Greening Dallas?

Dallas used to look like the future. Parts of it did, anyway. Logan's Run (released in 1976) was filmed there (also in Fort Worth, Houston, a sewage treatment plant in El Segundo, CA, and other locations). The 1980 PBS TV movie based on Ursula K. Leguin's excellent novel The Lathe of Heaven was shot largely in Dallas, as well. Something about Dallas' sun-baked, concrete public spaces and impersonal, corporatist architecture appealed to filmmakers of the time when it came to imagining, say, the 23rd century. This likely says a lot more about the filmmakers and their audiences than it says about the 23rd century.

It certainly says a lot about Dallas, where the future used to go to get strange.

Another future Dallas was revealed near the end of last month when the winners of the Re:Vision Dallas architecture/urban design competition were announced. The contest invited architects and collaborators in the fields of urban farming, sustainable land use, etc. to create a city block that:

encourage[s] and value[s] relationships, while fostering respect for nature and our neighbors, privacy and resources, economy and consumption.

One of the three winning designs came from the San Francisco-based firm of David Baker and Partners. It looks like this:

The image is via the architect's Web site, where several others are available, as are some words which expand on the images:

Rather than simply placing a single building in the middle of a neglected space, the design team's conceptual reach extends beyond the property line into the larger city. The team proposes creating intersecting greenways pieced together from open space and disused lots to set up a framework for future development and to connect existing but disparate public amenities, such as the Farmer's Market and the Trinity River.

At the center of the greenways’ "X", Lone Star Square will function as the public heart of the new food/agriculture district, with orchards, garden plots, and historical elements from the city's past. Running through the system of greenways are a series of water features that filter harvested rainwater and convey it in a stream to the agricultural fields to be used for irrigation.

It's good that people in Dallas and elsewhere are looking into future green buildings and alternatives to the dystopic present in which a paucity of shops and amenities, multiple days of unsafe air quality, and oppressive summer heat make the urban experience just plain bad. Like the impossibly strange Dragonfly Building proposed for New York, the project arises from a good heart and good intentions, even if it is a latter day Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And I'm most hopeful for the idea of harvesting rainwater, even though we're now at the beginning of the dry season in this part of Texas, and some parts of the state to our south are well into a drought. But somehow the whole bigass shebang strikes me as just so very Dallas in its scale and structure and attitude. Consultants and experts and government workers decide solutions to problems that earlier consultants and experts and government workers inadvertently created via their solutions to earlier problems.

Meanwhile, up in Milwaukee, a guy named Will Allen -- who last winter was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant -- has worked patiently and persistently to create an urban farm in a blighted neighborhood. He's featured in the trailer below.



(The trailer is from the film Fresh, the Movie, which I have not seen) What I find admirable and encouraging about his project is that it is not the work of designers, but of a man and his compadres who want to make a place to live and live well. There is a connectedness both to a community and to an idea of living with the means of feeding ourselves that really good designers sometimes miss and Dallas implementers of designs have consistently missed.

I mean he's the author of the sentence "And believe in what the worms will do for you."

Loaves and Fishes

Let me begin by confessing that I don't know for certain how to say what I want to say right now. Still, I'll try.

We have set up a fledgling community garden here in my little town, and that has led to numerous personal interactions and nascent friendships which I'd never suspected would happen.

More than plants can grow in a garden.

I've made friends with numerous stalwarts in the local Methodist Church, for example -- men and women whose worldview is hardly congruent with my own. I've worked with a man named Bob who is a master plumber and with Jim who is a master welder (and county commissioner) and with Lamont who is a master gardener. So many skills, so many people.

Today, I met (or rather re-met) Tim, a massage therapist and psychologist, who determined that he and his wife Frances needed to participate in the project. After some confusion about which plots were still open (our record keeping needs some fine tuning), we got him situated. The other re-acquaintance today was with Ron, the pastor at the local Church of the Nazarene, who wanted a project for his youth group to work on tomorrow during their weekend famine study. Ron and his church volunteered last month for our Big Event work day when they toted bales and slogged through dirt and mulch till our garden was almost ready for planting.

Yesterday, he emailed to ask if there were chores in the garden for his church's youth group to do during their weekend fast in observance of world hunger.

Wow.

Here's what I learned from Ron: the kids in his church will not eat for 30 hours this weekend. They will work to provide food for others during that time. They will earn money from pledges for each hour they fast. The money will be sent to feed the hungry in Rwanda. He told me that his instructions to them were to learn from their hunger, to understand the relationship between the pangs and their spirits, their souls. His asceticism was heart-felt and heartening, not mean-spirited in the least, but generous and loving.

Understand your luck. Understand the suffering of others. Understand how your spirit is part of this world.

It was an interesting -- even enlightening -- discussion. I mentioned the daily fasting of the faithful during Ramadan, the significance of eating to Christian communion, the ritual of the Seder meal for Jews at Passover. All this (and more) leads me to conceive of food not as mere fuel for our bodies, but as highly charged, symbolic stuff for our souls.

We were on the same page.

We found ourselves -- for the moment, at least -- in absolute agreement. A pastor in the Church of the Nazarene and a secular intellectual nodded and said yes to one another out in a garden with nascent tomatoes and sprouting beans and squash blossoms and okra seedlings and piles of mulch. We didn't and don't agree about theology, ontology, cosmogony, cosmology, ontogeny, ontology, phylogeny, or most other -ogonies, ogenies, and -ologies out there. But when it comes to food, we have common ground. More than that, we want to see another path for understanding our connection to the earth, one in which distinctions between our souls and our bodies amount to so much confused thinking.

Much of that path is bound up in eating.

A second look at the garden

Part I


Back at the beginning of April we had a major work party at the community garden because we were able to plug into a local civic work day called "The Big Event." We had kids from the junior master gardener program out there with us.

We had guys from fraternities helping out.

We had geezers with whiskers.

We had generous people from the town and from local churches.

An Ag Science professor showed up and broke in his brand new tractor with us.

Working together, we got a lot done. That morning we moved 130 cubic yards of donated mulch (a cubic yard is 27 cubic feet -- you do the math) and mostly filled 36 raised beds with amended soil.

Part II

Then there was the saga of the bees. My wife and I have lived with a hive of bees for about two years. They've colonized the north wall of our house. I've sporadically tried to get them removed, but the sort of expertise one needs to open a house's wall and capture a hive living inside is rare. I think I have finally found somebody to take care of the hive for me, but he's working long shifts at present and can't do the job for another week or more. I can't bring myself to kill them in this time of Colony Collapse Disorder. Whatever is happening to bees in this country, the bees in my house are definitely healthy.

So healthy that a couple of weeks ago our hive produced two small swarms. Here's a picture of one of them:

The county extension service put me in touch with a beekeeper by the name of Don who brought a hive box for one swarm and a "catch box" for the other. He left the hive with me and took the other swarm in payment. So a day or so later, I lost my bee hauling virginity when I loaded the hive onto the bed of a borrowed pickup and schlepped them out to the garden site. I waited till they'd gone to bed for the evening and stuffed a dish towel into the entrance, but it was nervous making all the same.

The next day, I hauled them again because we determined they were too close to the garden plots. Now they're about 200 feet away, which seems about the right distance. And they've settled into their new digs quite well.

I took that photo this afternoon, as well as the one below.

That's one of our bees foraging about 200 yards from the hive.

Part III


So the garden is beginning to take off. Green stuff is poking out of the soil here and there. A few things are even blooming. The bees are pollinating. I've met and worked with scores of people I wouldn't have otherwise--church folks, politicians, educators, master gardeners, anti-poverty volunteers, plumbers, farmers, and the local feed store proprietors. I've learned a lot about irrigation, mulch, soil amendments, compost, charitable donations, local government, legal matters, insurance, human relations, and bees.

Would Joseph Beuys have called what I've done art? And if he did, would he be right to do so?