Since I raise free-range eggs and talk about alternative farming, you'd think that I'd be like everyone else in the biz: running around in circles and screaming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" at the top of my lungs.

I had a subscription to Organic Gardening when I was a child. This was around 1970. According to its writers, the environment was due to dry up and blow away within the next few years, but it hardly mattered, because the chemicals in our food was going to kill off first, and that hardly mattered because the Russians and the Chinese were going to have a nuclear war whose fallout would kill us before our food poisoned us.

Fortunately, there was usually one article about gardening per issue, by Ruth Stout. She didn't do the whole sky-is-falling stuff. She talked about gardening. God knows why they let her write for them, since she didn't fit in. Most of their writers couldn't talk about selecting the right garden trowel without throwing in some gloom-and-doom stuff.

And so it goes. Here it is, almost forty years later, and nothing has changed. I've been trying to use Stumbleupon (one of the social bookmarking services) to find interesting farm sites, but it's mostly hypochondria, politics, conspiracy theories, and doom. Everyone's so busy bitching and making each other afraid that they don't have any time for farming -- or living, as far as I can tell.

I'm awfully tired of a steady diet of doom. Frankly, I don't think the doom-meisters know what they're talking about. I mean, take Big Oil. A hundred years ago, everyone bitched and moaned about John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil monopoly. A hundred years later, everyone still bitches about big oil. What does that tell us? Bitching about big oil doesn't do anything, even if you do it for a hundred years. So knock it off!

So I recommend that we all affiliate ourselves with soft-spoken causes with a positive outlook. Maybe we can set a good example, like Ruth Stout did, by tending our own gardens.