt is probably even more ridiculous than it sounds, ecologically and energetically speaking. Nevertheless, I have given over the only electrical outlet in my room to baby bawk’s heating pad, which means my own heater will remain cold on this rainy night. The impulse to protect a newborn is stronger than cuteness alone could possibly motivate, so the question I face tonight is this: why is it that an egg that might have a future can be cracked into a pan by even a thoughtful eater, but a gasping chick cannot be suffered to gasp its last?

It must be that every puff of feathers newly hatched seems unbearably precious, not because of what it is (a future chicken dinner), but what it represents (hope, or something like it). It is as if my baby bawk’s tiny white eggtooth stands for every shell that will ever break. His little peep heralds the continuance of life through the night and into the morning, making visible to us the hurtling progress of the generations, egg after chicken after egg.

But that’s silly. It’s one of Darwin’s sacred rules that overproduction of offspring is essential to the survival and evolution of every species. Every life cannot be saved, nor should it, if we want the next generation to be even more functional than this one. Still, it seems that to let a newborn die is to sever a link in the great unbroken chain of beating hearts, a chain which stretches from the first ancient glimmers of self-replication on into the endless expanse of our planet’s unknown future. When environmental conditions are changing so quickly that it's uncertain whether anything but the roaches can keep up, every link becomes invaluable; as Atwood's Crake would say, all it takes is one failed generation to erase a species from the Earth.

Whether or not my mind would equate them, though, an individual is not a generation. So what is the bearing of one sick baby bawk on the ethics of eating? None, perhaps, except to point out that even our simplest choices sprout from deep beliefs, which, though they are very important to us, may make no ecological sense whatsoever. An anthropology professor of mine once mentioned to me that the Papua New Guinean tribe among whom he did his fieldwork consider it a special treat to climb trees and snack on whole nestlings, with barely the down of first feathers upon them. Terrible, ghastly, unethical… and yet, their methods of gathering and growing sustenance have more or less maintained the integrity of their ecosystem for about thirty thousand years (and at comparatively high population levels), while our shiny new “civilized” practices are bringing our environment to crisis in less than a hundred.

Regardless of the ethics we invent, we humans are irrevocably intertwined with the rest of the biological universe. Just as we are owed a portion of its bounty, so too are we subject to its rules. Food production methods that don’t work must inevitably meet the same fate as chickens with fragile constitutions. Unlike my baby bawk, however, we are lucky enough to be able to observe, and to reason. We get the chance to choose some of our survival characteristics, by choosing our actions. Starting with what to have for breakfast.