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.

As taken as I am with the idea of “home ground,” I asked the students in the workshop to map their own communities, taking the following questions into consideration:

What are the characteristics of this location that make it a “place,” and not simply a landscape?  Where are the schools, cultural resources and green spaces?  Where does your food come from, and how much of it is grown within 100 miles?  How “walkable” is your hometown?
I was astonished to hear the variety of their answers, but also the degree to which they were not able to identify places of cultural worth, much less find a way to walk to them.  Admittedly, this seminar represented a small sample size, but these were students from the suburbs of Boston, the bedroom communities of Seattle and Atlanta, and even a high-rise neighborhood in Seoul.  It is never an easy task to train a critical eye on the landscapes we pass each day on our way to work and school, but even thirty minutes of focused reflection reveals some deeply entrenched issues afflicting all communities.

Next up in the seminar plan was a look at the work of pioneers seeking to identify and solve these problems, creating healthy, resilient communities on the foundations of broken landscapes once scarred by toxicity and neglect.  PBS’s series “Design E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious” offers a wide variety of episodes on the full spectrum of designers, activists and entrepreneurs working to create the sustainable communities of the future.

We viewed the episode on Affordable Green Housing,which examines the work of Jonathan Rose, who partners with community groups in New York City to develop affordable housing solutions that will strengthen the community, provide access to young workers and families seeking to remain in the communities they love, and offer healthy alternatives to the stifling housing options traditionally designed for big cities.  Oh yes, did I neglect to mention that these developments were beautiful, too?

The development of this aesthetic sense is something that the architectural and design elements of the “green” continuum seem to have understood from the start (not unilaterally, but certainly with respect to the designs that endure).  Those who do it well take into account basic human needs, like clean air, well-lit spaces, access to greenways and integrated community resources.  By extending this focus to include biophilic design, we apply a very simple leap of logic: why mess with creation … design with nature in mind, and as nature intended.  Rose’s central idea regarding cities is also elegant in its attention to our role within a larger ecosystem.  The richest community systems are polycultures, deriving strength and resilience from their diversity.  Unlike the massive corn monocultures that dominate our dangerously unstable food system, diverse biological networks are better equipped to evolve and meet the needs of changing climates and home grounds.

On the city level, this hypothesis extends to the idea that diversity is not simply beneficial, but essential to the health of a community. Why shouldn’t our less fortunate neighbors enjoy clean air, healthy buildings and walkable neighborhoods?  Aren’t these things more on the level of fundamental rights than trappings of privilege?  It’s not much of a reach to see that promoting this sort of resilience in the poorest communities enables far-reaching benefits for residents of all racial and cultural backgrounds.

We who work and live in residential school communities, while traditionally seen as isolated on islands of privilege, have a central role to play here as well.  I see the residential school as the ideal sustainability laboratory, with the resources, intellectual curiosity and youthful energy both to apply strategies for resilient living, and to innovate beyond the bounds of what is currently considered possible.  In our classrooms and on our campuses,  fascinatingly intricate networks of relationships evolve each day. We accomplish our business in confined spaces, share resources, and grow through close contact with diverse peers.

I hope to consider this question of sustainability, diversity and the resilient residential school in the future, as the future may well require all three characteristics in any successful community.  There are many, many committed folks working on high school and university campuses to promote sustainable community growth, and I plan to devote at least some of this space to publicizing these successes.  May we all work diligently to prove that our  communities, commonly thought of as ivory towers, are in actuality the true agoras of innovative exchange.

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