Sustainability, Diversity, and Community Resilience

About one week ago, as a part of our school’s observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I had the pleasure of leading a workshop that considered the intersection points of diversity and sustainability.  These ideas traditionally have received very little shared bandwidth, though that is changing, thanks to the work of folks like Majora Carter, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins and Green For All, as well as Will Allen’s Milwaukee-based Growing Power.  Perhaps most crucially, if we are ever to realize the vision of recovery that Americans so desperately seek in these hard times, we must address some very fundamental deficiencies, and inefficiencies, that blight the cores of our great cities.  The idea that we might use sustainable growth strategies and responsible development to remediate these problems is not so much radical, as it is radically simple.

Perhaps more relevantly to the students who filled the room, our school, as a diverse residential community, provides a fertile environment within which to build meaningful reforms for the outside world.

Crown Point Conundrum

As Vermonters and New Yorkers wind down the Celebrate Champlain quadricentennial calendar, Lake Champlain appears unwilling to yield the spotlight.   The iconic watershed, long a thoroughfare for transport and commerce, became an impassible gulf just over two weeks ago with the closure of the Crown Point Bridge.  Already reeling from the effects of the Great Recession, and the free fall of the dairy industry, businesses on both sides of the bridge have been stung by the sudden disappearance of this unlikely economic engine.

Were the fallout from this sudden crisis not so tragically pervasive, one could see it as a fascinating litmus test for the resilience of local economies.  While folks on both sides of the lake scramble to concoct stopgap fixes, it would behoove the rest of us to tune in and pay attention.

A Bit More from Wendell Berry

A passage that firms up quite nicely the advantages of an agrarian ethos:

“An agrarian economy rises up from the fields, woods, and streams–from the complex of soils, slopes, weathers, connections, influences, and exchanges that we mean when we speak, for example, of the local community or the local watershed.  The agrarian mind is therefore not regional or national, let alone global, but local.  It must know on intimate terms the local plants and animals and local soils; it must know local possibilities and impossibilities,  opportunities and hazards. It depends and insists on knowing very particular local histories and biographies.” — From “The Whole Horse” 1996 in Citizenship Papers

Putting Away the Pitchforks

Open the newspaper Pull up your customized, electronic news aggregator these days, and you will find a media reality awash in tales of populist rage.  Content for a time as the symbol of homespun simplicity, an American Gothic accoutrement, the pitchfork has regained the currency it once carried in the bygone days of agrarian populism.  For instance, here it is in the hands of Stephen Colbert.

Stephen’s Angry Mob Will Crush AIG

The nature of the protest hasn’t necessarily changed. Then, as now, populism sought to assert the rights of the downtrodden against a corporate culture that had infected the political system, narrowing the spectrum of debate to economic solutions that perpetuated the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few.  Unfortunately, we are rapidly losing touch with the utilitarian spirit that once defined the movement, as citizens are, in increasing numbers, no longer rooted in the land.  In fact, the contemporary uproar over the failure of AIG and the financial system writ large only underscores the failure of the populist revolt of the 19th century to create meaningful change in the complexion of the American landscape.