PIONEERS ON THE ISLES OF LIFE
On a city street 100 feet from the 210 Freeeway in Pasadena, California, stands a typical Golden State bungalow on a small lot. The home is, in actuality, a farm with just one tenth of an acre of arable land under cultivation. Just about every square inch of open land on the property is devoted to raising food. The Dervaes family of four that lives on that plot is so adept at growing edibles that they are largely calorie self-sufficient, and they sell surplus to a local chef to pay for grains, olive oil, and a few other staples they can’t raise on a postage stamp-size bit of turf.
The Pasadena micro-farmers are rabid non-consumers. So intent are they on practicing self-reliance within the heart of the city that they generate their own electricity via solar panels, bake bread in an outdoor cob oven, distill auto fuel from spent fast-foot-emporium fryer oil, collect rainwater, and produce their own sweeteners, their own canned goods, and seasonings and medicinal concoctions from herbs. They share their space with half a dozen egg-laying chickens, a duck or two, and several dwarf Nigerian goats.
What they do not produce, is as revealing as what they do. The family recycles everything. Since the four of them rarely go to a supermarket, they generate no plastic packaging waste, few empty tin cans and bottles, and very little cardboard. No food waste goes into the trash but is fed to the animals for overnight composting or is forked into compost piles. Utilities do not have to produce power for them; the petroleum industry can’t interest them in a gallon of gasoline.
So, on a street in a human-packed urban expanse there lies a true oasis of plenty, a green island of life anchored in a sea of concrete. On that verdant speck they live as few Americans do today. They do not have to run off to the mall or the hyper-supermarket or the gas station each week. Fast food is not on their menu. They rarely pay to dispose of trash. They do not pay a utility bill.
What the Dervaes family has done is kill off the consumer in their DNA. They have decided to liberate themselves from globalized capitalism so they may actually live better than the multitudes that surround them across the urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles. To a good degree, they have resurrected the lifestyle of the first European settlers who came to the great basin by the Pacific. The minute those pioneers of yore stepped down from their wagons, they set about forging a life of self-sufficiency directly from the environment. They had no choice, of course. They had to farm and forage for their calories or perish in the semi-desert heat.
The Dervaes have a choice, but they no longer find it acceptable to trade their toil and time for dollars so they may then wade into the global marketplace to extract whatever their dollars might buy. They want a direct, immediate return for their labor, and they get it by putting in the physical effort and employing their hard-won skills to produce a substantial yield. In doing so, they have created a thing of beauty inside a hard to crack urban nut.
What the Dervaes are practicing is a lifestyle being adopted increasingly by thousands of citizens across the land that sense that our hyper-consumption society is chronically out of sync with the natural world and even with the nature of what it is to be human. These pioneers in DIY living have their champions, such as Roger Doiron, who states bluntly that growing a good fraction of one’s own food is a subversive act that “has the power to radically alter the balance of power not only in our country but in the entire world.”
Adherents to this evolving mode of living are a new breed of post-consumer who would resonant with Doiron’s hyperbolic quote. They do not thirst for the next latest voodoo-phone or triple bacon burger with cheese. They want permanence, stability, exceptional quality nutrition, and pick it and eat it freshness that mass agribusiness and 18-wheelers simply can’t deliver. They do not want to consume foods that are toxic repositories of fat, sugar, salt, pesticides, antibiotics, coloring, herbicides, GMO tinkering, as so on. They do not want to be preyed upon by food chemists and chemical company wizards, Madison Avenue admen, marketing sharks, and lifestyle gurus. And they don’t want to walk into hyper-markets any longer and drown in a sea of plastic and polychrome cardboard packaging. Enough, they say.
On the tiny green islands of this evolving new New World, the frayed fabric of family life is restored and the pressures on the natural denizens of the environment are relieved. In these spaces children have real value and do real work in the form of daily chores. They learn the value of labor and essential contribution to family. They thrive. As healthy plants and animals overtake the urban barrens, wildlife comes back into the city. Insects populations increase and with them come birds to feed and to nest and find shelter. Small mammals, reptiles, amphibians and even fish follow.
Simply by plantings vegetable seeds to green up Megalopolis, humans can change an urban environment profoundly. Sure, a single nano-farm in Pasadena, CA isn’t going to render the city a Utopia, but once thousands of residents make the leap to green living the entire urban realm could be remade into what renowned game-change organic farmer Joel Saladin calls “a nest of abundance.” Pam Warhurst of Todmorden, England, turned her entire town into an edible landscape by planting fruit trees and fruiting bushes, herbs and vegetables along a few city blocks. Neighbors volunteered to help and to spread the word. Soon dozens of people took up shovels and spades and joined the fray. She said, “We didn’t do it because we were bored. We did it because we wanted to start a revolution.”
City planners were slow to recognize the green-thumb upstarts but are now actively promoting green development in such urban deserts as Detroit and Oakland. In New York City, an abandoned elevated spur railway called the West Side Line that nature had reclaimed with weeds, grasses and shrubs became a Mecca for neighborhood residents. City planners caught wind of what residents already were enjoying, and the line was redeveloped into 8.000-foot-long High Line Park where nature is encouraged to reclaim turf and new plantings are given the time and space to attain verdant maturity. Predating the High Line Park initiative was the creation of the Promanade Plantee, a three-mile linear greenway through the mazes of Paris.
Now, on urban rooftops above America, whole farms are springing up. Brooklyn, New York is leading the way. An elevated acre-size city farm called The Grange, the forerunner in the green makeover of Gotham Americana, yields produce, flowers, eggs, and honey six stories above the street, atop an old warehouse. Their customers are everywhere all around them on the city streets below.
While the greening of urban spaces is catching on rapidly, the malling of America is in decline, thanks to chronic overbuilding in suburban sprawl everywhere and to online retail marketers like Amazon who are pummeling brick and mortar retailers. The hideous built environments along our nation’s suburban roads will soon decay and reek of blight, while the inner cities will evolve into archipelagos of productive green space, friendly to humans, animals, plants, and fungi.
The transition from concrete grey and asphalt black to photosynthesis green can’t happen fast enough. For, to paraphrase the classic lyrics from the musical Les Miserables, “We want the green revolution, and we don’t care how. We want the revolution...now!
