Giant Hearted Genius* Dwarfs Raleigh

*”In Latin, Genius was the name used for the god who becomes each man’s guardian at the moment of birth…And since this God is, in a sense, what is most intimate and most our own, he must be placated and his favor maintained in every aspect and at every moment of life.” Giorgio Agamben

 Will Allen cast a big shadow at the McKinnon Center last night, conducting for a few hours our simultaneous efforts for a just and sustainable food future in the Triangle.  Like all good conductors he didn’t draw a whole lot of attention to himself, though he certainly could have as the was the keynote speaker (and a McCarthur Genius* Fellow) inside a place that often relays geniuses* throughout the Triangle.

“We know what the problem is,’ laughed Allen, ‘If someone suggests another study, I’m gonna puke.  We need to grow more farmers and we need to grow more soil in urban areas.  We’ve contaminated our soil, and now we’ve got to take action and grow food more intensively closer to where people live.  This can be a healing piece in our communities”

And man was the room filled with some great people doing the things he was describing:

• The youth genii* from the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle
• Jessamine, Kavanah, Santos and geniosos from the D.I.G Program at SEEDS
• Ginger Zucchino of The Gardener’s Kitchen
• Claudia and Jesse, resident genii* from the Stone House in Mebane
• Lucy Bradley of the NC Community Garden Listserv
• David Baron and fellow UNC HOPE project students
• David Harper of Land in Common and Jane Norton of Earth Heal and the Community Green Guide
• Alice Lloyd of the integral and prolific workshop series in Raleigh teaching people how to grow food with classes and workshops
• Piedmont Biofuels folks
• Enterprenurial genius George aka Lil’ Farm McGee (him of the non-earnest approach to sustainable farming)
• Crop Mob and BB folks
• Bobby Tucker, water deviner, stormwater genius* and young farmer
• John Parker, perpetual genius* at Good Work
• The many other people in the room we didn’t have a chance to see or talk to because it was so packed…

Will Allen and the work that he’s done struck my own genius* by demonstrating his groundedness in the everyday, prolonged effort and collaboration it takes to create lasting regenerative food systems and social justice, and how the two are tied together and can’t be done separately. That everyone has something to contribute to both the smart work, the planning, the meetings as well as the digging, harvesting, and waste stream maximization (there may be more competition for wood chips after this talk) which grows healthy communities by growing healthy food.

“The most important thing in these projects is working with the community you’re proposing to work in,’ said Allen.  ‘Food is the most important piece in community development, everything is on board when we expose people to what can be done in cities.  I see a new generation of young people creating a good food revolution.”

In urban Milwaukee, Mr. Allen talked about beginning in 1993 small, by filling niches in public and private spaces biologically, much like nature’s evil geniuses* wisteria and elagnus (most planted by State DOT’s) chokes out the grass on the interstate, fixing nitrogen for the plant communities of forest succession that really want to get to those vacant spaces.  Getting stuff off the ground in the communities we live in being the first sure step toward weaning ourselves from fossil fuel addiction, and all of the violence expropriated around the world that goes along with it.

Earlier in the day, I had the opportunity to talk with Sandy Smith Nonini’s Anthropology Course at UNC-Chapel Hill.  It was my first time in a college classroom in a long time, though I have deep affection for the books and praxis that college provided the opportunity to delve in to.  We talked about the description of Tenochitlan in Inga Klendinnen’s great book, Aztecs: An Interpretation:

“…the southern edges of the city were deeply fringed with the vivid green of chinampas; the long rectangular garden plots of dredged silt and lakeweed compost reclaimed from the lake, which the lake waters, the rich soil, and the most fastidious cultivation combined to make miracles of productivity, and which supplied the great city with most of its flower and fruits.” (18)

The Aztecs also depended heavily on a top-down hierarchy which was fracturing politically from the weight of centralized client-state relations.  Cortes and his fellow Christians were killers to a man, but Aztec civilization was greatly aided by their neighbors, who were being exploited by the nature of most cities, even sustainable ones, that draw resources in upon themselves without matching the production of surrounding areas.  When reading the famous description of Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, one of the first and most ruthless of Spain’s imperial conquistadors, its clear that despite that, Tenochitlan was a wonder that overcrowded and scarcity accustomed European eyes could barely imagine possible:

“We must not forget the gardens and flowers and sweet-scented trees, and the many kinds that were there of them, and the arrangement of them and the walks, and the ponds and tanks of freshwater wehre the water entered at one end and flowed out of the other; and the baths which he had there, and the variety of small birds that nested in the branches, and the medicinal and useful herbs that were in the gardens.  It was a wonder to see…” (172)

Later in her description, Klendinnen highlights what the majority of people were doing to create the splendor of Monteczuma’s castle:

“The city was also something of an economic and more particularly a social miracle.  The valley of Mexico, however rich in people, lacked crucial commodities..as it lacked precious metals, stones, shells, feathers which constituted ‘wealth’.  By the mid 15^th century, after the influx of displcaed populations, it was also short of agricultural land.  In close-packed Tenochitlan the labour force comprised full-time occupational specialists rather than peasant farmers with few inhabitants engaged in any form of agriculture beyond the tending of their own gardens…The exotic raw materials which supplied its famous craftworks..were drawn either in tribute or by activating the network of pochteca or long-distance merchants, a network that increasingly found its centre in Tenochitlan.” (19)

The students drew out a lot of the similarities to our present, and well what exactly is ‘tribute’ in our society?  What is the appartus that glues us and underlies the functioning of redistributive power these days?   How can we all grow more of our own food together both within and outside the market by reclaiming, maximizing, and regenerating niches?

The room was packed last night with these kinds of questions, and I hope we continue to ask more of each other and continue working to birth our collective genius*!