Originally Published in Permaculture Activist Magazine, 2011
I’m in a predicament: my native habitat is unsustainable. I’ve spent most of my life in cities, doing city stuff: riding public transit, hanging out at coffee shops, going to concerts and art shows, giving homeless people change. My identity is intimately bound up with the fast and beautiful chaos of urban life. It’s what I know, and I love it.
Yet since I first encountered permaculture some four years ago, I’ve been constantly reminded that cities, quite literally, suck. Viewed as an organism, they might be considered heterotrophic – that is, they consume far more than they produce. Sure, the per-person ecological footprint of urban life might not be as bad as that of the suburbs or exurbs. But less bad does not equal good, and the reality is that every city in the overdeveloped world is dependent on the systematic exploitation of thousands of acres of farmland, forest, and mines on a daily basis.
And then there’s the toll on people: in order to metabolize all those raw materials, cities demand that labor be specialized to a dehumanizing degree. Urban “education” values information over wisdom; urban “work” becomes ever more separated from domestic life.
It’s tempting to blame these ills on contemporary cities – ones of the corporatized, fossil-fueled persuasion. However, thinkers from Daniel Quinn to Manuel DeLanda to Jared Diamond have revealed how urban areas have been highly stratified places for millennia. From Babylon to Tenochtitlan, settlements of larger than ten thousand have consistently stolen the autonomy of those in their sphere of influence, and left vast swaths of countryside degraded in their wake.
So what am I to do? Apparently, my settlement pattern of choice is a tumor, putting entire populations to work extracting and processing resources, all in order to fuel a positive feedback loop of growth. Looking at it that way, it’s no wonder that many in the permaculture movement tend to be repulsed by cities. It’s got to be a lot easier on the conscience and psyche to build regenerative systems somewhere less anthropogenic, surrounded by a community of supportive species and like-minded people.
And yet, for me, that somehow feels like cheating. On a certain level, I know that if I turn my back on the metropolis, I’ll be doing so at my own peril: in our interconnected society, cities are paradoxically both the most vulnerable and the most powerful structures around. No matter how far we remove ourselves, we’re all affected by decisions made in cities – decisions about land use, taxation, resource extraction, and transportation infrastructure, to name a few. What’s more, cities contain a staggering amount of embodied energy, manifested in structures both literal and invisible. As we enter an era of climate change and energy descent, tremendous opportunity lies in retooling these products of industrial civilization to build the foundation for more stable, regenerative systems.
And so, I’ve thus far resisted the urge to escape. I’ve made the choice to stay in the city, and figure out some way to get this tumor I love to function a little bit better. Living as a devoted permaculturalist in the thick of consumer society isn’t always an easy balance. But as much as I can, I try to embrace the city’s contradictions, seeing the problems of the metropolis as solutions. Whether I’m foraging for discarded lumber in an alleyway, mapping public fruit trees online, or working with dozens of eager volunteers to build a forest garden from scratch, my most successful actions as an urban permaculturalist are those that leverage the qualities that make cities unique – massive resource flows, densities of cultural and financial capital, rich polycultures of skills and backgrounds – to create physical and invisible structures that are self-reliant and regenerative.
MY HOME TUMOR
Though I’ve spent considerable time in Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Rio De Janeiro, the place where I’ve chosen to put down my roots is the one I was born in: Denver, Colorado. It’s not a world-class city, by any means. There’s no subway – only light rail – and our opera isn’t anything to brag about. But Denver’s what I know, which goes a long way when it comes to building community. And as a medium-sized city in the middle of the country, it offers a fitting case study for the issues facing many cities at the dawn of energy descent, and how permaculture can help these cities find their way forward.
Denver was founded at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the Platte River, about ten miles from where the shortgrass steppe abuts the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. For thousands of years, this area consisted of squat clumps of buffalo grass, interrupted by patches of prickly pear cactus and the occasional cottonwood tree – and very little in the way of human sustenance. Although the area receives over 300 days of sunlight every year, cold winter temperatures, late frosts, and a scant 16 inches of annual precipitation make it a difficult environment for plants and animals alike. The Ute and Arapaho that passed through the area lived largely off bison, berries and chenopods, taking to the more productive foothills in the spring and summer.
Fast forward to 2011, though, and this desolate picture has been all but erased. Thanks to 150 years of imported food, fuel, and water, Denver feels like city in its prime. With its sunny climate, nearby mountains, and blend of Midwestern hospitality, rugged cowboy independence, and left-coast cosmopolitanism, the Front Range metro region has been gaining rapidly in population for decades. The redevelopment of central Denver’s neighborhoods has been slowed only slightly by the great recession, with new apartments, shops and cultural institutions arriving all the time. In the last ten years, a bustling music and arts scene has emerged, as well as an increasing emphasis on sustainable living: the metro area is midway through a multibillion-dollar expansion of our light rail system, and it has become a regional hub for the wind and solar industries.
If all this sounds a little too good to be true, it is. While members of the creative class adapt Denver’s core to their fancy, biking from their sleek condos to trendy locavore restaurants, hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents are enacting a very different urban narrative: living paycheck to paycheck, their homes in constant danger of foreclosure, working long hours at service and manufacturing jobs that continue to evaporate as the consumer economy grinds to a standstill. Designing a permanent culture may the the farthest thing from the minds of these folks. Yet many of them are intimately familiar with concepts that permaculture tends to espouse – self-reliance, local community, hands-on skills.
As I became involved with Denver’s fledgling permaculture and Transition community, the conspicuous absence of these voices from the dialogue began to feel more and more frustrating. In the potlucks, meetings and conferences I attended, there was no shortage of visionary ideas for reimagining the city. But all of these ideas were generated by a certain part of the population, and reflected the values and biases of that population accordingly. It didn’t matter that I was myself a part of that population; I knew a blind spot when I saw one, and it was clear to me that something was amiss. As long as energy descent and resilience thinking were framed in ways that only attracted people at the top of the resource pyramid, it would only be those at the top that benefited from the discussion.
I began to wonder: how is permaculture relevant to people in other parts of the pyramid? Where is it happening in the city already without us realizing it? What might the ethics, principles and design process have to offer to, say, a working-class Latino family? As it turns out, these questions were much less hypothetical than I could have anticipated. In the year and a half since I started asking them, I’ve found myself in way over my head, helping launch an ambitious indoor farm and education center in one of Denver’s most neglected neighborhoods. But hey, that’s how we learn, right?
BIRTH OF A HAUS
The neighborhood of Elyria-Swansea, along the northern edge of Denver’s city limits, is marginal in more ways than one. Incorporated in 1888, the area has always been home to working-class families – Eastern European until the 1960s, mostly Latino today. The 7,000 residents that call Elyria-Swansea home are surrounded on nearly all sides by a buffet of the more unseemly parts of the urban exoskeleton: a dog food factory, the National Western Stock Show complex, a variety of warehouses and distribution facilities, a water treatment plant, an interstate highway, and a main railroad right-of-way, to name a few. After decades in the eye of this industrial storm, Elyria-Swansea has earned the dubious distinction of being the single most polluted zip code in the state.
To make matters worse, the neighborhood’s isolation and low purchasing power have left it without many of the amenities that most of us deem essential to urban life. Alleys remain unpaved, creating dust in the summer and mud in the winter and spring. Sidewalks along the truck-heavy streets are in poor repair, or nonexistent. Besides the library, the church, and the rec center, there are few public places to gather; the only shops of any kind are corner stores and fast food restaurants. The nearest grocery store – a Wal-Mart – lies 3 miles away, across a maze of busy streets and highways. And, as in similar communities throughout the country, Elyria-Swansea is suffering from a near-epidemic of pollution- and diet-related illnesses, including diabetes, childhood obesity, and myriad heart and lung conditions.
Given this litany of challenges, it seems somewhat miraculous that there happens to be an old 20,000 square-foot greenhouse right in the middle of the neighborhood. The structure was built in the 1960s by a flower company for use as a processing facility, but was later abandoned as the flower market globalized. The greenhouse had sat vacant for years when, in mid-2009, it came to the attention of Paul Tamburello, a local real estate developer and entrepreneur. Paul had a passion for social justice and local food, and he immediately understood the potential that the space held for the community and the city as a whole. Only weeks after first seeing the space, Paul arranged to purchase the building with the intention of turning it into a center for urban agriculture and food justice.
Paul had a compelling vision, but neither the time nor the knowledge to actually get it off the ground. That’s where I came in. Dana Miller, Transition Denver’s initiator and a key connector in the city’s local food movement, got wind of the project and recommended to Paul that I get involved. At first, I was more than a little skeptical; my experience had taught me that 90 percent of such visionary projects fizzle somewhere between the napkin sketch and the opening ceremony. But after getting to know Paul a little, my fears were assuaged. His track record, open-mindedness, and heartfelt approach convinced me that this project might actually happen – and that I had the opportunity lend my permaculturist’s perspective to its development.
Within a couple months, the core team had become a formidable crew. Joining Paul and I were Ashara Ekundayo, a longtime artivist in the african-american community and a passionate advocate of food justice; Coby Gould, a good friend of mine and a fellow permaculturalist; JD Sawyer, a former project manager for a nearby college and newfound aquaponics expert; and several other enthusiastic volunteers. Together, we sketched out a three-part vision, roughly modeled on Growing Power, that involved growing food in an indoor farm, selling it a small marketplace at the front of the building, and teaching ongoing classes and workshops in nutrition, cooking and cultivation.
With such an exciting opportunity before us, we were all eager to start planting, teaching and selling right away. Thankfully, though, the project had different things in store for us, and our first year ended up being one of long and thoughtful observation. Before we could transform the neighborhood, we needed to develop self-perpetuating invisible structures. Before growing food, we needed to learn the idiosyncracies of our greenhouse, and before enriching the community we had to understand the dynamics of the neighborhood.
INVISIBLE STRUCTURES
The team agreed early on that we wanted the GrowHaus to be as financially self-sustaining as possible. That meant striking a balance between serving our mission and generating revenue through outside sources. Our fundraising strategy entailed using grants to finance our start-up costs without going into debt while nurturing a diversity of earned income streams for long-term sustainability (see sidebar).
Another key strategy was to weave a network of partnerships. It had quickly become clear that our project was too complicated to start from scratch, and so we were continually on the lookout for mutually beneficial collaborations. Thanks to Paul and Ashara’s efforts, our project had generated considerable buzz among Denver’s sustainability-minded crowd. Building off this excitement, we held monthly volunteer workdays with dozens of people at each, allowing folks to share in our vision while helping us with large projects like painting, replacing roof panels and organizing materials.
Other collaborations were less flashy, but no less transformative. We worked with a local job placement center to hire a federal TANF funds recipient as a farmer-in-training, at no cost to us. The Cross-Community Coalition, a family resource center down the street, was happy to join us in cross-marketing each others’ events to our neighbors. And as we were planning Seed to Seed, a high school summer program on nutrition and urban agriculture, we were fortunate to encounter Damien Thompson, an enthusiastic professor from a nearby university willing to donate his time to help instruct it.
PHYSICAL AND BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURES
The raison d’etre of the GrowHaus, of course, was growing food. From day one, I had been scheming to introduce permaculture systems like a perennial nursery, large-scale aquaponics runs, and polyculture demonstration beds. But before we could grow on a large scale, we needed a building that could provide the right conditions for year-round production – and on that front, we had our work cut out for us. The structure hadn’t been updated in decades, and the fans and heaters that still functioned at all were grossly inefficient. The roof was mostly covered in corrugated metal; all 20,000 square feet would need to be replaced with clear double-walled panels to let in enough light for plants. Every time it rained, meanwhile, the 40-year-old gutters leaked into the space, and there were enough animal-sized holes in the walls that it had become a sanctuary for squirrels, feral cats, and even the occasional frog.
Undaunted, we decided to start small and slow. With some of the funds we’d raised from film screenings and benefit concerts, we walled off a corner of the massive structure with clear plastic, replaced a few of the opaque roof panels with clear ones, fired up one of the old heaters, and planted our first crops in February 2010. In keeping with our network-weaving approach, we rented out parts of our heated Zone 1 to several other urban gardening groups to start their own seedlings. Each group donated a portion of their plants to us, and in April we held a seedling sale, where we raised a thousand dollars while getting hundreds of vegetable seedlings into the hands of gardeners across town.
Meanwhile, with JD’s help we began delving in to the exciting, daunting world of aquaponics. Our first system was based on Growing Power’s model, which consisted of a 4’x 8′ x 2′ fish tank positioned below two shallow gravel growing beds. Although the structure itself came together without a hitch, we learned a couple valuable lessons the hard way once we populated the system with perch. On the very first night the fish were introduced, one made its way through the pump screen and got stuck in the pump itself, shutting it off and depriving the fish of oxygen for several hours. Our attempts at growing potted plants in the system further compromised the health of the fish, as soil got swept out of the drainage holes in the pots and made its way into the water. All in all, only a handful of perch survived our first batch.
NEIGHBORLY LEARNINGS
Another source of frustration during our first year was our seemingly glacial progress in engaging our neighbors. From the beginning, we all understood that gaining buy-in from Elyria-Swansea residents was essential to the project’s long-term success. Yet, more than 6 months in, none of the locals were directly involved. What was taking so long?
For one thing, the cultural barriers proved to be more daunting than we’d anticipated. Though Elyria-Swansea was just a couple miles away from the Denver I’d known my whole life, spending time there often felt like visiting another country. Many residents were recent immigrants, with their old ways of life largely intact. Elyria-Swansea’s physical and cultural isolation discouraged people from spending time outside the neighborhood except for work, while their “social networks” involved spreading news through actual face-to-face interaction rather than Facebook and Twitter.
As the implications of our otherness began to sink in, I began to question my place in the project. Did I have the right, as an outsider, to be working in Elyria-Swansea? Was I really in it for the community, or was I merely acting out my fantasies of urban farming while assuaging my upper-middle-class white male guilt? Was the GrowHaus something our neighbors even wanted in the first place?
Fortunately, I didn’t have to keep questioning for much longer. Slowly but surely, we began to make deeper connections with more of our neighbors and find out that, to our relief, most were truly excited and supportive of the project’s mission. As we started to have honest, open conversations about the dynamics of race and class in the neighborhood, we learned that the lack of participation wasn’t about indifference or antipathy. Instead, it had more to do with the limited time and exhaustion that all working families face, as well as a reluctance to get involved with something they didn’t feel like they belonged to. As one resident at a listening session put it: “not many of us are going to want to come through the door if the faces on the other side don’t look like ours.”
We couldn’t change our faces, of course, but we could change our attitudes. If we were serious about community participation, we realized that it was time to stop waiting for neighbors to “get involved” in ways that looked familiar to our eyes and to start meeting them on their terms. It was time to limit the flood of young white volunteers, as eager as they were, and focus on making our invisible structures more approachable to the people next door. After a year in the neighborhood, we had finally understood what it meant to act in solidarity: having the privileged accept responsibility for adapting to the conditions of the oppressed, rather than expecting the oppressed to adapt to the conditions of the privileged.
With this paradigm in mind, a new strategy emerged. We began to actively seek out “cultural translators” to help us understand the dynamics of the community in greater depth. We started taking spanish lessons twice a week and found facilitators to run anti-oppression trainings for our volunteers. Finally, we decided to distribute some of our surplus space to five families we knew, giving them free soil, seeds, and a 3′ x 6′ plot in our heated space throughout the winter.
And, as if on cue, the neighbors began to warm up. Residents began walking in the door more frequently, whether to check out the place for the first time or just to say hi. Kids from the nearby middle school would visit once and keep coming back to help out, while adults offered to lend their skills in construction, truck delivery, and healthy cooking. We knew we still had a long ways to go in making the project “for and by the people,” but we were finally on the right path.
LOOKING FORWARD
All in all, the first year of the GrowHaus was a thrilling, and often frustrating, roller coaster of trial and error. With such a large space and comprehensive vision, it was hard at times to know where to even begin. But, after a few bumps, we began to get our bearings and build on our small successes. Our halting efforts have since crystallized into a solid financial model and strategic plan, and we now have the support of several large foundations and the expertise of a talented and committed board of directors to back us up.
Last fall, we finished a new and improved aquaponics system, where 80 tilapia and hundreds of winter greens are currently thriving. We’ve been conducting classes and service learning workshops several times a month, and are preparing for the second year of Seed to Seed, our summer high school program. We’ve begun selling microgreens to a nearby restaurant, one of many that are eager to buy whatever we grow. We’ve convened a multidisciplinary design team to help plan our renovations, and as 2011 warms up, we’ll be starting in on the first phase of construction. In the realm of neighborhood engagement, we’re in the process of convening a community advisory board, hiring a part-time community liaison, and helping launch a multi-neighborhood coalition aimed at ending obesity.
The circumstances of the GrowHaus may be unique, but it’s hardly alone. Projects like Our School at Blair Grocery in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Nuestras Raices in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Planting Justice in Oakland, California, and dozens of others are all working in their particular contexts to apply permaculture thinking to the urban communities that need it the most. Of course, we’re all figuring it out as we go along, and the path to transformative change can seem long and slow. But by methodically applying permaculture’s design process of observation, analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation, we’re making steady progress.
Since starting the GrowHaus, I feel more certain than ever that permaculture has just begun to scratch the surface of these hungry and complex beasts we call cities. Far from being answered, the questions that led me to get involved with food justice have only multiplied: what would a PDC taught by Elyria-Swansea residents look like? How might permaculture promote genuine solidarity between its current privileged base and the urban poor? How can these groups work together to create regenerative feedback loops that counteract the degenerative ones of global corporatism?
Ironically, the one question that led me to my predicament – can Denver ever be sustainable? – now seems to be beside the point. Let’s face it: sustainable or not, we’re here, all three million of us and counting, whether by choice or circumstance. Black, white and brown, we’re all striving to make the environment around us livable for ourselves and our loved ones in the best ways we know how. And for whatever foolish reasons, many of us will continue to stay here, long after the mall doors are shuttered and the gas pumps run dry.
Sustainability evokes stasis, a motionless endpoint, yet we humans live in a chaotically dynamic system we call Gaia. All is in flux, especially these days. And as conditions around us continue to change, cities will do what cities do best: adapt. City residents will take apart and tinker with the ruins of the unsustainable, breathing new life into the structures that surround us. We will learn to grow (and, yes, contract) in ways scarcely imaginable to us now. If permaculture has any say, we’ll be doing all this in a way that automatically increases the resilience of the ecosystems and communities around us. And if we’re at it for long enough, acting in sync with the biosphere and in solidarity with our neighbors, we might just wake up one day to find that our beloved tumors aren’t so cancerous anymore.
It’s a tall order, but that’s no reason not to start.