Hold on to what is good
Blessedly, the naïve world of nature is unconcerned with sophistication. It just keeps trying to heal and grow. While humans cultivate our cool indifference, millions of other species are working toward a good outcome for all. “We are literally living off the fruits of other creatures’ labors,” says agricultural ecologist Gary Paul Nabhan, “those of the birds, bugs, and beasts that loosely co-evolved with seed plants over the last hundred million years.”
A whole biosphere of species wants to flourish together. So why should our kind alone deem the future a lost cause? Writer and conservationist Alice Walker reasons, “As long as the earth can make a spring every year, I can.”
Consider two of many such projects now springing up around the Mid-Atlantic, transforming cynicism and despair into action, joy and results.
Greensgrow Farm began by “rethinking land, abandoned space, oil barrels, PVC, tools and trash,” its mission summary stoutly declares. The idea sprang up in 1997 out of a forlorn city block—an abandoned toxic waste site in a depressed Philadelphia neighborhood—when founders Mary Seton Corboy and Tom Sereduk toted in some hope and tomato seeds.
Today, Greensgrow is a thriving community hub, a fresh produce and “idea farm.” It’s plucky proof that magic can emerge from a mess and help revive an entire community.
Meanwhile, in the rural central Appalachians, organic gardener Anthony Flaccavento has been doing work similar, but more widely flung. In 1995 Flaccavento founded Appalachian Sustainable Development to help this area revive its degraded soils, local economy, water quality—and hopes. Years of mountaintop-removal mining, bad logging and nutrient-depleting tobacco crops, he realized, had stolen resources and livability from the residents they were supposed to help.
Flaccavento began questioning the despair-inducing “jobs vs. environment” PR that outside industries were using to justify all the wreckage. The we’re-at-war message was effective at pitting neighbor against neighbor, at the expense of the land and water and livable futures.
When people “act into a new way of thinking,” Flaccavento says, they “understand their place [in the world] in a new and more empowered light.” He discovered that ground level effort reconnects people not only to their own future, but to the whole biosphere and its longevity. It inspired him to found SCALE (Sequestering Carbon, Accelerating Local Economies), a consulting group now helping clients green up their places and economies across the U.S.
Ground level efforts don’t all succeed, Flaccavento concedes. But failure isn’t a reason to give up. In fact, he says, failure is the compost from which more viable projects grow, along with livelier livelihoods.
Greensgrow Farm puts it this way. “We believe that there’s a way things could be and that we can make them happen if we’re willing to work hard enough, laugh loud enough and be open enough to learn from our mistakes.”
