Mariellé Anzelone has a rant against urban farming in the New York Times this week. While I greatly admire her work elsewhere, I feel this piece is both unfounded and misguided. Her primary claim is that the urban farm movement has gone too far and is displacing valuable natural processes needed in our cities. That's a fair complaint, if true, but her examples of damage to 'ecosystem services' just don't seem all that harmful to me — or even very real for that matter.
Citing comments by a single editor at Dwell magazine — who apparently criticized the High Line for its lack of agriculture features — she claims the urban farm movement is now even encroaching upon urban parkland. In the world we actually live in however, New York CIty has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building what she admits is a remarkably valuable and very REAL wildflower meadow in the sky — score one for wildflowers. She also takes offense at the experimental grafting of fruit tree branches to the (presumably) lower limbs of street trees in San Francisco, but she fails to explain how this displaces wildflowers, or acknowledge that it might actually benefit the native pollinators she extolls by expanding the tree's bloomtime — score one for native pollinators. And, she imagines acres of single-species orchards in a city that prices real estate by the square foot — how is this even remotely possible economically?
Even if these claims were substantiated — and I doubt they can be — must we really choose between 'ecosystem services' and urban food production — can't we have both? Can't we have our wildflowers and eat them too?
Okay, so maybe garden vegetables aren't native species, but most are angiosperms, blooming and producing nectar for hungry bees and butterflies, and even forage for caterpillars (members of the carrot family (Apiaceae), including parsley and dill, are host plants for black swallowtails). I have yet to see an example of urban agriculture that resembles a "monoculture of exotic imports" — most are community gardens growing a diverse mix of herbs, vegetables, and a few flowering annuals and perennials. Even Eagle Street Rooftop Farm — a true urban farm — is growing a panoply of crops. So where exactly are these vistas "full of fruit trees"?
I have designed and built a community garden that is actively tended by more than fifty urban gardeners — most producing food for family consumption. I am building another now that will provide an additional thirty beds. Neither is displacing valuable wildflowers or native species, but rather poorly managed turf grass mowed by burning fossil fuel. Both sites were ecological wastelands that will now support an assortment of continuously blooming food plants, including tomatoes, corn, zucchini, eggplant, peas, peppers, beans, parsley, sage, basil, and a smattering of marigolds and nasturtium, among many other species.
During the many hours I spent amongst the original site conditions — measuring, envisioning, and laying out plots — I never once saw a butterfly, and hardly ever any sign of avian life. The completed garden now supports swallowtails, monarchs, cabbages, skippers, admirals, and a host of bees. And last fall, I spotted what I consider the auspicious crown-jewel of garden birdlife — the ruby-crowned kinglet.
And let's not overlook the fact that nearly a hundred individual members of the city's keystone species, Homo sapians, now have a recreational outlet that wasn't previously available to them. Aren't cities fundamentally human ecosystems anyway?
Ultimately, I believe Ms Angelone's beef with urban farming comes not only from her roots in what I call the 'native is better' movement, but also from the too common NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) impulse.
It's all well and good to say that substantial agriculture does not belong in our urban environment, but as world populations press up against the Earth's carrying capacity, we need to find new ways and places to produce the calories needed to eventually sustain an estimated 10 billion souls. Our oceans are already over fished; where will these calories come from?
From bulldozed rain forests, that's where, and tilled wet meadows, filled in swamps and other socially-marginal but ecologically-rich places. Why push our food production out to the planet's undisturbed edges — and then burn fossil fuels trucking it back in — when we can fill at least part of our needs in already-disturbed sites closer to home?
And concerning the 'native is better' movement: I too was once a card-carrying member of that crowd, but I'm just not buying it anymore — at least not as a comprehensive solution. When I was in that camp, an uneasy feeling never fully left me that something was missing from the concept. I could never quite put my finger on what that something was until I read Emma Marris' well-researched, The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. Her book's thesis is perhaps in direct opposition to Angelone's — Marris claims that non-native species DO provide valuable ecological function and that it is the 'native is better' crowd that fails to recognize this.
Based on many years of personal observations, I have come to agree with Marris. In particular, my observations of the yearly monarch migration — which Angelone cites in her article — support a 'rambunctious garden' approach. Year after year, I witness migrating monarchs moving through Riverside Park feeding on the native aster cultivar (nativar) 'Alma Potschke' (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae 'Andenken an Alma Potschke') and on non-native Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifolia) and especially on butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii). They are not all that attracted to our thinly blooming straight-species native asters or our great swaths of local-genotype milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). We purposefully preserve that milkweed because monarchs are closely associated with the species, yet In twenty years of hopeful anticipation, I'm still waiting for a single crop of caterpillars on any one of these native volunteers. So, should we rip out all those ornamental nativars and non-natives that are now nourishing our migrating monarchs, and let the naturally occurring milkweed take over? Keep in mind that it's a long way to Mexico without a sip of non-native nectar here and there.
In the end, I suspect there are just two simple truths to be acknowledged concerning "ecosystem services": first, more life — more plants and more species — is better, whether those are native or non-native, food producing or ornamental; and second, the more we keep our human ecosystem inside the city — including food production — the healthier the planet will be. To those ends, I believe we can have both natural processes AND urban food production. One does not necessarily preclude, or even impinge upon, the other.