BioTribes: Emerging Techno-Agrarian Communities
A revolution is underway in America, well below the radar now, certainly, but its roots are grounding in the fertile soil of frustration among middle-class citizens whose standard of living has, in a generation, eroded substantially. While a cornucopia of global industrialized goods and services pour forth from mammoth box stores and fast food emporia, quality of life declines for the majority.
But frustration breeds creativity, and creativity breeds change. Pioneers on the streets and in the fields are pointing the way to wholly new way of organizing community. They are starting with the most basic commodity of all: food. And they are getting the message out with the internet. They are changing the world.
If you do not know names such as Joe Salatin, Elliot Coleman, Pam Warhurst, Stephan Rize, or Roger Doiron (just to name a very few), you will eventually be influenced by their work. They are sounding the clarion call for “restorative” gardening and agriculture. They are repairing the biosphere and reaping abundance. They are changing communities in the process.
Let’s fast forward to 2040, just a generation in the future. Your children or grandchildren will surely inhabit that near future. They will not be eating McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts. They will know better. They won’t be customers of such purveyors of fat, sugar, empty calories, and disease.
By 2040, dependency on industrialized farming will be in decline, and citizens everywhere will be growing their own foods on urban rooftops, on suburban lots, and on rural postage-stamp farms. Using the simplest and cheapest technologies available to them, they will produce vegetables, fruits, and eggs (some may even move on to meat and milk) where they live all year round. They will have developed highly productive home gardens, community gardens, and local micro-farms, and they will be eating fresh whole foods morning, noon, and night.
Because they will be linked with their neighbors through the soil and through the internet, their emerging techno-agrarian communities will be real communities. Gardening and preparing fresh food will strengthen ties between neighbors, give children an important role in community, provide a life-enhancing outlet for seniors, and make it possible to forge relationships with neighboring boroughs and villages.
Most importantly, people will have some control over their own lives. They will not be totally dependent on producers a world away to provide sustenance. They will have more in common with their forebears eight generations ago than with their own parents and grandparents.
Some of these citizens in 2040 will be new entrepreneurs who earn their living growing vegetables and fruits in small spaces. Their customers live nearby, after all. They will burn no fossil fuel to get their food products to market. They will not have to package their goods in plastic or printed cardboard. The food packaging waste stream will be a thing of the past. Food waste will be composted and recycled to grow more food and enrich the soil. People will boast about having the best compost pile.
In Arizona in the 1980s, this nation planned and fabricated Biosphere I at a cost of millions to see if humans could be locked away in an artificial world for several years and survive. In 2040, at a cost of next to nothing, millions of citizens in America will be living in self-generated biospheres I like to call BioTribes. They will thrive in these “new towns.”
Neighborhoods, benefitting from such endeavors as the remarkable experiments underway among students in the South Bronx and residents in East Los Angeles, will become engines of plenty instead of food deserts. New jobs will be created. Food will be plentiful, organic, nutritious, and delicious. The fast food joints will atrophy because people will have come to understand that such businesses were selling sanctioned poison.
Organic farming and gardening culture will change the landscape. Birds and insects will proliferate as the land becomes user friendly to them once again. I’ve seen it with my own eyes after planting $50 worth of wildflower seed mix on a forest margin next to a new organic garden. Thousands of blooms attracted legions of birds, bees, and insects of all stripes. Nature roars back and heals abuses quickly when given a chance.
Once the emerging local gardening and small farming revolution gains real traction, America will be overhauled by its frustrated middle class, citizens who recognize, adopt, and follow a green avenue out of their dilemma. These Americans will start becoming producers within the new BioTribe boundaries. They will begin to tone down hyper-consumption patterns for lifestyles that restore the land, restore the community, restore themselves, and restore a small blue planet.
