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Strengthening Rural-Urban Connections
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
One of the things we point out in _A Nation of Farmers_ is how deeply similar the problems of inner city and rural cultures are. In both cases, there is often a great deal of poverty. In both cases, there is often inadequate access to decent food, since rural areas have lost much of their garden culture, and supermarkets are often far away for both populations. In both cases, there are inadequate jobs for younger people, and often high levels of unemployment for those committed to staying either in the neighborhood or the country. The ability to stay there, and transmit a local culture is thus very low. Urban dwellers become completely disconnected from subsistence culture, while rural dwellers are brought to believe, often, in the superiority of urban life, and urban culture, and strive to mimic it in destructive ways. Rural areas are colonized by industrial agriculture, polluting the area and reducing their ability to feed people in the long term, while urban areas are colonized by industrial business, and polluted and their environment degraded.
Nearly every society struggles, in some measure, with the disconnect between urban and rural life, but most societies have had more contiguity between the two than our own does. Having a local future, and enduring local foodshed requires that we start rebuilding connections between urban and rural cultures – because in many ways, the difficulties that both have could be partly ameliorated by closer ties – economic ones, of course, but not just economic.
Many cultures have traditionally had much closer ties between urban and rural populations. For example, in Russia, people often had small summer cottages that they retreated to, not just for pleasure, but to garden and forage in the woods.
(24 March 2009)
Artists, Foreclosures and the Ruins of the Unsustainable
Julia Levitt, WorldChanging
I’ve been waiting for a story like this to pop up, so when I heard it on the radio yesterday I geeked out a bit. As NPR’s Jennifer Guerra reports, artists in Detroit are buying up foreclosed properties and turning them into cultural havens. In the crumbling Motor City, Mitch and Gina Cope have been purchasing ailing properties at rock-bottom prices, and are encouraging other artists to do the same.
That part isn’t shocking; rather, it was just a matter of time until a really good example showed up. Artist communities are known for reinventing downtrodden neighborhoods the world over; in fact, the phenomenon of artists-come-in, neighborhood-becomes-hot, prices-go-up, artists-forced-out is so familiar now that what’s happening in Detroit can be seen as something like the larval stage of neighborhood development. But Guerra uncovered a development that hadn’t even occurred to me:
(19 March 2009)
City dwellers have smaller carbon footprints, study finds
Adam Vaughan, Guardian
Greater use of public transport and denser housing make urbanites more eco-friendly than their rural counterparts
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… The report by London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) looked at 11 major cities on four continents, including London, Tokyo, New York and Rio de Janeiro.
It found per capita greenhouse gas emissions for a Londoner in 2004 were the equivalent of 6.2 tonnes of CO2, compared with 11.19 for the UK average.
The rural northeast of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, were singled out for having the highest footprints per capita in the UK.
In the US, New Yorkers register footprints of 7.1 tonnes each, less than a thrid of the US average of 23.92 tonnes.
(23 March 2009)
Earthship’s Michael Reynolds on the Colbert Report
Steve Colbert Report via Gristmill
This is one of the most successful, least awkward Colbert interviews I’ve seen, with a guy named Michael Reynolds who builds houses out of trash and runs Earthship. -Dave Roberts
[VIDEO AT ORIGINAL]
(25 March 2009)
