Author: Jessica Chen

5)  They have limited their farms to a scale that is compatible both with the practice of neighborhood and with the optimum use of low-power technology.

Farming in the modern day has been simultaneously romanticized and distanced from urban lifestyles.  Phrases like ‘returning to the land’ imply that those who farm are not the same as those who live in cities – that urbanites and country folk are two unmixable cultures, like oil and water.

But, coming to Louisville, and seeing houses and yards like those of Joe Franzen and Claude Stephens, has changed my perception and definition of ‘farming’. Joe and Claude are both visionary individuals, motivated to live within the limits of a sustainable and rewarding lifestyle. They both live in urban areas of Louisville, yet their yards are small urban patches of greenery amidst rows of houses and a high population density. From the fronts of their houses, the last thing you expect is a substantial garden in the back yard.

Walking into these yards, I was struck by an intense admiration for both these people. Even with their busy lives, they somehow managed to grow gardens in these yards – yards teeming with life and nourishment, indicative of care and foresight, revealing of the intentional and motivated personalities of their inhabitants.

They were yards overflowing with carefully cultivated flora: fragrant herb gardens, colorful patches of swiss and rainbow chard, broad leafy lettuces, bright juicy berries, tomatoes bursting with flavor, and many more vegetables and fruits that nourish both our minds and souls.

These two people are just stand-out examples of a growing movement of urban farmers – their backyards, though not a 40-acre property with tractors and hay bales and traditional implications of a farm, are their own personal farms, filled with crops that they themselves cultivate and can easily eat for dinner.

When I return home to suburban New York, I’m returning to a back and front yard more than twice as big as the yards here. We have a swingset in the back, unknowingly resting on fertile soil – a perfect place for a thriving garden. My dad wants to cover this precious soil with asphalt and add a basketball hoop.

Now, I have a renewed motivation not to let him do that. With the houses of Joe and Claude in mind, I plan to begin to create my own urban farm, a farm that is limited in scale enough to fit in a suburban neighborhood, but still be vibrant and dynamic enough to provide fresh greens for my family, and a spiritual connection to the soil.

“Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.” 

In this haunting yet optimistic phrase, we’ve been instructed to be joyful, despite the dire and depressing facts our current environmental situation. This phrase resonates deeply with some of my personal beliefs.

On multiple occasions, Wendell Berry strongly asserts that the deterioration of sustainable farming culture can be directly attributed to our capitalist, industrial economy and our unshakeable dependence on fossil fuels (BITT, 60). Berry then goes on to trace the roots of this cultural phenomenon to human ambition (9).

This logic makes a lot of sense to me, but also comes with some pessimistic implications. I believe that this ‘ambition’ is an intrinsic quality of human nature. Capitalist economic structure, both domestically and internationally, links directly to man’s natural competitiveness and our perpetual search for the ‘next best thing’, the thing that is always slightly out of reach, in the interest of greed and self-improvement.

Here’s where I take issue, where I can’t find joy in the facts. By attributing our capitalist economy to human nature, in a way we are accepting that it can’t be changed. It serves as a moral crutch that rationalizes our history of abusing nature, and almost seems to set us on a one-way road to purgatory.

I grappled constantly with this issue, to no avail : How can we possibly take control to change our current situation of environmental abuse, if human nature, by definition, stays constant and cannot be changed?

Perhaps joy can be found with the addition of a little bit of faith in humanity. Perhaps my thoughts would prove more productive if I believed that human nature is capable of changing. Maybe this change shows itself in the type of work we are participating here in Louisville – by working together, we can change the paths of our collective mindset, towards a more hopeful and sustainable future.

As Wendell Berry so aptly summarizes, “Once free of [ambition], we might again go about our work and our lives with a seriousness and pleasure denied to us when we merely submit to a fate already determined by gigantic politics, economics, and technology” (9).