"Don't Do" Simple Rules of Thumb

Back in 2015, I thought about doing a christmas tree farm. We don't have a huge property, but it's big enough to support thousands of fir and pine trees were I to clear some acreage. I planted 300 trees all over the property to get a feel for the potential productivity of the soil. The trees grow really well on some parts of the property, and struggle on others. 10 years later some of the saplings I planted are well over 10 feet tall and have a 6" trunk. In others, they're basically the same size they were when first planted.

As a few years went by, I decided the christmas tree farm wasn't viable, plus I wasn't really interested in it, and liked the trees and how they grew. The christmas tree business is actually pretty weird. The trees are pruned specifically to form them into an unnatural shape. It's not hugely labor intensive, but by the time a tree is sold maybe a couple of hours of labor are spent per tree.

At the end of the whole project I was done with christmas trees in general. I could do a nursery for fir trees or something like that, but probably not the whole chop a tree and sell it thing. In fact, that's a pretty typical pattern for me, and I'm sure many other people as well. I can tell when I am on the wrong path when I do a thing, but it is difficult to see the correct path by itself.

I guess the correct path eventually emerges, like a negative space drawing. My formula is really simple: does a thing actually add more life, or does it grow or feed the dead world? It's also really simple to see the answer to that question on almost any topic, there's no painful wrestling with lies and justifications. Who wants more dead world? There's a lot of twisted freak people who keep building Mordor, but hardly anybody really wants Mordor or wants to serve Sauron/Hades.

I started applying that "don't do" concept on my property and with my personal projects a couple of years ago. Initially I didn't see how to apply it, so it was a bit of a struggle for some time, but eventually it became more obvious. The overall scheme is to imitate, insofar as it's feasible, the natural order. Nature creates a profusion of forms and beings. Apply that to the christmas trees: am I going to cut down the existing forest to plant a monoculture crop, then mow around the trees and sling fertilizer and chemicals at them? No. That's really a crazy thing people do.

Here's a better example. Our property has some drainage issues (we receive lots of precipitation per year). There's a failed network of drainage pipes here. Should I "replace" those with many hundreds of feet of plastic pipes to route the water from the surface to a creek? No way. Plant some water tolerant trees, route the water on the surface through some swales so nutrients stay in the soil. Maybe dig a pond or make a wetland in really problem areas... It costs less and follows the life path.

Inevitably this thinking spills out of personal projects and into my professional life. I've been working in tech for years. In its latest incarnation, it's firmly in Mordor "death land" in spite of flying pride flags and wanting to be "inclusive". It's going to be impossible for me to stay in Mordor. Any tech thing that might help some Orcs escape mordor, is doable, but corporate tech world is pretty bleak these days.

Anyway, the life path is leading me to interesting places.