GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER
A man from the past, hero for today’s Sustainable Living Movement

Two different strains of fungi and a submarine are named after him. He was a man of great spirituality and faith, but subscribed to no specific church. He was recruited by Booker T. (though the MG’s weren’t around yet) and started out growing green onions. Aids to both Gandhi and Stalin asked for his advice. There are rumors that in an unimaginable act of racially-motivated violence he may have been castrated, and other rumors that his disinterest in female companionship simply implied that he was gay. Either way, he was doing it even before there was a word for it.
But he did not invent peanut butter.
That’s Dr. Booker T. Washington, the founder of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. The it is ‘chemurgy.’ And the man I speak of is George Washington Carver, whom I absolutely adore.
George Washington Carver knew the importance of the small family farm and of community service; he believed that we should look to nature for advice instead of trying to tame it to our will; he knew that eating healthy, nutritionally sound home cooking was vital to good health and that wastefulness is a bad thing.
Although his contributions were born of economic necessity, his ideas are my ideals.
Here is a man whose work exemplifies so much of what we’re trying to get back to today. If he was alive now he’d be a guru to the sustainable movement, the slow food movement, the holistic movement, the recycling, conservation and environmental movements. He understood the interconnectedness of things, and that ignoring this would have disastrous results.
He also would have brought something key that is missing in these movements: He would have brought poor people into the fray. Much of today’s progressive movements center around with the middle class and wealthy white people because, unfortunately, they’re the ones who can afford the “luxuries” of healthy food, clean energy and organic cotton.
But Carver saw that the poor are the ones most affected by bad food options, high energy prices and lack of education. He believed that the poor would benefit most from a less wasteful world. He was a naturalist at heart and observed that nature did not waste anything, and he tried to do and teach the same.









































































