The Greening of Young People
The place was haunted, the abandoned college farm. Pigeons and owls lived in the crumbling agricultural buildings. Livestock hadn’t been housed and tended there for more than a decade. The college, my alma mater, like schools across America everywhere, had long since contracted with giant food service companies tied to mammoth agribusiness concerns that could deliver prepackaged bulk foods to the cafeteria kitchen. So, by the 1960s, virtually all college and university farms across this land had ceased operations. Students no longer worked the farms, no longer provided fresh locally grown foods for the table.
This unheralded, below-the-radar change in our culture was deemed progress, of course. Why did we want modern students to work and learn on a farm, for goodness sake? There was no future in it for young people. No opportunities then. No money in it. No good life in suburbia. No possibility of retirement to Florida.
Today, schools everywhere, from kindergarten to post graduate institutions, are haunted, too, by the paucity of experiential education tied to the land, to growing, harvesting and consuming fresh local food, to being productive in the most basic sense, and to rooting young people in something real, tangible, life giving, and damned well important to our future as a nation and as a planet.
Columbine High School. Does that name haunt your memory banks? The killings there? The young people killing young people and their teachers? That event was the first such headlined tragedy at a school, and it has triggered an unending sequel of such murders at schools, on average now, nearly once a week.
At the height of the crescendo of school shooting violence, my wife turned to me and said, “These children have nothing to do in their lives. You don’t see the Amish and Mennonites doing these things.”
No, you don’t.
Why? Children in hard-working farm communities are rooted in the good-earth reality of producing products from the land to directly sustain their families and generate surplus so that that extra bounty may be sold to generate income for the family. Being bound to the land is a major stabilizing force in the lives of the young. There is physical work to do, myriad chores to perform, copious tangible skills to learn and master. Their contribution to the family and community is direct, absolutely necessary, and life affirming.
Columbine? If we feed our young people violence in the media, movie violence, violence in the electronic games played relentlessly, violence at the very heart of our culture, we grow violence in return. If our social models laud only consumerism, fame, wealth, leisure, and entertainment, little wonder some fraction of our youth live as aliens among us, detached, idle, unmotivated. Their contribution to society is sometimes brutally life threatening.
In the South Bronx of New York City, of all places, a few innovative instructors began an experiment to foster tangible skills among their students by developing garden farms to feed the local schools fresh vegetables and fruits. Supermarket chains did not operate in those city neighborhoods, so there was no access to healthy foods. The teachers sought to change that, and in so doing helped young people start their own food production businesses that began selling fresh grown foods to the school districts and to other customers. Suddenly there was student enterprise. They could make money to support their own programs and expand them, and export them to other schools, too.
The South Bronx public school experiment speaks of something larger, a sea change, a cultural shift. Within the last decade, institutions everywhere have begun reexamining the role of local agriculture in the lives of communities. Following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers during 9/11, citizens across the nation woke up to the fact that they were acutely vulnerable to forces they had no control over. One of the most glaring vulnerabilities was the reality that throughout most of the continent, people were not producing foods locally, and the vast majority of food tonnage was being shipped in by land, sea, and air from hundreds and thousands of miles away. The average calorie, it was determined, traveled 1,400 miles to the plate on the dining table.
Remember the haunted abandoned farm on the college campus in the opening of this essay? Such rotting ghost facilities may soon be a thing of the past. On the campus of the University of Maine in Orono, banks of very large greenhouses have been erected recently with the goal to someday feed the university student body all its vegetable needs. UMaine is only one such example. Berea College in Kentucky maintains a fully fledged working farm and students have to work to provide the bulk of their own foodstuffs.
Now, surprisingly, local agriculture has become sexy. Customers clamor for local produce, local dairy, local meats. They flock to farm-to-table restaurants and new farmers markets. Farming as a career is now in vogue. And it’s young people who want to do the farming. They want that lifestyle, one of hard, honest work to produce excellent fresh products for customers in their local communities and regions.
In the near future, local agriculture will increasingly absorb young people like a sponge, and give them real, tangible work to do, even if it’s just a summer job. The goal now should be to establish garden farms in all the schools, right down to kindergarten and all the way up to the Ivy League. Put young people to work. Give them chores to do. Everyday. All year. And let them enjoy the fruits of their labor in the fresh food to eat and in the dollars they earn from the sale of their self-generated garden goods.
Heaven knows we need to pull ourselves up out of the cesspool of real and virtual violence to rebuild our culture into one that is life affirming, life enhancing. We could do that with our fingers in the earth, with good compost under our fingernails. It starts with the planting of just a few seeds or raising a few backyard chickens. Then, maybe, we could start growing an abundance of fine productive young people.
