CHAPTER 12

Stories from the Front Lines

Not coincidentally, we have discovered that almost everyone we know in the local food revolution understands Peak Everything, although they rarely speak of it.

In Grow! Stories from the Urban Food Movement, Stephen Grace serves up generous helpings of nutrient-dense stories of farmers and farming in the gritty urban tangle of the sprawling Denver metropolis, revealing a hidden revolution with the power to quietly heal lives and communities.74 Drawn by a common urge to rebuild food security and sovereignty, the unsung pioneers Grace discovers are arising from broken communities to forge a regenerative local economy that is steadily and unexpectedly transforming fractured landscapes. The book emerged from Grace’s attempt to find the bounty available in his own backyard (“so many tasty foods, so many fascinating people”). Reading Grow! fires our imaginations, inspires hope, and compels us to join the local food revolution and experience the joys of “living deeply” in our cities.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview I did with Grace in the summer of 2015.75

MICHAEL BROWNLEE: What’s been the most surprising thing about this journey for you?

STEPHEN GRACE: There is so much reason for despair in the world, and all the people I met who are involved in this movement are completely cognizant of the magnitude of the world’s problems. They understand the gravity of the situation we are facing, whether it’s catastrophic climate change, the diminishment of our national resources, social problems, peak oil, peak this, peak that. They are completely aware, very well educated, and very in tune with these things.

The more you know, the harder it becomes to navigate in a day-to-day world. It would be very easy to succumb to despair. The beautiful thing about this movement, and the great surprise of it, is how joyous these people are in their urban food enterprises. Throughout their day-to-day involvement, there is an undercurrent of joy that drives them just as much as a looming apocalyptic scenario of despair out on the horizon. That incredible, irrepressible undercurrent of optimism was a great surprise. They understand the gravity of these problems. Yet they are driven by an optimism, by a determination to create change, however small it is, in a very meaningful way and in a very joyful way.

These events are so much fun. The premise of an event might be: “Here is a problem. Our food system is horrible, it’s destroying our health, it’s destroying planetary health, and it’s destroying our social connections.” But there is always an undercurrent of celebration that rises to the surface, a celebration of what remains of our natural environment, what remains of our food system, what remains of our social connections—and rebuilding and healing all those things that are broken. No matter how grim the premise of an event, I’d always leave feeling good, having a great time and in a very meaningful way, connecting with people in a very, very deep way.

MICHAEL BROWNLEE: So would it be fair to say that what you received out of this project is a kind of optimism in the face of apocalypse?

STEPHEN GRACE: I started in a dark place personally, feeling that things were pretty grim on all levels. A lot of people in my life had been taken from me. I had seen incredible trauma—on a personal level, people in my immediate social circles, and planetary problems—and I wasn’t feeling very good about the state of things. That was the big surprise and the big takeaway, something that I’ll take with me forever. Every single person that I profiled in the book is completely cognizant of the magnitude of the problems, but every one of them has such joy and determination to do good. Being around people like that, I just can’t help being affected by it and taking some sense of optimism from that. That’s what I took personally from that journey, and hopefully I have conveyed that in the book.

I can’t help feeling that we are going to be all right somehow, some way, against all odds. That’s not rational. If you look at it rationally, whether you crunch the numbers or just start listing out the problems that are out on the horizon, it can seem pretty oppressive. But then, I spend time with someone like Carlos—a young person coming from extraordinarily difficult circumstances that I can’t even imagine—and his optimism cannot be repressed. It just keeps rising to the surface, and he keeps moving forward, trying to do good in the world. I can’t be around people like that and not have that change my outlook and change me in a profound way. I feel like I can continue to move forward in my life with a sense of optimism and hope and determination. If you keep connecting with people, and you keep helping them cultivate what they do, keep cultivating your own motivation to do good in the world, you can’t help but be successful.

There’s excellent evidence of success in a lot of these initiatives, and some that aren’t successful. In urban food, you’re constantly experimenting, constantly trying things, and moving forward. You almost have to have that entrepreneurial spirit: “Oh, this didn’t work, but we’re going to try this over here, and we’re going to keep moving toward success.” And even when people don’t achieve the success that they envisioned, I think there’s such incredible dignity in the fact that they’re trying. That, to me, is a victory in the face of the looming cataclysmic thinking of dark apocalypse. I mean, they have tried all sorts of things that didn’t work, and they moved on to the next. There is optimism, and there’s entrepreneurial spirit. That’s something that I hope comes through in the book and what I hope people get from the broader movement.

To me, it’s bigger than just the food movement. It touches on something deep and meaningful in the human spirit. Maybe it’s the urban pioneers, or a new wave of can-do optimism when we are at our best as Americans—the idea that, yes, this is daunting, but we’re going to make it work.

What strikes me is that involvement in urban agriculture has been personally revolutionary for the individuals that Grace writes about. The local food revolution is healing lives and communities. The people Grace encounters—the mostly unsung heroes of the local food revolution—are the source of a rich stream of nutrients that nourish our souls. These individuals, motivated by unseen forces, represent the abundant and diverse variety of “edibles” growing mostly quietly in our midst, even mostly hidden. They rise mysteriously from the exhausted soils of community—recovering community, we could say, for these fierce local food heroes are lovingly cultivating and rebuilding this troubled soil in ways that fire our imaginations and make our hearts swell with hope, and compel us to join them. They thrive in an emerging ecology of restorative economics that is so radically different from what most of our society has become that, at first, it might seem utterly alien to us. But underneath it all, we can recognize that in this meandering path they are forging, in this process of recovering our food sovereignty, lies home.