Went to an urban farming forum last night at the epic David Brower Center in Berkeley. And was overwhelmed, even before one of the presenters talked about it, again by the class-race conservation divide. Looked like the crowd of about 250 all had graduate degrees and were white-ish. Also, the buzzwords started to pile up from the five presenters - a verbal SEO greenwash fest:
Food commons
Landprint
Foodshed (i.e. watershed)
Foodscape
Seed-saving
Carbon-banking
Populist education
Ecological literacy
Artisan quality
40 percent of the bay area landscape is devoted to agriculture. Wow.
The second presenter, a youngish dude, editor of the Earth Island Journal, mentioned that the biggest challenge to successful urban farming was bridging the race-class social divide. His urban farm, Alemany Farms in SF, gets younger, whiter, college-educated volunteers but not so many others. They have an Autumn Harvest festival and an Earth Day Barbeque - that's why there's nobody there. It's too cute, too ineffectual, too nonprofit. Got to be a way to make it REAL.
There was one cute presenter with a swallow-tail cardigan.
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