Resilience on the Brightmoor Farmway

Aug 232012
 

In Spencer Beebe’s recent post “Confluence,” he mentioned Earthworks Urban Farm as an example of the regeneration of Detroit. It’s far from the only example. Ten miles away on the other side of the city, Sam and I saw urban gardening transform an entire neighborhood: the Brightmoor Farmway, part of a larger district called Brightmoor. While much of Brightmoor languishes under the burdens of foreclosure, unemployment and blight, the Farmway stands out for its active community organization. While the city of Detroit struggles to meet the needs of its citizens, the residents of the Farmway are creating resilience from the bottom up, through gardening, arts, and community-based business.

Sam and I spent one sunny morning in June driving around Brightmoor with one of its leading lights: Kirk Mayes, executive director of the Brightmoor Alliance, a community development corporation (CDC) that brings together about 50 smaller organizations to coordinate diverse community projects, from leadership training courses to arts programs.

Mayes began our tour by showing us some of Brightmoor’s most blighted areas. Parts of Brightmoor felt like a ghost town: blocks full of abandoned houses, some partially burnt down with others simply collapsing from disrepair. We turned from the narrow commercial thoroughfare, dotted with boarded-up retail buildings, onto an abandoned side street strewn with rubble. A young father pushed a stroller along a crumbling sidewalk littered with broken glass. “When those kids start walking, you’re telling me this is what they’ve got to walk through?” Mayes asked us pointedly.

 

An abandoned house in Brightmoor

A few blocks away, we entered another world, in which blight had been carefully transformed into beauty. Abandoned houses were no longer left to rot, but boarded up neatly, and in many cases redecorated. An unused garage had been transformed into a community performance space. A corner lot had been cultivated as an edible community garden with raised beds. We’d left the ghost town behind, and entered the Brightmoor Farmway.

A repurposed house on the Brightmoor Farmway

The Farmway has its own neighborhood association, founded by community leader Riet Schumack and now made up of 350 residents. The association has built over 30 community gardens and pocket parks, as well as publishing a newsletter and offering a variety of programs in gardening and the arts for neighborhood children and youth. For Mayes, a veteran community organizer, the close relationships forged by these projects are the keys to the Farmway’s transformation. “The byproduct of these relationships is a physical change in the neighborhood,” he notes. “They’re doing more than just gardening: they are literally building community.”

As we passed one boarded-up house, we noticed that the window had been painted with an inspirational message: “Resilience: the power to return to original form after being stressed, compressed, or beaten down.” A remarkable parallel to the guiding vision of Ecotrust!

 

Message written on abandoned house, Brightmoor Farmway

In addition to successes in gardening and neighborhood beautification, the Farmway has spawned two successful youth-led businesses. Under Schumack’s direction, a group of youth began selling their homegrown produce at the Northwest Detroit Farmer’s Market, soon reaching over $3000 of revenue in a summer. Following that success, a group of teenagers began to learn woodcarving from high school teacher Bart Eddy, and started a business called the the Brightmoor Woodworkers, whose growing client list includes key neighborhood institutions such as a pre-school, a newspaper, and the Alliance itself.

In our visit to the Brightmoor Farmway, Sam and I got a taste of what it might mean to create resilience in an urban context. Mayes, our guide, emphasized the importance of the community gardens to this process, building relationships through shared commitment. “If we initiate together and we plant the seed,” he noted, “we’re implicitly together until the harvest.”

The Brightmoor Farmway, like Earthworks, is just one of many examples of the green shoots of Detroit’s revival. In future posts, we’ll continue to explore the themes of urban regeneration and resilience in the context of Detroit.

Confluence: Where cities and mountains meet

Aug 152012
 
An aerial view of Jackson Lake and Teton Mountains in Wyoming.

Jackson Lake, Wyoming

Over the past few weeks, my son Sam and I have been navigating different tributaries in the Magic Canoe’s voyage of discovery. Sam, with companion and Ecotrust economist Noah Enelow visited Detroit to chronicle stories of regeneration after industrial collapse. Meanwhile, I have been fly-fishing the clear, cold headwaters of the Snake River with Patagonia’s legendary founder Yvon Chouinard. While Sam and Noah were deep in conversation with urban farmers as houses burn from arson in the next neighborhood over, Yvon and I were immersed in the wild Teton Mountains at deep blue Jackson Lake, with moose wandering the willowed floodplain of the Snake River.

How can these dramatically different backdrops provide us with insights for crafting a natural model of development? A unifying theme underlies our experiences: simple technologies that remain close to nature are surprisingly effective in creating resilience and natural wellbeing.

Yvon Chouinard checks his fishing line while standing in the Snake River.

Yvon Chouinard checks his line in the Snake River.

Out among the moose, elk and grizzlies of the Tetons, Yvon taught me a simple but profound fly-fishing technique called tankara. Tankara dates back to the fifteenth century, and has been practiced on small streams from Asia to Europe ever since. It involves a shorter line and a simpler pole than modern fly techniques, allowing a more precise connection to the fly; a slight twitching of the fingers makes the wet fly mimic the movement of an aquatic insect, triggering an immediate response from hungry cutthroat trout. It’s also cheaper than modern fly-fishing. The pole costs about $120; there is no need for a $500 reel with miles of backing, no big fly box or $850 graphite rod.

Patrick Crouch is the program manager of the urban farming non-profit Earthworks

Patrick Crouch runs Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit.

“In Japanese,” Yvon explained, tankara means “from the heavens.” Such was my experience yesterday with Yvon on a clear mountain stream, immersed in nature in an ancient, time-tested way. “Tankara is a metaphor,” Yvon says in a recent article in Flyfisherman magazine, “for society as a whole, which keeps trying to make a failed economic system, based on endlessly consuming and discarding, work. Maybe we should turn around and learn from the past.” It is also similar to the work Ecotrust is doing with Ecotrust Forests, a natural model of forestry that increases returns while protecting ecosystems. Perhaps not incidentally, Yvon invested his entire 401k in Ecotrust Forests, saying “the safest thing to do is invest more in what we need, less in what we want.”

Simple tools and approaches that are close to nature– technologies that support natural economies– are at the core of our work at Ecotrust. A few weeks ago, we released  Madrona, an open-source software platform we’ve developed that has the potential to transform the process of natural resource planning by making the tools of the trade more flexible and easier to use.

Travis Bland cleans freshly harvested kale in a big bucket

Travis Bland cleans a healthy morning harvest of Earthworks kale.

Across the country in Detroit, Sam and Noah witness a prime example of investing in basic needs while learning from the past. In the face of declining industry, a group of hardy Detroiters has taken to one of the oldest economic activities of all: farming. While downtown high-tech start-ups make headlines, urban agriculturists such as Patrick Crouch of Earthworks Urban Farm are taking the opposite approach. “We’re into low tech because we want things to be accessible,” Crouch explains. Each year, the farm turns a handful of Detroit’s most disadvantaged citizens into enterprising farmers, with skills that range from planting and composting to food marketing and business management. Trainees have gone on to manage profitable farms such as Rising Pheasant and successful shops such as Detroit Farm and Gardens. Like tankara, Earthworks is low tech, close to nature. And it works.

FoodHub’s popularity surging

Jan 202012
 

The FoodHub team is breaking out the bubbly — a bubbly bottle of fruit soda that is, with our 3,000th member, HotLips Soda! Just over two years old, FoodHub’s award-winning online marketplace, an Ecotrust project, was built to connect companies like Hotlips Soda with regional suppliers and buyers. As the companies and connections grow more robust, so does the regional food system. Continue reading »

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