Dr. Joachim Frank

Abstract:

Keeping a vegetable garden in an area surrounded by wildlife – a personal perspective of sustainability Humans, from the perspective of animals, are the intruders.  Deer, bears, foxes, rabbits, moles, groundhogs, wild turkeys still roam on the four acres of my land in the Berkshires.  No sign will stop them; nothing but a fence.  Homebuilt fences do not survive the onslaught of winters; commercial ones are almost as expensive as a subscription to farm goods for the rest of our lives -- as much as we can guess.  
Let us widen the perspective and think about plants. Again we are the intruders with our monocultures of grass, with our arbitrary definition of weeds.  The late E.O. Wilson wrote a book entitled Half-Earth:  It’s too late to save our planet in its entirety, let’s at least preserve half of it. Biodiversity is something precious to be saved.  Can we do this on a small scale?  Of our four acres, we actually use one and keep the other three wild.
This and other aspects of local sustainability will be the subject of my – wild-- ruminations.