Journal
I argue that while both are interesting, and the purposes of the remainder of this text, hopefully interrogating, it is the city that is more fascinating as we all live in the era of global networks and global centralization, and since 2020, it is estimated that more of the world’s population lives in cities and in the future, it will be the city, not the rural, that dominates the world-stage.
That idea, the Idea of equity, of justice in experience in the presence of Truth is what compels me to write these words, but the words themselves, are, in the Platonic mode—of the city. And for brevity and to capture the Idea of the ideal city, I will refer only to the polis or the urbs, which it’s important to note are associated but have slightly different intonations for how we might live together.
Donald Trump beat out Clinton in a race to the top of the political structure because he persuaded so many to believe that the political structure was built to be against them.
He is a pluralist.
He is a demagogue.
Pluralists and demagogues don’t win power because they cheat—they win power because they inspire division and fear. They persuade individual people, voters, in this case Americans, to turn to an ‘other’ and say “that’s what America should be about. It should only be about my group.
And my president is not a demagogue.
But for my father, he fought. He knew what was at stake immediately, and stood, wound-wrapped, and gave his spirit and his labor to the fight for blood. As the Arizona sank, he took photographs of the flames in between giving orders to soldiers as to how to administer aid. I am deeply proud of the work he did that earned him the War’s earliest Legion of Merit.
I don’t know if this perspective comes from my father or from thinking about the idea of my father, but when your dad is born before the end of the Great War, fights in the Second, and sees it end of 28 … you tend to see a few things:
In this series of posts, I’ll include academic and non-academic sources on narrative, the Myth of the Lost Cause, and Texas’ (actual) history.
I think there’s always been a fine balance in writing instruction on how to make writing feel immediate and worthwhile, while making sure students have the proper skills and abilities. If my classes have been an example, there’s plenty of times where students think a particular type of writing is “irrelevant” to them, even when they’re gaining useful critical reasoning skills by engaging with a particular problem.
Still, though, when I went into the rhetoric-heavy, argument-focused English class I’m teaching now, I began to ask myself how we might get them to see or feel the immediacy of their writing within the arc of my 15 weeks with them. After all, we’re working with concepts and theories that are over two millennia old. That’s kind of how I initially got to my idea to teach with a video game.
So, responding to David Flemming’s call to bring back “play” to the rhetoric and writing classroom (2016) and working within Justin Hodgson’s methodological framework for gamifying a course (2012), I decided to create a “public.” In the class, in addition to traditional writing assignments, we’re playing SimCity (2013) together. Each student becomes a mayor with a particular agenda and is networked with other students in the region. Students take on analog (I don’t like to use “real world” because I don’t think virtual spaces are less real than others) identities of cities or major corporations like Shell Co., the New York City Zoning Commission, real estate companies in the Hamptons, Tesla, Las Vegas, et al.
As each “student mayor” works toward their agenda within the gamespace, which is designed to conflict directly and indirectly with others’ in the regions, conflict arises. Then, using the skills they’ve gained in the rhetoric classroom, they write to each other, conduct rhetorical and stakeholder analysis, and use writing to resolve the conflicts that come up in the same way that institutions use writing in the analog world.
The last project for this course (and their required English track at ASU) is a public advocacy or “civic discourse” paper. For this, students will reflect on their experience in the writing classroom and in the virtual space of SimCity to identify, more or less, how writing “works” for cities and urban issues; they then compose civic discourse and present it within a local forum like a town-hall meeting or will publish a neighborhood newsletter, etc.
It’s been met with mixed responses from my students, but all of them are engaging with the ideas in the virtual gamespace and seem to understand how this is meant to reinforce civic writing. And watching them take on new identities has been incredibly rewarding!
Later this week, I’ll follow up with some anecdotes from within the game.
Over the past few months, as I watched this election unfold and began teaching for the first time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want my teaching to do. I teach freshman composition, so I want my students to understand and compose argument, but there’s an opportunity in teaching writing to show students how to interact with(in) their community.
I’ve got a considerable amount of freedom with my syllabus, so I’ve been teaching my first-year composition classes through the lenses “ecocomposition” (as expressed by Dobrin & Weisser) and rhetoric as a tool for “urban community management” (as expressed by the Sophists, since forever). I also think it’s important for my students to see the kinds of impact they can have on their environment, so my writing assignments have them focus on spaces, places, people, and issues within their immediate communities, either the university, the city of Tempe, or their hometowns. We almost always look at local urban issues, or global sustainability issues. And though I’m still hammering out the formal pedagogy, I’ve come up with this one-liner that’s stuck with me over the past year: “Learn, Act, Teach.”
Context presupposes any particular piece of writing, so when my students investigate issues, they learn about the history of that issue, the participants and stakeholders, and, generally, the “why’s” of any given piece.
In addition to having a context, writing also has a purpose. So, over the next two weeks, we’re looking at formal rhetorical analysis. My students select a text or material “argument” (situated in some context) and identify what the argument is doing, or how it tries to get its audience to act. Once they understand how this works by analyzing other texts, we’ll move into drafting our own arguments, so they can act through (and with) their writing.
And writing is fundamentally about sharing. Writing exists because of and for communities. So, once my students can identify different writing genres, can compose argument, and analyze others’ texts, they’ll go into their own communities to teach their friends and neighbors about particular issues and advocate for their stances on the problems and resolutions within the urbs.
As I mentioned, I’m still tacking down the pedagogy, so if any of y’all feel like talking with me about this, please reach out.
In my next post, I’ll talk about how I’m using digital texts and video-games to create “new publics,” where my students can play in and play with these ideas of community management and stakeholders. Then, after that, back to food and local sustainability tactics.
Community management and sustainability have overnight become local issues. So where the Federal administration chooses to ignore sustainability, communities: neighborhoods, businesses, and towns, have to get to work.
Once you've decided more or less what you want to grow, it's only a matter of siting and designing your bed. After that, comes all the labor of actually growing stuff. In this post, I'll briefly examine some options folks have for designing and building their own planting beds.
To make it somewhat reductive, you've got open beds and raised beds. While there's nothing wrong with digging up some lawn, plunking down a few bags of fertilizer and getting to work, I'm going to recommend folks use raised beds or at least line their ground-level beds. By using some kind of wooden or stone liner, or just planting in a raised bed, you don't need to worry about grasses and roots choking out your vegetables' as much. Also, some plants are going to much better in their own enclosures, like the spud box.
So when designing the bed is site. What you're growing (and what you may grow in the future) will determine how much sun your plot is going to need. For this, just check the seed packets and see what the most common required sunlight values are. For the especially fastidious, you can also set up a camera on a tripod to take a photo of your proposed site every hour to get a sense of how much shade is cast on the spot throughout a sunny day.
Then, material: One of the most common mistakes I've seen folks make is line their vegetable gardens with treated wood, to prevent rot or termites. DON'T do this. The treatment that is sprayed on those planks will get into your soils and, qua, your vegetables. I exclusively use stone or brick, but if you can get out to a local lumber-mill and request some un-treated wood, that will work as well [though, you may have to replace the planks every few years].
So once you've got your site and a lining material you're happy with, dig out the plot by hand or rent some landscaping tools to tear up your plot. Then, set the liner in about one to two inches into the soil and pack in earth on both sides to get them to sit still. Fill your bed with your fertilizer of choice and you're good to go.
For those looking for a longer step-by-step discussion of what I've discussed here, check out Howard Garret's book or website for detail.
In the next post, I'll address good pairing plants and some ways to deal with pests once you've gotten started.
Works Cited
Mabel, Joe. "Picardo Farm, Wedgwood neighborhood, Seattle, Washington: A community allotment garden with raised beds for the physically disabled." Wikipedia.org, Wikimedia., 28 Oct. 2006. Digital photograph.
Notice: Starting today, I’m (officially) reducing my blog posts to once a week (on Sunday around this time) as I prepare for final papers and exams. (More) regular posting should resume after 7 May.
Last week, I planted a new generation of cabbages. Provided that these grow, this will be my 4th successful harvest since I started the garden plot. Now, having done this for a little while, I feel like I have some recommendations and “tips” for those looking to get started gardening.
Ultimately, the most basic things you need to know are what to plant and when to plant it. [Where is going to matter, too, if you’ve not got the soil or space, but I’ll address that next week.] ‘Whats’ and ‘whens’ are going to take a bit of research, but it starts with what you like: If you like cooking with vegetables, I’d recommend cook what you like to eat; if you prefer meats or baking, try spices and garnish in lieu of lettuce and cucumber.
I usually recommend that everyone start with cabbages or kale, as they’re relatively easy and grown on their own without a lot of attention or plot management, where carrots for example, take a lot of care (read, “micromanagement”). This is where that “plant what you eat” comes into play, where my first yield was ~12 heads of cabbage. I’m not a huge fan of cabbage. Ate a lot of stew that year. Regardless, lettuces and waxy-leaf greens are typically hardy. If you were to start a summer garden, you could still manage them, but they’d need partial shade.
If you’ve got a lot more time on your hands, where you can go to your garden more than twice a week, you might try peppers or carrots, but these are going to take more water and will need to be watched for pests, regularly. The folks at your local gardening store are also a great resource for what to start growing, wherever you are.
So, all that said, what’s first? Growing zones. All seed packets are going to say something akin to “Check your growing zone for planting dates.” The USDA upkeeps these charts here. As global warming swings around, you may come back and check these charts every couple of years. For example, back in the 50s or 60s, Austin would have been 8a, but we’re 8b now.
Once you know your growing zone and have an idea of what to plant, it’s just a matter of getting it in the dirt. Next week, I’ll discuss how to site your garden plot and what the difference between raised and ground level beds are.
Even as cities become more progressive and implement trash-reducing policies like Austin's Zero Waste by 2040 plan or recycling programs, citizens still throw out too much. Ultimately, waste management takes a lot of time, especially at the household level. What do you throw out, what do you recycle, and what do you compost?
In Austin, all houses and apartment complexes are required to have single-stream pickup. If you're curious when yours is or you need to contact City Residential Services for a new bin, etc. you can use this link. You'll notice, too, that there are a few things listed on the city's site that you can't recycle in the bin: like electronics and food. So what do we do with those?
For electronics and batteries, there are often separate sites that are designed to handle that type of waste, as electronics have acids in them that hurt the environment. We also need to keep these out of landfill as much as possible, because there can (rarely) be issues with landfill liners breaking, allowing chemical waste into groundwater or running off into streams.
For food, because we can't recycle food products (including packaging like pizza boxes or cartons), there's nothing we can do, right? Well, no. A large part of food waste that houses throw out isn't always food that's spoiled or just wasn't eaten, but biodegradable waste like fruit peels, eggshells, or plant stems. If you make a salad and peel leaves off the ribs (look for my kale recipe to be posted here later today) the ribs get thrown in the trash, just like orange peels, stale bread, and potato skins.
So here's what I'm proposing: compost it. Lots of folks don't have their own garden or space to pile up leaves and food waste (living in apartments with now yards complicates this strategy) but live near community gardens often without knowing it. If you commute to or from work, there's often at least one on the way. Here at my university's campus, we've also got places to compost at our community gardens or other green fee project sites.
So where's it go? Potato, orange, and banana skins can be wrapped in a recycling safe container or Tupperware bin, sealed, and thrown into the freezer. Provided that your containers are airtight, it won't generate smell and you can keep it at your pleasure until you can get to your nearest compost site. A few weeks ago, I had some boiled cabbage leaves in a sealed bin for four days before I could get out to Sunshine on 45th! That compost gets turned into fertilizer, goes back into your community to feed your neighbors, and doesn't need to be trucked out (read, "carbon emissions") to be processed elsewhere. And when we can easily keep material out of landfill, we ought to, if only to fight the Pacific Gyre.
If you've got some time, google around and see if there's a garden near you that will take your compost. In some parts of town, they might even pick up! Also, feel free to use the contact information at the bottom of this site to get in touch with me and I'll help you find one nearby.
Works Cited
Cohen, Philip. "Food scraps compost heap." Digital photograph. Flickr. Flickr, 7 Jun. 2014. Web. 10 Apr. 2016. Source
Last night, I was in line at HEB to check out and overheard something which made me think: the customer in front of me was from out of state and was here visiting a family member. Not being from Austin, she was unaware of our ban on plastic bags. When offered paper bags at nominal fee of 10¢ per bag, (which by the way, is about the same as the production cost of the bag) she was offended, because she, as a customer, deserved free plastic bags. She would have spent literally 20¢, because she didn't have that many groceries, just some party supplies, but that little exchange made me think about how we understand our ecological impact.
In Austin, we've got it pretty good when it comes to waste conscientiousness. And a lot of it, I think we take for granted (or, at least I know I do). For example, many cities elsewhere in Texas and in the US don't have recycling programs or waste combating policies beyond federal regulations. Our Zero Waste policies are actually quite a bit fashion forward, but are by no means unique.
Looking back to the history of environmentalism, (discussed on 24 and 28 Feb) Austin City Council aims at keeping 90% of discarded material (the fancier way of saying 'trash') out of our landfills as a part of the city's Resource Recovery Master Plan (City of Austin). But regular folks (from and not from Austin) resist the bag ban as a part of this plan. So: why?
As we talk about environmentalism, conservation, sustainability, et al. ad inf. there's two ways people generally talk about becoming sustainable: developing better tech or merely using less. But using less, like the (all too common) exchange above means people need to change their behavior in order for us to become sustainable.
In the next post, I'll introduce some things we can do, just as urban residents, to work toward reducing waste. I'll also begin introducing organizations around town for those who want to get out and do something more active.
Works Cited
City of Austin. "Zero Waste by 2040." austintexas.gov. City of Austin, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.
Hajj0 ms. "Plastic waste at Coco Beach in India." Digital photograph. Web. 22 Mar. 2016. Source
Over spring break, I spent a lot of time at the community garden. Before spring break, I hadn't been able to get out there too much because of papers, campus visits, and all that. So once I did go out, the plot was overgrown and my kale (pictured) was about 2.5ft tall. And our vegetables did so well, not because of any great skill on my part, but because the community has been tending the soil for over 30 years.
So there's a narrative of sustainability: community gardens are (mostly) public spaces where people come together to share experience, knowledge, and tools, but also where they can share an identity. People can go to get away from the city and just be in nature for a while, working with the plants and soil. Like parks and markets, social spaces like gardens give folks an opportunity to come together and meet their neighbors. People can go to share stories and planting tips with their neighbors or just chat while they work. But the community garden, unlike city parks or other public spaces, is unique in that generations of neighbors have come together to make sure that the soil will be fertile and that the plants will be healthy.
When we're talking about sustainability, it's important to keep thinking about the future, that we need to consider what's fair and right, not only for ourselves, but for the generations that come after us. And Sunshine Community Gardens, which was founded in 1979, is proof that people can come together to work toward the future. Because generations have been fertilizing, tilling, and rolling the soil, my plants have grown much bigger and healthier here than what I've grown at my own house, a plot I started about a year and a half ago.
There's also something compelling about working beside the people you live with, but otherwise don't really get to meet. One of my plot neighbors has been out at Sunshine for 25 years, and countless times already she's given me insight about how to thin plants healthily and has shown me the best way to tend soil. I already knew a fair bit about gardening and have grown my own food, but working beside veteran planters has, in turn, made me better. Just by sharing that space, we share a history of the space, of the neighborhood, and of urban farming.
Things are better when we share, but when we share with the goal of making tomorrow better, we're not only cultivating kale, and arugula, and pumpkins, but also our neighborhood. On Saturdays, you see families with small children, creating memories that they'll pass on to their families. In the summer, folks kick back on the community porch and just spin stories of what used to be here, local histories you can't find in the library. And otherwise, the service and labor you share with your community just gives you a sense that you're part of something, which is why I love working with my neighbors.
Over the next few weeks, I'll start posting links to organizations and opportunities to get involved in our community (and also a few farm recipes to look forward to!).
In the previous post, I discussed how industrializing cities broke the principles of sustainability, leading to the degradation of the environment and of residents' quality of life.
As city planners and architects saw the devastating effects that unethical urban planning had at sites like Bradford, London, and Paris, they designed greenspaces as a response (Cleary 68-69). By building public parks and gardens, citizens would have room to breathe and experience nature within the city.
One social thinker who was especially influential in this movement was Englishman John Ruskin (1819-1900) who criticized Victorian Era industrialists for diminishing nature and abusing English laborers. Ruskin argued that cities needed to be "rooted in the soil" and to understand their relationship to the land around them. By understanding our relationship to the earth, we can be more aware of how we harm the land.
Following this philosophy, landscape planners designed urban parks of various scale to help cities return to being "rooted in the soil" and provide opportunities for urban dwellers to experience nature, one of our principles of sustainability. In cities like Paris, London, and Berlin, lands held in private through the Renaissance were made into public parks like the Bois de Boulogne, Regent's Park, and the Tiergarten. Thereafter, the concept of "green lungs for the city" became common and civic thinkers saw the benefits that parks had on public health and wellbeing.
In addition to bringing nature into the city, national parks were established, starting in America in 1890, to preserve nature outside the city. With Teddy Roosevelt's signing of the Yosemite National Park Bill, the first national parks were established to set land aside, away from industrializing urban centers so that they would be protected. National parks and national game reserves would provide opportunities to experience nature as it was before developing countries industrialized their locales.
So with the development of these two kinds of parks, urban dwellers in the 19th and 20th centuries again had opportunities to experience nature and to be social in public. By maintaining public health and wellbeing, these early greenspaces at the city level were the first steps toward making the city sustainable again.
In the next post, I'll examine how community gardens and neighborhood parks lead to social sustainability at the microcosmic level.
Works Cited
Cleary, Richard. “Making Breathing Room: Public Gardens and City Planning in Eighteenth-Century France.” Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art. Eds. John Dixon Hunt and Michael Conan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. 68-81. PDF file. 28 Jan. 2016.
Schlaier. "Das Cafe am Neuen See im Großen Tiergarten in Berlin-Tiergarten." Digital photograph. 17 Aug. 2009. Web. 9 Mar. 2016. Source
In the last part, I introduced the principles of sustainability and discussed some of the global, ecological issues we're facing as a species. In this part, I'll examine how we industry got us here.
I was recently in Minneapolis this past weekend looking at a prospective graduate school, and being from central Texas, I was complaining about the climate before even visiting, afraid that the frozen north would actually kill me. I landed at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport on Thursday and it was relatively chilly (for me) at 35° F. When I (and an assortment of students not from Minnesota) asked about if this weather was normal, the director of graduate studies jokingly said "Oh, yeah, it's normally around 40° and by the end of the week goes up to 75° and we all go out and barbecue! No, this winter's been crazy and the snow normally drops the temperature by twenty degrees; sends all the sun back up."
Yesterday, before I got on my return flight, it was 62° F and U Minn students were literally playing beach volleyball and sunbathing on the Scholar's Walk. Normally, the Twin Cities in late February is supposed to be in the low 30s, and yesterday set a historic record for heat index. So there I was, walking around in my winter coat and dress pants, from Texas, complaining about how hot it was in Minnesota!
Although global temperatures have naturally gone up and down through history, since the 1850s, we've recorded a steadily increasing global average temperature. Though some places are cooling as others are warming in both surface and troposphere temperature (IPCC Fig. TS.6), leading some to use the term 'climate change' rather than global warming, the whole world is getting hotter. Giradet, in his concise summary of the relationship between city and environment (which is fairly cheap and which I would recommend for anyone concerned with the overview), explains that it all begins with coal (65).
Specifically, with Britain's introduction of coking coal in the early 18th ct. which led iron and steel being much more widely available, the Industrial Revolution started in London, Liverpool, and Bradford (Giradet 64-72). In Bradford alone, the pollution due to the coal stacks was so intense, and the city, which exploded in tenement housing due to poor urban planning, was so filthy, that George Weerth wrote in 1846 that "In Bradford, however, you think you have been lodged with the devil incarnate. If anyone wants to feel how a poor sinner is tormented in Purgatory, let him travel to Bradford" (qtd. in Giradet 69).
This explosion in urban population, due to the migration of poor farmers and other rural workers to cities like Bradford and London, led to pollution, exploitation of the lower class, poor urban planning, and the depreciation of natural resources, breaking all the principles of sustainability (mentioned earlier this week). In fact, the water quality in Bradford was so poor due to industrial waste dumping, that cholera and typhoid outbreaks were common; the urban density of 104,000 in 1851 (from only 13,000 in 1801) made these epidemics more severe and damaging (Giradet 69-70).
Industry, developing in the 18th and 19th cts., lead to a reduction in the quality of life, an increase in the commonness of disease, and the beginning of global warming (Shah). Industrial smoke let off greenhouse gasses (commonly in the form of excess carbon released into the atmosphere), industrial waste polluted rivers and drinking water, and industrial planners designed towns to pack in workers and maximize profits, at the expense of public health. All of this led to environmental feedback loops, the melting of sea ice, and the vicious cycles that make Minneapolis 62° F in February. And if that heat stroke isn't enough of a wake-up call, I'm not sure what would be.
Later, I will compile a condensed version of the science of global warming on this site.
In the next post, I'll look at the history of sustainability and health, focusing on what industrializing cities did right and how we can learn from their efforts, today.
Works Cited
Giradet, Herbert. Cities, People, Planet: Urban Development and Climate Change. 2nd ed. West Sussex, England: Wiley, 2008. Print.
IPCC. "TS.3.1.1 Global Average Temperatures." IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.
Shah, Anup. Climate Change and Global Warming Introduction. Global Issues. Anup Shah, 1 Feb. 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.
Without argument, I think most people will agree that our world is changing. Both our social and physical environments are under constant pressure, and even in 170 CE, the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius noted "all these things you see will change almost as you look at them ... The universe is change: life is judgment" (Meditations 5.3.4). So while everything is changing, what's up for debate is our history and how we move forward from here: our judgment.
What we do have is our histories, our "facts," and our values. When I sat down to write a "sustainability blog," I juggled these categories and asked myself "which of these is the most important?" I could write about the history of sustainability, essentially collating facts and photos digitally. I could draw from my data management experience and visualize the "facts" and "stats." Or I could comment on cultural values, highlighting why certain ideas are unsustainable.
And then I realized that that's not enough. Like the environments we live in, all of these factors are in-play at the same time; so my job (as I see it, and you're welcome to contest that if you're looking for something different) is to bring everything into perspective to understand how and why we are where we are: with huge continents of garbage the size of Texas in the Pacific and North Atlantic, large migrations of rural populations to dense, urban centers with the appearance of renewed urban poverty, and with substantially increased risks of dust bowls and greater depressions due to the changing climate.
To introduce how we got where we are (ecologically) and what we can do, I want to introduce the Principles of Sustainability, which will in large part be an organizing theme of my research and also of this blog. Those principles are that 1) we can't diminish our natural capital, and 2) we can't diminish opportunities for others to experience nature. These principles lead us to consider a "sustainability triangle" that is the combination of "environmentally sound decisions ... economically viable decisions ... and socially equitable decisions" which together lead to sustainable development (Hassenzahl, Hager, and Berg Fig. 2.1).
So in this increasingly globalized world, what we need is to make information accessible so we can understand our situations and make sustainable choices. So that's what I'm doing, here: curating. With all this information in mind, we can begin to understand what we can do about these issues, together.
In the next post, I'll follow up with the history of how industries and cities have developed unsustainably.
Works Cited
Aurelius, Marcus Antoninus Augustus. Meditations. Trans. Martin Hammond. London: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.
de Loutherbourg, Philip James. Coalbrookdale by Night. 1801. Oil on canvas. Science Museum, London. Source
Hassenzahl, David M., Mary Catherine Hager, and Linda R. Berg. Visualizing Environmental Science. 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011. Print.
A year ago, today, I took out my first head of cabbage in the garden I started in my back yard. Though I started the garden for several reasons, I decided to plant and grow food because I saw how disconnected we've become from our meals. My father (Joseph) was a botanist; he was born in 1917 and grew up in the Great Depression on a small farm twenty minutes outside of Tom's River, New Jersey. During the week, he'd work the fields with his grandfather (my great-grandfather Jim) and during the weekend, he'd work in the garage with his father (my grandfather Joe). And they got by in relative comfort through the 30s because they lived close to the land. Then, seeing the damage the Dust Bowl brought, he enrolled at Rutgers to study biology and try and give something back to his community by researching and teaching.
My father, his father, and his father before him (as cliché as it is) grew something as far back as we can trace the family's history through Germany, England, and Ireland. So I decided to grow something. The season before the cabbages, I tried to grow pumpkins, but I planted them too late and the frost killed them before the fruit grew big enough to be worth anything. Then, the cabbages, which turned out okay (see pictured).
Since those first heads of cabbage, I've learned a lot about what to do and what not to do when attempting "urban farming." And around the time I started digging the pitch in the yard (now about 2 years ago), someone I respect, Dr. Justin Hodgson (himself from a line of farmers) told me that to be a citizen in the 21st century, you need web-space. Which led me here. To a blog.
Why? Well, I decided that if I want to do something about the state of the world, sustainability and all that, it starts in conversation. So this blog, as well as the rest of this site, will be dedicated to what I've learned and ways that other people might find those lessons/challenges/opportunities useful. I'll pull together ways to live more sustainably, opportunities to get engaged with the community (working with non-profits, education groups, etc.), and a few recipes from the garden.
Since I'm new at all this, please feel free and welcome to give feedback on any aspect of the site, the visuals, the writing, the length of articles, etc. Also, if you're equally interested in living more sustainably and would like to contribute to this project in some way, let me know and I'll find a way to give you some space, as well.
