“Back to Basics” Fair Teaches People About Sustainable Living

Sustainable living refers to a lifestyle that tries to reduce the amount of Earth’s resources that are used. Over the weekend, a sustainable living fair was held in Pine River to help people get “Back to Basics”.

Whether it’s making your own coffee or learning how to raise your own chickens, people from Central Minnesota were learning many ways they can better their lives and live a sustainable lifestyle at the Back to Basics sustainable living fair.

“Sustainable living, as we talk about it, is essentially that we want to be better prepared to deal with whatever comes,” Quinn Swanson, Happy Dancing Turtle Executive Director, said.

At the fair, there were nearly 50 different workshops helping people achieve a sustainable lifestyle.

“The topics that are covered today are so broad,” Swanson said. “From how to keep chickens, to how to turn T-shirts into a quilt.”

There are numerous ways that you can help the environment and achieve a sustainable lifestyle: anything from the soap that you use to the food that you eat can make a difference.

“One of the key things is to use natural soap, instead of an imposter which is sodium lauryl sulfate,” Christine Jones, Pure Soap Flake Company’s Owner, said. “It cleans by corrosion, creates acidic soil, promoted as natural, but actually very harmful to the waterways.”

People also learned about a more modern way to farm with hydroponics.

“It’s sustainable, you use a lot less water, you use 70-90 percent less water with hydroponics,” Dan Swanson, Extended Seasons Indoor Gardening Owner, said. “It’s cleaner, and you get faster growth.”

Hydroponics could be the future of farming, but the event’s keynote speaker, Kent Solberg, is trying to save traditional farming by talking about the importance of soil health.

“Farmers understand that soil is the basis of their business, it’s the basis of their livelihood, and I think we’ve walked away from some of that with the industrial farming model. This is bringing it back full circle,” Kent Solberg, Back to Basics’ Keynote Speaker, said. “If we have healthy soil we have healthy plants, if we have healthy plants we have healthy livestock, if we have healthy plants and livestock we have healthy people, and that’s absolutely huge.”

The Back to Basics fair achieved its goal leaving people with many new tips to live a cleaner and more sustainable lifestyle.

Happy Dancing Turtle spends most of its time educating children on living a sustainable lifestyle, and the organization plans to return for their 14th “Back to Basics” fair next year.