The Hard Labor Farm

(With apologies to Raymond Mungo.)

I’ve been taking advantage of the good weather to work in the yard, leaving myself quite worn out and tired and not real capable of stringing together thoughts for blog posts. What’s rather disconcerting is that instead of developing essay topics while working in the yard I find that I slave away happily and don’t think of anything at all. It’s like my mind is a complete blank when I am out there. Maybe this is what it’s like to be one with Nature.

At any rate, I saw this in today’s Times, Contrarian Carbon Cutters. It made me wonder where manual labor would rate. My many hours of working in the yard have generated a lot of exhaled CO₂. Not to mention some blood — so far I have stabbed myself in the arm with an Echinacea stalk, sliced a finger with a pair of grass shears, nearly impaled my head on garden stake, and rammed a hand into a forsythia stump. (I’m like the Les Nessman of gardeners.) That last accident came in the midst of a major project: clearing a forsythia thicket in order to establish a new vegetable plot. At least ten hours have been spent so far cutting and bundling branches and digging out stumps. I wonder if less CO₂ would be produced by using motorized equipment. Using a powered saw and a tiller it probably would have taken only a few hours to clear out the forsythias. As it is, I think it will take another five hours of manual labor to finish the job. Maybe more.

Breath less and leave a smaller carbon footprint?