Amish Gardening

How energy moves through the ages, almost like memes.

When my wife Ines and I was out working in the garden today I realized that I have an Amish approach to gardening (in short they don't believe in using electric power or other modern inventions. Some superstitious thing, I don't know). Last summer, which was the first summer for us in this house, I made the decision not to buy electrically- or gasoline-powered appliances for garden work. The idea was that we (or really me) would get some free exercise from being the power-source when mowing the lawn and such. My neighbor laughed at me when I told him, but I have been steadfast to such a degree that I have even declined taking over my dads electric lawn mower for free, when he got himself a new one.

Anyway.

I'm standing in my amishly powered garden writing the first draft of this article using my iPhone, thinking that the tools I use, manual though they are, were probably not made from scratch by the Amish people over in the USA. They were almost certainly made by machines, with little human help. That leads me on to a train of thought I have had before: The machines were made using tools, that were also made by machines, that were also made using tools, that were also made by machines.. and so on, but not ad infinitum.

At some point in time, the first very tools were made by human hands alone. These very first tools were used to craft new and better tools, that in turn were used to make even better tools, and after many many iterations and much passage of time, they were used to craft tool-making machines.

This should mean that my shovel has inherited some of the energy that the first humans used to create their first tools. And I find that rather fascinating.