SCA’s Sustainability Lesson Has Broad Implications
Thursday, March 21, 2019
by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer
“Sustainability is about our relationship with the natural world and how we interact with the world around us,” said Jess Wilson addressing members and guests at the March 7 Sewanee Civic Association (SCA) dinner meeting. Farmer, political lobbyist, and Renaissance woman who raises sheep and sells wool, Wilson highlighted the importance of making choices based on how systems interact. She pointed to the Sewanee Community Chest and other work of the SCA as illustrating sustainable interaction.
Vice President Brandon Barry urged residents to donate to the Community Chest fundraiser before the March 31 deadline. Donations can be mailed to P.O. Box 99, Sewanee, TN 37375 or made online by visiting www.sewaneecivic.org .
The fundraiser needs $18,000 more to provide support to the 25 organizations earmarked for gifts. Recipients include boy scouts and girl scouts, Sewanee Elementary School, Folks at Home senior care services, and the Sewanee Community Center.
“Everyone who has ever lived in or around Sewanee or visited the area has benefitted from the Community Chest,” Barry said, emphasizing how the network of systems the Community Chest supports enhances quality of life.
Evaluating “how systems interact and how they change as we interact with them,” forms the basis of Wilson’s decision making process when trying to decide how to live sustainably. She learned the “systems thinking” method during her study of sustainable agriculture at Sterling College in Vermont where she earned her degree. Wilson’s lobbying as a famers’ advocate resulted in legislation exempting farmers who sell online from charging sales tax. She founded the South Cumberland Farmers Market linking local farmers and customers via online shopping and the South Cumberland Food Hub which connects local farmers to wholesale customers.
But on a day in, day out basis, it’s the sustainable lifestyle choice of Wilson and her family that stand out. Explaining that releasing trapped carbon by burning fossil fuels is the root of climate change, Wilson acknowledged that she engages in some activities that contribute to the problem like burning wood for heat and buying products manufactured by burning fossil fuels. Wilson and her family counterbalance these climate-change contributing choices with other choices. Her husband Nate makes biodiesel from used cooking oil to fuel their cars, and they drive old cars Nate keeps running rather than new cars whose manufacture requires high fossil fuel inputs. To grow vegetables, Wilson fertilizes with compost, trapping carbon from decomposing organic matter in the soil. She line dries the family’s clothes. And the Wilson’s solar farm generates electricity they sell to TVA for energy credits on their electric bill.
“I’m privileged, though,” Wilson admits. Line drying clothes is time consuming and setting up a solar farm required a large financial investment. “People living in poverty don’t have the means to those choices. We’ve got to look at the bigger system. Individuals alone can’t solve the climate problem.”
“We need to empower people to choose by rebuilding infrastructure that allows people to make good choices like the Mountain Goat Trail and farmers markets,” Wilson insisted. She advocated supporting small farms, local businesses, and community initiatives that facilitate interconnectedness.
At the April 4 SCA meeting, attorney Ryan Barry will talk about estate planning and how a family can secure its homestead.