I have seen beautiful places in the world. To me, the most beautiful have been of two kinds: totally unspoiled natural beauty and totally controlled gardens. Really, only a few such instances of either have really succeeded in taking me aback. I dream more about the latter though. The first of its kind was an ancient river valley in Morocco where the locals cultivated wonderful fruits and vegetables in semi-bounded areas with only dirt paths connecting the many different plots. The second was the gardens of Japan, which were perhaps more pleasing to the eye, but certainly less productive and more artificially contrived. To my knowledge, America has neither of comparable examples of these. However, certain botanical gardens (and butterfly gardens) do offer slight competition and may in fact be worthy of a separate category of their own.

I think we can do better, so I propose a further blending of agriculture with landscaping. One might call it the idea of edible landscapes, human-based ecosystems, or aesthetic agriculture. I would like to use more powerful imagery, so perhaps “Eden Reborn” would suffice for now. While some people do visit farms for their beauty, such motivations are more often byproducts of ingrained nostalgia for our more agrarian past than objective regard for beauty. These feelings neither teach us much about how humans have used the biological systems around them historically nor do they actually bring us closer to actually engaging further in the process ourselves. It is in effect a typical tourist experience: completely separate both spatially and culturally from the social spheres most people inhabit today. This does not mean that such modern agriculture examples are without merit, since chances are that they will keep us well fed for a long time to come. However, agriculture could be much more aesthetically pleasing and engaging for urbanites, but it would have to be totally revamped. It must move beyond its current homogeneous landscapes that have been designed with mechanized efficiency primarily in mind. My impulse is to create something that is both beautiful, productive, and engaging.

Of course, I lack the skills in both agriculture and landscaping, so I would need to involve a few experts to help formulate the concrete design plans. I do not know yet what land would be best suited for for such a project, but certain criteria would need to be met: very close to major human populations, low acquisition cost per acre, unpolluted/fertile soil, and existing geographic features adaptable to creative landscaping. The final product would be more than a park or a u-pick plot. It would be gorgeous... fruit and nut bearing trees everywhere with edible under foliage. Beautiful greenhouse structures would provide places for tropical plants in places too cold to support them. Sculptures and other massive artwork would be interspersed throughout the landscape. I have a vision of such environments someday ringing the outside of human settlements, or perhaps even fully integrated within them, but I cannot yet conceive of the path towards making this a reality. Urban agriculture is still very small scale, poorly conceived, and under capitalized. Sprawl continues for now, but I think contraction is imminent. I hope someday we will be able to mostly withdraw our activities from the countryside (the old wilderness) and bring dense agriculture into dense human population centers. Conceiving of a social schema that allows people to develop and maintain such areas is still difficult. Who will sow and who will reap and what will the relations between them be like?

I now have some good examples to present through which I would like to frame my vision. WWOOF is a group of small organic farmers who welcome workers into the day to day operations on their land. They mostly attract the young, idealistic sect who are happy enough trading their labor for free shelter, organic (vegetarian) food, and the chance to work outside on some nice farmland. I have done a bit of work on one of these and I would consider the experience to be satisfactory, but not really uplifting in any particular way. Still, I'm sure there are plenty of excellent examples I'll never experience. However, what I would consider to be a better example is Sadhana Forest, a reforesting project offering vegan meals and sustainable facilities to its volunteers. This is a truly great place where people feel as though they are working for something they believe in with a group of similarly driven others. There is a deeper sense of community there and the organizers make it a priority to have their volunteers living with each other, relying on each other, on a day-to-day basis. There is a great need in the world to have these kinds of projects because of several key aspects of their design: environmental sustainability, education, manual labor in horticulture, idealistic experimentation, and common community. The last is perhaps the most important: everyone deserves to live and work in these settings, especially the confused and destitute.

My idea is to acquire land and operate in a similar fashion to Sadhana Forest, but with some modifications. Everything would have to be beautiful as well as sustainable... designed well, that is. Volunteers would be able to pick their own food and make their own dishes whenever they pleased. These volunteers would have the option to live in free dorm conditions or pay for more upscale guest houses. It would have a U-pick dynamic in which members of the public could pay an initial price to cover what they might eat inside and would be allowed to subtract that from the total cost of the fruit they picked. There would also be volunteer/education programs for the outside public to participate in on a rolling schedule, anytime of the day. Things like that... I'll stop short of more detail herein. If anyone wants to get together with me in doing such a thing, let's start scouting locations. Hard work galore to come!