Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [54]
Thinking like an island requires that we accept conflict and contradiction; accept that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to run; accept that, as Wes Jackson articulated it, “We are more ignorant than knowledgeable and need to act accordingly.”
A farm is like an island; when run well a farm should be self-contained, self-sustaining, its nutrient loop closed and fulfilled from within, not reliant on external inputs. This is farm as ecological system, but in a world where only 1 percent of us are growing the food for the rest, farms have a cultural and educational role as well.
I spent twenty-five years developing a small twelve-and-a half-acre farm and education center in California. Floating in a sea of tract homes and shopping centers, this farm was another type of island. During its heyday, twelve-and-a- half-acres produced one hundred different fruits and vegetables, employed thirty people, provided food for five hundred families, and generated close to a million U.S. dollars in gross income.
Threatened with development, we formed a non-profit organization—the Center for Urban Agriculture—and against all odds raised a million dollars to save that land, placing it under one of the first active agricultural conservation easements in the country.
But the internal struggles of farming in a suburban environment eventually got to me. I found myself longing to live and farm in a place where one’s sense of responsibility extended beyond the edge of the lawn. So we moved 1,200 miles north, to an island in British Columbia, Canada.
Boarding the ferry to get to that island was like pulling up the drawbridge. There was this sense that we were leaving the madness of the world behind; Island as refuge. But I soon discovered the great paradox; that those things I thought I was leaving behind were right there as well, and in ways that were more difficult to ignore. Living on an island, I discovered, does not allow for escape, it forces engagement more than disengagement.
We farm on one of the islands original homesteads, 120 acres that sit in the heart of the island’s watershed.
One of the most wonderful parts of living on this land are the quiet glimpses into the past that appear in unexpected ways, the sense that we are a part of a long chain of humans on the land, from the native people who first fished its creeks and lake to those who built the original homestead to ourselves, each link informed by the past and by the land itself.
I have always emphasized the importance of land tenure as a critical principle for creating a truly sustainable food system, but now I wonder what land tenure really means. After all, we are just passing through, temporary tenants and caretakers of a larger natural force. All that will ultimately remain is the land, and the best we can do is to leave it more fertile, more alive, and more biologically diverse than we found it, and to use our brief time on the land to feed and to nourish and to inspire.
We are living on the cusp of one of the most significant global changes since the onset of the industrial revolution. We all are acutely aware of climate change, a looming energy crisis, and populations increasing in parts of the world at staggering rates. We know that the most fundamental elements of life, such as soil and water and clean air, are under unprecedented assault. Unlike the Polynesians who had evolved a closed system on their islands, most islands are now wholly dependent on the outside for their most basic needs.
If we are going to be able to move through and survive the massive changes that are taking place in the world, many more of us are going to have to find our way back to the art and craft of growing food.
In October of 2001, I gave a speech to the Bioneers conference in San Francisco in which I proposed that, in memory of the thousands of people who lost their lives at the World Trade Center, a portion of that site be converted