Urban Ag: A Bridge Between Jefferson and Thoreau

In thinking about Jackson’s essay “Jefferson, Thoreau, and After,” it didn’t take long for me to arrive at the conclusion that neither Jefferson nor Thoreau offers a vision of the landscape that provides everything I would hope to derive from it. Like Jefferson, I want a public life, one engaged with my neighbors and the body politic, but like Thoreau, I also want some measure of privacy, regular access to green space, and the ability to occasionally escape to an entirely different context. Further complicating the picture is the fact that I live in a city, the environment that both Jefferson and Thoreau loved to hate. Yet I think there may be something that would prompt Thoreau and Jefferson alike to take a second look at cities, and that might begin to make our cities into places where both agrarian and romantic needs are met: urban agriculture.

The idea of growing our food in the city deals most obviously with Jefferson’s critique of urban settings: that they are places of “useless luxury and corrupt wealth” (175) where no one has access to the land. As Jackson describes it, Jefferson believed that “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of god,” and he worked to create a republic where  “a few as possible shall be without a small portion of land.” (175) There are many urban farms in existence in the united states today that give city dwellers a sense of what it means to work the land, while also serving to reinvigorate a depressed urban area. For instance, the farm Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin employs local people at a complex that includes six greenhouses, two fish runs, outdoor pens for livestock, and 5 beehives. Farmers teach local people how to grow their own food, while producing food to sell at local markets. (Click here for a nice Youtube Video).

A similar project exists within New York City, in the form of Red Hook Community Farm, run by the organization Added Value. The farm employs local schoolchildren, and its produce meets a critical need in a community where there are few supermarkets.  Finally, for anyone who does not believe that food could be grown in a place like Manhattan, there is the vertical farm concept, which would convert skyscrapers in major cities into food producing machines.

I don’t for a minute believe that any of these initiatives would convince Thoreau to leave Conchord, Mass and move to the city. I do, however, think that Jackson presents an overly harsh portait of Thoreau’s feelings about agriculture. Thoreau may not have loved all farmers, but he grew beans of his own when he lived alone at Walden Pond, and in Walden he describes how trying to maximize the health of his crop gave him a heightened sense of his surroundings. I suspect that Thoreau would at least appreciate the way that urban farms can heighten people’s understanding of natural processes.

Urban agriculture cannot make us good citizens, as Jefferson wanted. Nor can it give us the unspoiled nature that Thoreau idealized. But it can bring us closer to both our neighbors and natural systems, and it does something even more important by diffusing the tendency to believe that our utopia lies elsewhere. The environmental historian William Cronon wrote the following words as an argument against romanticizing wilderness, but they can be interpreted as a general caution against looking too far afield for solutions to the problems of our landscape. “By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness,” he wrote, “we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.” (11) What’s nice about urban agriculture is that it offers city dwellers both community and nature, without requiring them to leave the places where they live.