Scott Carlson

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Eagan, Minn., near an unusual farmer who worked a remarkable piece of land. The young Martin Diffley grew an array of vegetables on fields tucked amid grassy, protective hills and dense woods, a landscape much different from the deforested, monoculture farms so common in the region. Diffley established his Gardens of Eagan, one of the first organic farms in the Midwest, on land that had been owned by the Diffley family since 1855; pesticides and other common agricultural chemicals had never been used on it. But its edenic traits could not save it. In the late 1980s, as the Twin Cities oozed into the countryside around it, the forests were bulldozed and the hills flattened to make way for unimaginative houses in various shades of beige.

The story behind the loss of that place forms the broken heart of Turn Here Sweet Corn, a new memoir by Atina Diffley, Martin’s wife. The book is billed as a gardening guide, love story, business handbook, and legal thriller, but it is really a wrenching tale of a common yet private tragedy: the way development pressures push farming families off the land, and what happens to those families during and afterward….

In the 1990s, Richard J. Jackson had an epiphany while driving on the car-choked Buford Highway, on his way to his job at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America,” he says. Dr. Jackson, who is now a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Public Health, has since become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health.

College leaders, with help from facilities managers, sustainability directors, faculty members, and even students, should think hard about how systems on their campus would operate in an energy-scarce world. That thinking should range beyond running part of the campus fleet on a cafeteria’s fryer oil, a seemingly-popular response at the moment.