The house smelled like roasted ground nuts and upturned soil. Yolam Okello wiped dirt off of his shovel with his work shirt. "It was clumping," he explained. "I need to loosen the dirt before the rain comes."
Eight hours away from Kampala, the capital of Uganda, Ramogi village is the home to Okello, a subsistence farmer. "If you don't dig, you don't eat," he told us. "It's the Ugandan way."
Before this summer I never had to think about growing my own food or nurturing my own land, except for maybe watering a dying Swedish Ivy that sat humbly on my dorm room windowsill. I attempted to be sustainable, I tried to recycle and I often thought about environmental issues plaguing our generation. However, I never thought about the terrible impact that resulted from my personal disconnect from the nature surrounding me, the very disconnect that encourages a lack of responsibility to take root and grow.
"So what do you grow? How do you grow it? When do you help with harvest if you are away at school?" Yolam couldn't help but be incredibly curious. I tried to explain that my family doesn't grow anything, that I bought my food off of cold metal shelves in grocery stores. He wrinkled his nose with obvious disdain. "But then you don't know where your food comes from. You don't know how they grew it. How do you treat your land?"
Ramogi, as any local would be quick to tell you, includes many acres of farming land and greenery. Locals view the environment as part of their community, not an entirely separate entity. It is because of this viewpoint that they have remained connected to the land that sustains them.
Jaramogi Apollo, the head of the NGO I was working with, laughed when I asked him about the mistreatment of the environment worldwide. Chuckling, he replied, "We can't abuse what sustains us, how does that make any sense at all? It is like your expression from home why bite the hand that feeds us?"
At this point in our educations and lives, we all know that the natural state of the world is changing. Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth" have informed us of our impending doom, and I don't want to beat a dead horse by harping on our need to recognize the danger we face. Instead, I want to offer a different call to action, a call that encourages our internal thought process to change the way in which we are viewing this destruction.
In his essay, "The Trouble with Wilderness," renowned environmentalist and University of Wisconsin, Madison professor William Cronon, claims that members of our western society do not look at the trees in our own backyards as legitimate nature, instead idealizing "true and untouched" wilderness. Cronon eloquently stated that "if wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both."
Urbanization has caused us to forget that apples aren't grown in grocery bins, and popcorn doesn't come from a box. Here at Dartmouth I fall victim to my urban roots, even in this beautifully rural location. It isn't that easy being green, or even remembering why we need to be green. However, if we can just remember to work together to create a home within nature, not beside it, the task might become that much simpler.
We need to make this internal change in our way of thinking about the environment not because all of the physical efforts made at conservation are futile, but rather because it might be the only way to personalize daunting environmental issues. I am not idealistic enough to think that just because we might change the way we view our surroundings, everything will be OK. But if we don't consider our actions harmful to our own community, which includes the nature in our own backyards, we might just not care enough until it is too late.
Yolam Okello reminded me that every human being must remember their place within and our reliance on this world. As I left Ramogi, squeezed into the back of a sweltering truck and holding back hot tears, Yolam shoved seeds into my palm and whispered instructions. "So you too can grow," he said. "I hope I have taught you well enough how to dig."
