I HAVEN’T HEAR OF A SINGLE incident of city slickers building barns in their backyards and raising cows. But cows are not the only mammals that produce milk for human consumption, only the most common. Of the all animals I could have in my backyard, personally, I would prefer to split the rent with a couple of goats. Nigerian dwarf goats can get by on a small lot, and you can handle them without needing someone else’s help. Few things make me happier than starting off the morning with some pita and labane, with a little bit of olive oil and za’atar… mmm… I could easily get used to a couple slices of goat cheese on a foccacia with roasted red peppers and eggplant later in the day… Think I’m kidding? Here is a short film shot by Time Magazine about a woman who raises several goats — and chickens, and rabbits, and pigs! — in her own backyard, not four short blocks away from my former home in inner-city Oakland, California! I am seriously jealous!

NOW WE TAKE IT TO the next level: aquatic animals. Who would have imagined that you could turn your aquarium into an actual fishing pond? Indoor fishbowls are too small to produce anything substantial, and most freshwater fish will die off very quickly in stagnant still waters. But as a number of innovative urban fish farmers have found out, some species like perch and tilapia will still thrive even when confined to tiny tanks, as long as aquaculture plants are grown in conjunction with the fish. The plants feed off of the nutrient-rich poop that the fish produce, and the fish benefit from the water filtration services that the plants provide. True, for them to survive in cold Canadian winters, you would have to build a small greenhouse on top of the pond to maintain a temperate climate under the bubble. But our neighbours to the west in Milwaukee, Wisconsin experience winters that are harsher than ours, and they harvest 10,000 pounds of fish food in the middle of the city! Watch this clip to find out how they do it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qZPwBPAqks

AND NOW WHAT MAY BE the most radical form of urban farming: beekeeping! Yes, apery is still practiced in downtown Toronto, as it has been for at least a century; the Toronto District Beekeepers’ Association was founded in 1911, and it’s still going strong. Bees are so important to the entire food chain, because they pollinate all of the other plants that you grow in your outdoor garden. And the honey that you could produce by maintaining a healthy hive that feeds off the flowers in your own backyard would be better for you than any other honey, because it would naturally inoculate you from any allergic reaction to local hay fevers. The biggest challenge that beekeepers face in the urban areas is reassuring their neighbours that homegrown hives don’t pose a threat to them or their children. It’s no easy task to overcome those phobias. But as the video clip below makes plain, even an area as urban as New York City can boast of its busy beekeepers. And as the song goes: If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KSTYtS6c3E

IN THE FIRST GREEN APPLE PIE trilogy on urban agriculture, we laid out the problem in detail: the population of the planet is growing exponentially, and even factory farms can’t keep up with the rising demand for more food. The solutions being touted by agrobusiness corporations are either catastrophic for our planetary support systems or else they are scientifically impossible. The population of the planet will eventually decrease to a fraction of its current figure — it has to, at some point, we are only experiencing a temporary unsustainable overshoot that will rectify itself in a matter of decades. The only question that remains is whether that descent into a world of far fewer humans will be a slow, measured one, or a rapid, frantic one? Will the transition to the food distribution systems of the future be marked by consensual belt-tightening and right-sizing, or will it be fraught with nightmarish sectarianism and ruthless class war?

I REALIZE THAT THESE WORDS may evoke hostility and even anger in some readers of the blog. Yes, it is absolutely frightening to come face-to-face with the realization that our exceedingly comfortable way of life, based on the hyper-exploitation of finite natural resources and socio-economic pyramid schemes, is drawing to a close. But please, please, do not shoot the messenger. We cannot avert our eyes and stick our heads in the sand until the very moment that the tsunami washes away everything that we care for. But there is good news. The good news is that humans have lived on Planet Earth for literally millions of years, quite comfortably, giving as good as they got. The corkscrew roller-coaster ride of population-boom-and-bust is merely an anomalous spike in course of human history, and it certainly does not prove that humans are incorrigibly cannibalistic — only that the prevailing culture of reactionary capitalism categorically is.

SO WHERE DO WE GO from here? Well, the good thing about local food solutions is that they are all win-win solutions. Yes, they use less precious resources. Yes, they are healthier for you, your family, and for the watershed that quenches our collective thirst. Yes, they ensure our political and physical security in a world in which there are no more guarantees. Yes, they tear us away from the A.D.D.-infecting Sega systems that alienate us from our own friends and families, and bring us back to real life, back into our beautiful bodies. Yes, they make everyday activities like eating much more romantic. And heck, yeah: local food just tastes better. Period. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it sure isn’t going to fall in one day, either. But we’ve got to start sometime, and the sooner the better. For every step that we take towards the Earth, the Earth will take two steps towards us. And she’s going to feel so good to come home to.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGbnG0nH3n4

GRASSY LAWNS HAD come to be associated with upper-class status in the minds of the rest of us peasants. And so some of the first important public parks on this continent, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, were designed with the English pastoralist style in mind. But until the Second Industrial Revolution about a hundred and fifty years ago, most of the North American Continent was covered with moss and shrub. The average person couldn’t possibly afford a retinue of caretakers to constantly monitor the length of the lawn and incessantly scythe it down to mere centimetres. It wasn’t until the rise of the machines that manicured lawns were within the reach of the commoners. With the arrival of the lawn mower by the mid-1800s and the first fossil-fuel-powered mower emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, average Joes and Janes could adopt the tropes of the ridiculously prosperous and simulate at least the appearance of affluence.

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scrub

TODAY, EXACTLY HALF of the world’s population lives in urban areas; here in Canada, that rate is as high as four-fifths, and in Ontario it’s even more than that. A mock meadow has no meaning in a metropolitan Toronto: you can’t take your flock of sheep out to graze on the grass; you can’t possibly take a long, romantic walk in the woods; and you certainly can’t get lost in the forest, enchanted by the wondrousness of it all. You are bound in by fences and borders, enclosed on all sides with stick pickets and chain links. At most, you can take the domesticated dog outside so he doesn’t defecate on your carpet. You can make a fake firepit and burn a meaty meal on open coals, brought in by rail from a coal mine on the east coast of the country. You can nuke the lawn till it’s more florescent than anything else that grows on the Goddess’ green earth, but I’m sorry to say it, your little slice of heaven remains short of satisfying.

ASSUMING THAT YOU CAN’T see yourself anthropomorphizing blades of grass and that it doesn’t trouble you at all to continually castrate the sex of these small green creatures (which is how the grass experiences lawn mowing), and that you’ve got lots of disposable income so you don’t mind paying labourers to mow the lawn often — there’s still the matter of chemical maintainance. When they’re in the wild, grasses don’t keep green from May to September, they’re only emerald for a few weeks at a time, after which they fade to a pale pastel. Exactly a century ago, the first artificial fertilizers were invented to mess with the chemistry of the grass and trick it into staying jade green all season long. Then military-industrial R & D gave us the means to more efficiently kill off all the other species on the lawn without the exhausting, almost impossible task of weeding: herbicides and insecticides. So now we wage carcinogenic chemical warfare on the earth itself. And for what? To keep up with the Windsors?

lawn

Painting by Leonard Koscianski

THERE ARE ALL KINDS of alternatives that would be preferable to the grassy status quo, things you can let your lawn do. But the first proposal I can come up with off the top of my head is clover. Until the 1950’s, clover was considered to be a desirable item. But when the chemical corporations realized that their marketable products killed off clover as well as the other weeds, they re-branded clover as evil. How fickle and foolish we were to have bought their propaganda! Clover remains incandescent green as long as it’s pleasant to be outside, and can’t be discoloured, even by canine urine. It flourishes in sub-standard soil, fixing nitrogen into it, actually improving soil quality. It wages a war on weeds for you, crowding them out by natural selection. It demands so very little from you, only a small amount of water, much less than grass. And it certainly doesn’t need to be mowed — it automatically grows to a height of about twenty centimetres, and stays there perpetually.

THE ONLY THING you could possibly say against clover is that bees love it. And some people — especially little people — don’t necessarily love bees back. That humans have almost eradicated the natural habitats of bees, threatening them with extinction, and jeopardizing our own survival on this planet at the same time, since bees pollenate one-third of all human food — is a topic for another blog entry. But for now, let’s just settle the clover question by arming ourselves with the knowledge that maintaining a whole host of different types of flora in your yard will ensure a diversity of species — including insects — naturally keeping the bees in check. And if you’re planning on using it in a high-traffic area, then you want to mix it up with other ground-cover anyway. The idiom “to be in clover” even means to live the good life, carefree and easy — that’s no linguistic accident!

Clover

Clover 2

To learn more about the history of how we surround our houses with lifeless lawns, I highly encourage you to read the excellent article entitled “Turf War“, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, published exactly a year ago in The New Yorker magazine.