One common theme that runs through the prepper community has always baffled Salty & Spice, and that’s the apparent lack of concern for the environment… the same environment we depend upon for our daily survival.
Spice & Salty are conservationists, but they are most definitely not tree huggers. Here’s some graphical proof of this from a recent project at “The Place”.
The goal of this project is to improve the health of the ecosystem at “The Place”, making it a far better place for game animals to call home.
Here’s a before picture:
Here are a couple of after pictures of the same spot:
What’s going on here? We will tell you below, and we talked about it on this week’s 3BY podcast:
The carnage you see above is what happens when a contractor brings his Giant Toothpick Maker of Doom (not it’s official designation, but it oughta be) and munches all of the trees attempting to invade the prairie remnants into mulch. This will allow us, in the spring, to do a controlled burn to both eliminate many, many toothpicks and encourage the regrowth of the prairie grasses.
When we bought The Place a few years ago, it was wooded hills with a couple of prairie-remnant hilltops connected by a cleared logging road. Since then we’ve added a pond (stocked with fish and also a reliable water source), small cabin, and some permaculture food plantings in the form of fruit and nut trees and vines. It also has an abundance of huntable game, notably deer and turkey.
Conservation isn’t usually on the list of prepper concerns; but we’ve found it needed to be put on that list. If we didn’t take care of the land, the scrub woods would take over the prairie remnants. Besides losing the wildflowers (valuable in their own right in my (Spice’s) world), we’d have lost ‘edges’; the places where different plant communities come together. Wildlife loves edges. If we hadn’t worked to keep the prairie bits, we’d have lost all the quail, and probably half the turkey and deer. We’d also have lost the easiest hunting; a long line of sight down a clearing with a safe backdrop behind the lanes that the deer and turkey use morning and evening both for travel and feeding.
If you want to be able to live off the land, you have to help keep the land alive.
If you start babbling about climate change, I’m going to call you on breaking the “no politics” rule. Otherwise, I am with you conservation.
No worries on that, we do not talk politics in any way, shape or form on 3BY, it’ is STRICTLY off limits.
Conservation isn’t politics, it’s simply wanting to improve nature. Our land, our choice, as it should be.
It’s not so much that I’m against conservation, but that I’m opposed to rapid conservatism. That mindset will drive me away immediately. I practice, but don’t preach…
Conservation is critically important to the environment. Deer and turkey’s don’t care one little bit about politics and theories, but they care a whole lot if there is water, food, safe areas to live and breed. That’s what we are doing here, and that’s what this story is about, how we can take what we have and make it a better place to live not through legislation or trying to force people to do one thing or another, but by picking up a dad-gum axe or opening up our own checkbook to get it done, on our terms, in our timeframe.
Like too much in our country, people immediately go to politics when they hear a word like conservation, and that’s a darned shame. We don’t do politics, not even a little, at 3BY (with the exception of expressing our support for the Second Amendment, which we state up front).
What we want to encourage is for preppers to begin thinking conservation, not starting with the state, but rather starting in their own kitchens, their own back yards, and their own neighborhoods.
I don’t know of any prepper who really wants to live in an unhealthy, dirty world, but I do know a lot who aren’t doing much even in their own households to make their local environment any better. That’s a shame.
The term “conservation” is what I grew up with in the Boy Scouts, etc. The term “environment” was even okay when it came in vogue and we were cleaning up dead rivers and lakes, removing the brown clouds that hung over cities, or cleaning up toxic waste dumps. When we get to “climate” we’re into a political subject. It is short steps from conservation, to environment, to climate.
I think we are in agreement, though “conservation” now sounds almost like Middle English. Maybe using that term will be enough for people to recognize that we are discussing something normal, rather than political. 🙂
You are right, sir. This is what happens when people (who we won’t talk about because we don’t talk politics on 3BY) steal & corrupt words. The environment is nothing more than where we live. It’s not a political movement, I don’t care what anybody says, it’s the earth, the sky and everything in between.
Lest you think me a tree hugger, look at what we just did to over 100 trees 🙂 The toothpicks we have left of those trees don’t feel particularly hugged.
This is a simple example of what we have done, I wrote the check for the big machine, Spice made the plans (in fairness, she did check with both her brother who is an expert in prairie restoration and a local department of conservation official who’s a friend who’s volunteered to help us in his spare time – not on your nickle).
Part of what we want to illustrate and the lifestyle we choose to live is as government-free as possible.
Conservation is a great word, a great idea and something I want to encourage, so I’m stealing the word back from the politicians.
I think you need an update next year on how this project worked out.
Oh, there’ll be updates. It’s a multi-part project, with some spraying this fall to discourage fescue on the one spot that’s infected, some tree thinning in the woods this winter, and a controlled burn in the spring to encourage the prairie….and constant vigilance to root out the invasive weeds and trees.