Cure for a cold, gloomy, and wet fall day: Gotham Greens! Check out their high-tech rooftop hydroponic farm located above a Brooklyn bowling alley. Locally grown, pesticide free herbs and vegetables produced using clean energy sources, and I can’t believe how much I want some of that lettuce right now!
(all photos: Gotham Greens)
HUNGER FREE COMMUNITIES NETWORK!
This is Exciting! The Hunger Free Communities Network is up and running! It’s “a nation-wide platform for coalitions, campaigns and collaborations committed to ending hunger in their localities to learn from each other and share their knowledge and experience with other hunger free organizers.”
A vision for a centralized resource where information can be easily shared and accessed! I can’t wait to see where this goes! Take a look!
LIKE RADIO, WITH PICTURES!
So, my research for this documentary involves visiting and sometimes volunteering at community gardens and urban agriculture projects and talking to people who grow things — Lucky Me! And because it’s fun and interesting, and because I like the sound of people’s voices, I’m recording some of these interviews and posting them here — Radio Free Gardens!
Please check out this segment of Emily’s story and let me know if you like it!
I trotted down to Union Square this morning to visit Andrea’s gloriously tiny, fire-escape garden. On the small (8’x4’ maybe) iron platform, she’s found space for basil, foxglove, thai chilis, rosemary, a blueberry bush, avocado and orange trees, strawberries, tomatoes…and even two small kitchen stools for sitting and chatting!
And yes, it’s still a fully accessible, functioning fire escape :)
Andrea has sharpened her small-space, urban-gardening skills as the manager of the ingenious indoor garden of a local (and committed to locally-grown food) restaurant, but more about that later!
We’ll be following Andrea’s story of a garden-demolished-and-rebuilt throughout the summer, but her fire escape made me so happy, I needed to post a photo or two for continued inspiration!
Don’t get me wrong; I love neuroscience. LOVE. It has played a significant role in past research projects and now I sometimes describe myself as a sort of “fan” of neuroscience.
Can neuroscience explain our interest in the paranormal? Tell me all about it!
Are there neural foundations for the shoplifting impulse? A virtual page-turner!
Candy and the brain? Delighted!
I eat this stuff up with a spoon!
But while I love, love science, I raise an eyebrow at needing neuroscientific validation for truths that we know through our own experience.
The case in point:
The current issue of the journal Nature features an fMRI brain imaging study that suggests city dwellers have stronger emotional responses (in particular, stronger negative emotional responses} to social stress. This study follows some earlier findings that schizophrenia is twice as likely in people raised in urban areas versus rural ones. Certainly genetics and circumstance play a role in brain health as well, but the influence of urban living is not inconsequential. And apparently there are more studies in the works to investigate how green spaces can mitigate the negative effects of urban living on the brain.
But.
Don’t we already know this?
In the discussions about the value of urban gardening and urban farming, I’ve noticed some contentiousness about the economic value of urban agriculture, but never about its social benefits. I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who says that a community garden plot doesn’t make a person feel more connected to the world around them, or that seeing a garden in the city doesn’t lift one’s spirits.
What’s often implied, though, is that the feel-good element of urban agriculture is not a legitimate factor in the equation. It’s hard to translate well-being into currency, so we can’t work it into the bigger economic and environmental puzzle of food and fumes.
I’m glad the neuroscientists have jumped on the urban agriculture and green space bandwagon; maybe scientific validation will exert some pressure in the political realm. Maybe the healthcare industry will jump on board as well. But I think I’ll skip the fMRI and continue with my more rudimentary methodology a.k.a. “The Garden Visit.” I’m meeting some pretty great growers who are discovering and sharing the health benefits of urban agriculture in their own garden-laboratories.
Stories from the gardens are coming soon!
More on the city and stress study led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg’s Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany can be found here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110622/full/474429a.html
(braingarden image by Alessia Giangrande)
Yes.
Really?
At least Edward L. Glaeser, Harvard Professor of Economics, thinks so.
In his recent Op-Ed for The Boston Globe, “The Locavore’s Dilemma: Urban Farms Do More Harm than Good,” he envisions urban centers dotted with large swathes of farmland, but cannot wrap his imagination around the possibility that the people (we, the people) who live within these hypothetical urban farm cultures might be….different from the way we are now.
For one thing, these urban farms, says Glaeser, will get in the way of all the driving we have to do.
“Urban farms mean less people per acre which in turn means longer drives and more gasoline consumption. Shipping food is just far less energy intensive than moving people.”
Unless.
Unless those clever people (we, the clever people) commit to alternative means of transportation or different lifestyle choices that allow for less gas consumption.
And it’s not only the gas and all that driving, according to Glaeser. It’s the higher cost of producing products in a local climate that might not offer ideal conditions.
“We must weigh the environmental benefits from shipping less food against the environmental costs of producing and storing local food in a state that doesn’t exactly have ideal conditions for every kind of produce.”
I know, Professor Glaeser. I, too, find it inconceivable to do without every kind of produce, but, eh, I bet I could adjust. And so could you.
I don’t think anyone is saying that urban agriculture alone will save the day. But there’s an implicit assumption that urban agriculture will force a sort of paradigm shift – we will not stay the same.
Thanks to theMOVE (http://getoutma.org/) for calling attention to Glaeser’s Op-Ed, which you can read below:
(http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-16/bostonglobe/29666344_1_greenhouse-gas-carbon-emissions-local-food)
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