Heartlines_For_Good - Learning for Life

Raymond talks about how the family tries to live a
life that is healthy for the earth and humans.
“
I grew up in Johannesburg, and after
high school in the early 70s, I decided to travel
overseas and took a third class boat ticket from
Cape Town to Portugal. I was hitchhiking around
Portugal and sat on a beach one day, playing with
the sand, and as the sand poured through my
fingers, I saw all these little balls of polystyrene
foam. And I thought, ‘What are we doing to the
environment! We can’t carry on like this.’ As I
continued my travels through Europe, I saw one
river after another in an absolute mess – the
Arno, the Rhine, the Thames – and it just felt as
though we were killing the planet.
“
I became an
organic farmer
and now I run
a foundation
here on the
farm that
teaches people
how to farm in
a healthy way –
healthy for the
earth and for
us humans.
We found with our children that a respect for the
natural rhythms of the day, as well as a healthy diet,
has given them a good grounding. If you feed your
kids on a diet of 50% sugar and 50% TV, you can
hardly be surprised if they’re hyperactive after that.
“
Wherever we’ve lived, we have always seen
ourselves as part of nature, so we’ve always
recycled as much of our household waste as we
could. From an early age, our children have been
aware that there’s a compost heap outside that
makes the garden fertile, and that the vegetables
we eat grow in this fertile soil. We try to use
energy and other resources efficiently, and we
harvest the rain and use it carefully for irrigation.
“
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