Painting by Ruth Blackwell Rogers
As environmental practitioners, we cast nets to sample nature, to gather knowledge, to provoke action. Ornithologists use mist nets to capture birds for banding, advocates and organizers use social networks to foment governmental and public action, and vast amounts of data are gathered from different disciplines to construct climate change models. What do we hope will be the end result of our collective net work, as we seek both the tangible and the ineffable?
Splitting the term “network” in two creates an abundance of associations to explore. The word “net” suggests everything from the Mahayana Buddhist concept of Indra’s net to capitalist definitions of net worth. “Work” might connote the physical toil and sweat of field research or the mental gymnastics of philosophy.
Volume 19 of Whole Terrain seeks creative interpretations of the theme Net Works that encompass the full range and scope of environmental practice.
See the full call for submissions here.
by Laura Hilberg
Jen Hartley arrived for our meeting at a downtown cafe right on time and out of breath, having just come from an informal meeting of Grow Food Northampton board members and core volunteers. They had gathered to discuss the success of their recently completed land purchase campaign. Grow Food is already realizing its vision of increased food security, equal access to fresh food, and sustainable agriculture in the Northampton community. The group now found themselves with an exciting question to explore: what has made this project so successful?
Grow Food is a young organization, and rose out of community concern for the fate of the Bean family farm that had gone up for sale. Among those interested in the property was the City of Northampton, whose officials planned to use the land for new recreational fields. Many town residents felt that the Bean Farm should be preserved as working farmland. Located on the fertile soil of the Mill River floodplain, it was one of the last working farms within the city limits. The farm also has additional historical value for its role in the 1800s as a stop on the Underground Railroad and home of an abolitionist community which included well-known figures David Ruggles and Sojourner Truth.
In 2009, concerned citizens circulated a petition for the farm’s preservation, eventually collecting 850 signatures from town residents. This sparked a community-wide discussion about land use, raising awareness of issues including food security. Hartley said it was “big drama, which was sad, but also drummed up a lot of publicity for our project. The community forums were packed!”
In December, the adjoining Allard farm went up for sale as well, and this finally allowed a compromise. The Northampton Department of Recreation would buy one small parcel and the City of Northampton would also own a small parcel bordering the Mill River as conservation land. The bulk of the property would be stripped of development rights and preserved forever as farmland under the state Agricultural Preservation Restriction. Grow Food now had the opportunity to purchase the land at
a reduced cost. Members of Grow Food approached many non-profits in the area, seeking collaboration on the project. They were turned down over and over again, usually because the other non-profits didn’t have the funds to work on a project of such large scope. In February 2010, Grow Food became registered as a non-profit so that they could tackle the fundraising on their own.
A national non-profit called the Trust for Public Land (TPL) agreed to take a chance on the brand-new community organization. TPL works by buying farmland and other open spaces from the seller, and then holds the development rights and resells it to a conservation-minded buyer (keeping the price of the land low). In this case, TPL divided the land into parcels and offered Grow Food the chance to buy a combination of any or all of the parcels.
“July was the hardest time. We didn’t know if we could do it,” said Hartley. She said meetings with TPL and their national fundraisers were difficult at times. They encouraged Grow Food to create a list of community members, and then generate an amount that the organization believed those members could give. But Grow Food felt that meant approaching people and telling them how much to give and when. “It felt all wrong,” said Hartley. Instead, they looked for outside fundraising consultants and
finally found several dedicated people with flexible ideas. “That’s when we were able to say, ‘Yes! This is how it needs to happen, we’re going to do it our way!’”
With this additional support, Grow Food put together a campaign that urged people to “examine their values and give according to their own ability.” Hartley said that without that change in the fundraising strategy, the project probably would not have been possible.
Grow Food celebrated the official start of the ‘Capital Campaign’ with a harvest celebration in September 2010, and by this time they had already raised $250,000 dollars. The end goal of $670,000 felt impossibly far away, and Hartley said she often thought “We’re never going to make it at this rate.”
But shortly after the banquet, community interest skyrocketed due to dedicated volunteer work. Over 200 volunteers made personal appeals and phone calls, went door-to-door, put out mailings, wrote thank-you notes and tabled at the weekly farmers’ market. They organized a local showing of Fresh, a documentary featuring giants in the sustainable agriculture movement such as Michael Pollin and Joel Salatin. A number of local small business owners donated a portion of their profits on services, including landscaping, massage, nutritional counseling and more, and Whole Foods in nearby Hadley dedicated one of their regular “5% Days” to Grow Food, donating 5% of their proceeds from one business day to the project.
At the beginning of the campaign, Hartley and her husband sat down to think about the largest amount they could possibly give. “Scary! But we had to just do it,” she said. As the campaign wore on, Hartley looked at what she had around the house that might have monetary value. It started with a blender. Jen sold it for $10 with proceeds to be donated to Grow Food. That kicked off a trend, and soon the Grow Food listserv was packed with used items and services for sale on behalf of the organization. Hartley
said it was powerful to see volunteers and staunch supporters give, give again and then look in their closet for more.
“It wasn’t until Christmas that I knew we would make it,” said Jen. On New Year’s Eve, Grow Food officially notified TPL that they would buy all available parcels of land, totaling 120 acres.
On the last day of the campaign drive in late January, the Kestrel Trust gave a large donation that tipped the scale to just over the goal of $670,000. Because of these fundraising efforts, Grow Food was able to create the Forever Farmland program, expanding the organization’s focus outside of the Northampton area and launching a regional effort to protect valuable farmland.
Grow Food signed the sale agreement on February 25, 2011, and became the proud owners of some of the best farmland in the region. The capital campaign drive was over after only 7 months! They hired two young, local farmers to start a model Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project on the property. In March, Grow Food added Lily Lombard as a full-time executive director and Jen as the Community Education and Administration Director. Grow Food is also building community gardens, creating educational programs and offering low-cost, short-term leases of some fields to farmers in the start-up process (known as a farm incubation program). Within the CSA, named Crimson & Clover Farm, 25 shares have been subsidized for low-income families in the area, and a portion of the harvest is being donated to local food pantries.
Harltey said personal relationships were key to Grow Food’s success. Many of the core volunteers have known each for years. They also had many community connections. Lombard’s presence was vital for the group – Hartley described her as “a force of nature”, “doggedly committed” and “an excellent and very skillful leader.” Other members have diverse and often highly specialized skills, including experience in grant writing, policy, administration, bookkeeping and graphic design.
Hartley also brought dedication and vision to the project, even quitting her job to work on the project.
For her, the creation of a community farm was more than just a way to produce local, organic food. It was also a necessary step towards providing food in the near future. “We can’t stop what is happening [climate change and peak oil], we can only mitigate the damage. And we have to start now,” she said.
Hartley says she feels a lot of pressure to move her community towards increased resilience and flexibility in the face of change. She wrote a personal appeal letter to her own family and friends in which she gave voice to her concerns about her daughter’s future (“I want her to have food to eat,” she wrote). However, she knows she can be serious and somewhat blunt, and often made the conscious decision to step back, allowing other members to help her emphasize positive ideas and hope. Hartley felt that in order to be successful, the group had to “communicate in the most effective way.” A board member told Jen that he felt Grow Food never ignored the realities of a grave situation, but still let individuals decide what they were ready to hear. “Grow Food was always telling the truth. It gave people hope,” said Jen.
In Jen’s words, the campaign was a “confluence of community, networking and rabid commitment,”and it worked!
Visit Grow Food Northampton on their website at www.growfoodnorthampton.com for more information, or contact Laura directly at lhilberg@antioch.edu.
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By Emily Bowers
A spur-of-the-moment decision to throw a monkey wrench into a 2008 Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leasing auction made Tim DeChristopher an unforeseen leader within the environmental movement. DeChristopher was found guilty on two felony counts on March 3, 2011 after disrupting the auction in Salt Lake City, Utah.
One outcome of his disruption was the eventual voiding by the Obama administration of most of the leases after improper leasing procedure was discovered on the part of the BLM. Some of those canceled leases included eight parcels surrounding Canyonlands and Arches national parks. You can read more background on Tim’s story in part 1.
After the auction, DeChristopher co-founded Peaceful Uprising, a Utah-based grassroots organization committed to empowering non-violent action for the sake of defending a livable future. In an interview with Whole Terrain, DeChristopher said that although there’s no clear definition for “a livable future,” it would have to be a world in which “we can continue to hold onto our humanity.”
He spoke about the corporate control of government that threatens such a future to crowds at Powershift 2009 and again in 2011 as a keynote speaker. He has rallied crowds at 350.org and climate justice events, educated students at universities across the east coast and empowered environmental groups nationally to rise up against climate and environmental injustice.
One word that audience members use repeatedly after listening to DeChristopher is inspirational, but this doesn’t equate with sugarcoated speeches of naïve hope and false promise. Instead, DeChristopher tends to call it as he sees it, perhaps saying things others wouldn’t.
As he said in his 2011 keynote speech at Powershift 2011, “Sometimes the truth isn’t very nice and it needs to be said anyway.”
He has repeatedly told his audiences that it is likely too late for modern society to take the steps necessary to prevent the collapse of industrial civilization due to the deleterious effects of climate change.
“Right now we don’t have a livable future,” he told Whole Terrain. “We have a very dark, bleak future.”
But the news isn’t all bad. DeChristopher continually emphasizes that we as individuals have the power to direct society in the direction we want if we have the courage to do so.
DeChristopher says civil disobedience is the most effective way to raise awareness about the climate crisis. “[Civil disobedience] reframes the issue,” said DeChristopher. “Rather than saying, ‘Look, climate change is so serious that we are going to see four degrees of temperature rise and we’re going to be at 650 parts per million [of CO2 in the atmosphere],’ it says, ‘Look, it’s so serious, that I’m going to put myself on the line to do something about it.’”
“People who are distant from us, that might only read the newspaper story, they can still blow that off too,” he continued. “They still have that power of denial and can say whatever they want about the person taking action. But for people around us, I think that’s going to have an impact. And I think that’s the kind of movement-building that we need to be doing, is telling our story through our actions—making our actions line up with how serious the crisis is and then inviting others to join us and having that ripple effect in that way.”
He is critical about the hesitancy that he says defines the current climate movement. He attributes this hesitancy, this unwillingness to take loud and drastic actions in protest of climate and environmental injustice, to a fear of the consequences associated with such actions.
“Certainly it’s true that our actions have consequences,” said DeChristopher, referring to climate-centered activism, “But our inactions have huge consequences as well. I think this is a case where our inactions are scarier than our actions—those consequences are bigger.”
DeChristopher’s own motivation for disrupting the oil and gas leasing auction were in part due to the consequences he thought that inaction might carry.
Although afraid of going to jail, DeChristopher said he’s been scared for his future for a long time, “and scared for something much bigger than spending a few years in prison.”
“I think the scariest thing is to stay on the path that we’re on now, and that doesn’t mean that prison is not scary,” DeChristopher said, “It’s just less scary than the alternative and I think that’s something that more people need to realize in the movement.”
He is equally critical of attempts to usher in sustainability solely by switching to the green brand of consumer supplies when shopping. He said that it takes more than our identity as consumers to change the course of a society.In his November 2009 blog post titled, More Than Consumers, DeChristopher wrote, “To get to a sustainable culture who we are as consumers will have to become a small part of who we are as human beings…then the spiritual void that begs for material consumption begins to be filled by a more human identity.”
When asked for further explanation about the need for a national identity change, DeChristopher pointed to an estimate that Americans see around 3,000 advertisements a day. “So that means that basically 3,000 times a day we are reminded that we are a consumer,” said DeChristopher. “We don’t have nearly as many reminders that we are also citizens of what was once the greatest democracy in the world. We’re also people with the ability to connect to one another and inspire each other through our actions. I think that’s the kind of identity that we need to be building up.”
When asked about some positive indications of change he’s seen in his journey through the past few years, DeChristopher spoke passionately about global signs signaling a return to “people power.” He mentioned revolutions in the Middle East and rallies against government austerity measures.
“I think Egypt was kind of a tipping point, for a lot of the world, in that we saw that people standing together are tremendously powerful and there’s nothing that can stop them,” he said. “I think,especially for our generation, we haven’t seen that before.
“You know, I was born the year that Ronald Reagan took office, and throughout my life we’ve always seen that corporations are powerful and people are weak and that nothing people can do is going to make a difference. That’s been kind of like the paradigm that has defined most of my life and now we’re starting to see that that’s not true, that people, when they stand together courageously, stand on principle, that they can make a difference—that they can rise up against injustice and create the world that they want to see.”
DeChristopher said he was encouraged to hear about tens of thousands of citizens uprising to protest anti-union legislation in Wisconsin early in 2011. “I think that’s what a lot of us have been waiting for a long time,” he said. “We’ve had this sense that the world is not okay, that there are definitely things wrong and there’s got to be something we can do about it. If people would just get together and if people would just start standing up…we could be powerful.”
Originally set for June 23, DeChristopher’s sentence hearing was rescheduled for July 26.
You can visit www.peacefuluprising.org and www.bidder70.org for more information about the organization and Tim DeChristopher’s trial.
By Emily Bowers
Photo courtesy National Park Service
On a clear evening in southeast Utah, when the sun has just disappeared from sight, the sky holds a deep azure that intensifies from horizon to troposphere. The sand and rock substrates, typically awash in dull shades of sandy tones, pulsate deep hues of red and orange. Green desert shrubs speckle the landscape.
The vibrancy and juxtaposition of these complementary colors may defy one’s notion of desert: this is not a barren landscape. The expansive openness is a visual reprieve from the commercialized clutter of our developed city centers. The open space facilitates a smooth transition to a quiet mind.
Southeast Utah is home to Canyonlands National Park, which is about 50 miles southwest of Moab. Arches National Park is less than 20 miles to the north of the same city. On December 19, 2008, the Bureau of Land Management convened an auction to lease parcels of land in this territory to the highest bidding natural gas and oil companies. Eight of these parcels were next to Arches and Canyonlands.
Photo by Daphne Hougard, 2011
On the day of the auction, a 27 year-old economics student from the University of Utah named Tim DeChristopher sat in the audience holding bidding paddle number 70. He wore a long-sleeved red shirt, had a shaved head and a couple days worth of growth on his chin. He had just taken his last exam of the fall semester in a class titled “Current Economic Problems.”
DeChristopher, in an post-auction interview with the Solve Climate News Group, remembered the auction as “cold.” There were no pictures or descriptions of the beautiful places the parcel numbers represented, there were only numbers.
Parcel 163 goes to bidder number 51 for $10.50/acre.
Parcel 164 goes to bidder number 25 for $7.50/acre.
In a fitting touch of irony, the last question on the final exam for DeChristopher’s economics class asked whether the parcels being auctioned that day were accurately priced according to the social and environmental externalities of oil and gas exploration activities. DeChristopher answered “no.”
Initially he just bid to raise the prices, feeling empowered that he had cost oil and gas companies thousands of dollars in a few minutes. About halfway through the auction, DeChristopher started winning parcels. Empowered with a few initial wins, he kept his paddle up, winning a total of 14 parcels, many in a row, worth about $1.8 million.
At this time, some of the other bidders expressed their suspicions of the youth’s buying spree and the auction was paused. A federal agent approached DeChristopher and asked him to step outside.
The auction was controversial from the beginning. Environmental groups were in the process of filing a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, the governmental body responsible for the auction. They claimed the BLM hadn’t provided a sufficient Environmental Impact Statement as required through the National Environmental Policy Act.
A group of activists stood outside the auction holding signs to protest the leasing of the land, which, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune, included 7,670 acres around Arches and Canyonlands national parks. As a former self-described “armchair activist,” DeChristopher felt he needed to do something more than just stand outside with a sign and continue to be ignored by those in power.
When DeChristopher stepped outside with the federal agent, he was asked what his intentions were on bidding on his newly acquired parcels. DeChristopher’s response, as documented in a November 2010 interview with The New York Times was, “My intention is to disrupt this auction because it’s a threat to my future and a fraud against the American people.”
Albert Einstein once said, “Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.” In some ways, DeChristopher’s actions could be seen as a struggle with conscience. Conscience won.
Alexander, frontman of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, released a new music video that features footage from the Tim DeChristopher support rallies.
In his blog post the day after the auction, DeChristopher wrote, “When faced with the opportunity to seriously disrupt the auction of some of our most beautiful lands in Utah to oil and gas developers, I could not ethically turn my back on that opportunity. By making bids for land that was supposed to be protected for the interests of all Americans, I tried to resist the Bush administration’s attempt to defraud the American people.”
When he attended the Pricing Carbon conference held at Wesleyan University in November of 2010, in which he was the only speaker to receive mid-speech bursts of applause, he said that he had made a conscious decision to disrupt the auction and he still stands by that decision. He confessed that although he had some trepidations surrounding jail time, he knew he wouldn’t be able to live with the thought that, at a time when economies were auctioning off the future, he didn’t do anything meaningful to stop them.
In an interview with Whole Terrain two weeks before his conviction trial DeChristopher said he saw the auction as three things: one, an attack on the survival of the human race in regards to climate instability and a “drill now, think later” mentality; two, an attack on democracy in regards to the lack of transparency and public participation in the decision-making process for public lands; and three, “the destruction of our natural heritage and the sacrifice of some pristine, irreplaceable places.”
“Certainly the most powerful of those for me was the threat of climate change, and that was the biggest motivator, ” DeChristopher told Whole Terrain. “As far as representing myself in court, I think the thing that most clearly justifies my actions was the second one, the fact that they weren’t following their own laws and this wasn’t a democratic process…The main thing that my jury needs to understand is that I’m charged with disrupting a legal auction and there wasn’t a legal auction going on.”
DeChristopher’s defense was prohibited from explaining the illegality of auction to the jury during his trial in the first week of March of this year. The judge deemed this information, as well as climate change-related information that could be included in a necessity defense, irrelevant in the face of DeChristopher’s intention to break the law.
The jury was also not told that 87 of the 116 parcels leased were later rescinded by the then new secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar after it was ruled that the auction did not abide by oil and gas leasing protocol.
DeChristopher was convicted on March 3 on two felony counts for disrupting the auction: one count for violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act and one count of False Statement. He is facing 10 years in prison and fines up to $750,000.
His sentencing trial was moved from June 23 to July 22 due the buzz of rallies planned on that day at capital buildings across the nation in support of DeChristopher.
On the day of his conviction trial and for through the four days that it lasted, DeChristopher’s supporters had flooded the streets outside the courthouse and raised their voices in song and chants, accompanied by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. It was an attempt, in the words of Terry Tempest Williams, to summon “new volumes of outrage and love” in response to the threat of a decade in jail for standing up to what one individual saw as a crime against the American people.
The Trial of Tim DeChristopher from Ian Wittenber on Vimeo.
Next up: Tim DeChristopher speaks to Whole Terrain about civil disobedience and the current environmental movement.
By Hanna Wheeler
Tom Stearns pictured on the cover of his company's seed catalog. Photo courtesty of High Mowing Seeds.
High Mowing Seeds founder and president Tom Stearns knew from a young age that he wanted to work with the earth for a living. “I always said I wanted to be a farmer or a geologist…not that I knew what either of them meant,” he said, laughing.
Stearns grew up in Connecticut and western Massachusetts where he inherited his love of gardening from his dad, who he describes as “quite a nature lover.”
As a high school student at Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachussets and later as a college student at Prescott College in Arizona, he concentrated on the social and political aspects of environmental studies. Meanwhile, he was still gardening. When he was 17 or 18, he learned about seed saving.
“Something clicked,” he said. “My attention started to shift from fighting what I didn’t believe in to fighting for what I did believe in.”
He put together a one-page seed list, printed 500 copies and started selling seeds at the age of 19.
In the first year he only sold $2,000 to $3,000 worth of seeds, but it gave him the chance to learn the subtleties of seed growing and teach himself how to select for hardy, consistent seeds. “It’s very different from growing vegetables,” he said.
It’s that dedication to farming that makes High Mowing Seeds unique. Surprisingly, most seed companies don’t actually grow their own seeds. “They are basically marketing and distribution companies,” said Stearns.
But High Mowing Seeds near Hardwick, VT is a farm-based company. That means employees have their hands in the soil, inspecting fields and pulling up plants that aren’t growing to specifications. It’s also one of the country’s few 100 percent organic seed companies. The company does its own field testing and has both a full lab and a seed-cleaning facility.
“We have our eyes on the ball the whole time,” said Stearns. “It gives us a chance to improve the quality at 10 different steps.”
Stearns officially launched High Mowing Seeds as his full-time business in 1999, just four years after his first seed list. A year later, he hired his first employee. “We hit the ground running and have been running ever since,” said Stearns.
In fact, the company began to outgrow itself. “In 2006, the growth of our company was bigger and faster than we expected. We were tripling in size every two years. We were growing so quickly that everything wasn’t working,” said Stearns. He refers to this stage of a company’s growth as the “gangly teenager stage.”
Rather than just playing keep-up, Stearns knew he needed to build the future company he envisioned and then grow into it. Good idea, but it meant cash.
Borrowing money usually comes in the form of getting a loan from a bank, but most banks don’t like to take on risky ventures like organic seed companies. Small business owners often borrow money from friends or family. But sometimes, as Stearns said, “…your friends and family aren’t that rich.” The other option is partnering with venture capitalists. But in that model, the investor would want Stearns to sell the company to a larger company as quickly as possible. “Then the investor would make out like a bandit, but the company wouldn’t be locally-owned anymore. The social mission would go out the window,” said Stearns. He sited nearby examples, including Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, which is now owned by the London-based Unilever conglomerate, and Tom’s of Maine, which is owned by the Colgate-Palmolive company.
Instead, Stearns thought of another option: creative financing with a locavore spin. He sought out community members who shared the company’s social and environmental mission and valued the prospect of good paying jobs in the area. He pulled together a group of 17 people to invest in the company. Since then, the company has grown two and a half times and is paying back the initial investments with substantial interest, freeing those 17 people to re-invest in community initiatives.
Stearns says the community investment in High Mowing Seeds is an example of the Slow Money movement, which is about “putting together the investors who have the resources with the entrepreneurs who have the passion for a triple bottom line of people, planet and profits,” said Stearns.
It’s a model that’s springing up across the country. Stearns is in high demand across the U.S. and Canada to give talks and write articles about the High Mowing Seeds example. He hopes there will be more media attention to “the front lines of people rebuilding their food systems. Those stories need to be told,” he said.
In fact, the Hardwick area and local companies such as High Mowing Seeds have received a lot of media attention.
High Mowing Organic Seeds on “Dan Rather Reports” from High Mowing Organic Seeds on Vimeo.
In 2008, The New York Times wrote an article about the Hardwick local food network called, “Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town.” In 2009, Dan Rather Reports aired a twenty-minute feature on the Hardwick food system, including an interview with Stearns. Also in that year, author Ben Hewitt published his book The Town That Food Saved about the Hardwick area and celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse showcased his visit to Hardwick on his television show Emeril Green.
All of that high profile attention didn’t stem from just High Mowing Seeds or just a single farmer or just one commercial composter. Instead, the buzz centered around the way Hardwick’s small food entrepreneurs are cooperating to create a local food economy. And behind all of those camera-ready scenes of cooperation and saliva-inducing organic food, there’s the Center for an Agricultural Economy. And who has the energy and vision to serve as president of the board? You guessed it: Tom Stearns.
“There was a group of us agriculture business owners in the area— some friends mostly. We started getting together to talk shop about our businesses and products and challenges. Those meetings grew to involve more people. A lot of us shared the same mission,” said Stearns. That team of agri-preneurs decided a non-profit could coordinate efforts that would support the budding agricultural economy and the new face of the Center for an Agricultural Economy was born.
Stearns became the president of the group in 2007. In just three years, the organization grew from zero to eight full-time staff. It also purchased a 16-acre property to serve as a demonstration farm. And it has built the Vermont Food Venture Center, a $4 million, 15,000 square-foot community kitchen incubator.
When Stearns describes the kitchen incubator, he uses words like “ginormous” and “wild ride” and somehow starts to talk even faster than his normal breakneck pace. The enthusiasm is contagious and completely justifiable. When the kitchen incubator opens later this spring, small scale farmers and gardeners can finally access all of the stainless steel food processing equipment, federal inspection, labeling, testing and nutrition analysis that’s required for commercial value-added food.
“How do you take the step from making 20 jars on your counter to selling it somewhere? It would basically cost you $100,000,” said Stearns. “Even if it’s the best recipe in the world, there’s no guarantee to get a hundred grand out of it to pay for your own facility.” It’s just another example of Hardwick-style cooperation making the agricultural economy turn.
The Center for an Agricultural Economy estimates that local food has created 200 new jobs in the area. “Here we are in this little corner of rural Vermont adding jobs. It’s unheard of,” said Stearns. It’s a success story that people from all over the world want to see. “People from 80 countries visited in the last year. They’re flying in just to see what’s going on— to see and feel and taste what a healthy food system is like,” he said.
Stearns calls Hardwick the Silicon Valley of sustainable agriculture because of the level of collaboration. Other places in the world are seeing similar economic revitalization through local agriculture, though unlike Hardwick, many examples are near urban centers. “In other rural places, the ambitious people leave. Here, they’re moving back,” Stearns said. Finally, Steans’ advice for ambitious, community-minded young people is: “Don’t wait. I encourage young people who have ideas to start them. Just get started.”
