I hope everyone had a Happy Festivus!

 

Its been a great year! And, this New Year marks the first full year I've been back in NC, and all I can say to that is its good to be home :)

 

This time last year I was working at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University on the Face Up Project with the artist Brett Cook.  The project was a collaborative art and community building project with its own highlights and lowlights.  Brett Cook was one of its highlights; definitely an inspiration and I have since been focused on facilitating collaborations and weaving narratives as a strategy for sustainable community building.  

 

Roshen Sethna is another local young activist doing amazing work weaving community narratives.  She recently co-produced the Building a Local Food Economy panel for WUNC's the State of Things. The show included great regional and local players: David Harper of Land in Common, Jennifer Curtis of the Center For Environmental Farming Systems, Micheal Bacon of Durham Central Market, Mary James of Dogwood Nursery Farms, and Miguel Collado of Los Primos Grocery in North East Central Durham.  David advances the conversation on using vacant lots in Durham for community gardens and gives SEEDS and Bountiful Backyards a shout out near the end of the show, thanks David!

 

Victory of the Commons, one of Roshen's photo projects with personal narration, weaves together a number of local food experiences, revealing an interesting and complex food web that you and I are but a thread with in.  She includes photos of local friends, the Crop Mob out at the Stone House, BB's Herb Walk with Will Endres, Durham Farmers' Market, and Piedmont Biofarm (including Margie Ellison's oral history of Piedmont's land).

 

Black Brown America is an oral history project--also by Roshen--that documents the personal histories and friendship of Margie Ellison and Javier Benitez. It speaks to their community building efforts in Chatham County as a celebration, reflected in the recent Black/Brown Conference, held in Greensboro.  Thanks for these amazing pieces, Roshen!

 

Anathoth Community Garden, where friend and young food activist David Hamilton has been the interim garden manager, has made its mission to confront racial and economic tensions in their community. It can be a model for communities, especially faith communities, willing to confront privilege and racism in their food systems. Here is great coverage by the Independent.  

 

I expect equality and inclusion of diverse cultural perspectives to become important and visible aspects of community-based food system work in our region this year.  The Wayne Food Initiative is a great example, and the seeds Wanda and Earl Boone are planting with One Durham Everybody Eats have great growing potential: check out their video.

 

Likewise, the Black Brown Green Alliance is showing increasing interest in community gardens and local food systems while the folks at SEEDS and Stone House have committed to furthering food justice dialogs.  Young food activists from our region, especially folks involved with UNC's FLO Food, are putting social & economic justice at the forefront of our sustainability agenda as we organize the Southeast Youth Food Activist Summit in February.

 

While equality and cultural appropriateness are crucial aspects of any community sustainability strategy, the great task of the dominant paradigm within our generation will be weening ourselves off of addictions to material gluttony and convenience. As a society, we have a strong need to surround ourselves and continuously re-create the high level of material wealth we have grown accustomed to.  The sons and daughters of the liberal and conservative bourgeoisie are particularly afflicted with this desire. Unfortunately, this level of comfort gives rise to techno-topian and eco-elite concepts of sustainability such as hydrogen cell vehicles.

 

The reality is, the sustainable world we are all imagining can't be bought. Folks who penny pinched their way through the Great Depression have a clearer vision of sustainability and we are on the edge of loosing important stories and practices those elders remember, like canning and preserving food for ourselves. This is not a doom or gloom perspective, rather it is a vision of collective struggle and community; of stronger, deeper relationships; of being more intimate with each other and the land, and of recreating local cultures and economies using lessons from the past.  Part of the "journey to sustainability", as Eric Henry of TS Designs refers to it, will require us all to deal with privilege of race and class and to build relationships and understanding across culture and amongst culture as we learn to share this land in common.

 

I look forward to what will unfold for us all in 2009!