article

This is an article that I submitted to conspire for the spring issue about place, but it didn't quite make the cut. I'm not sure if this was the final draft that I submitted or not, just was in my google documents so I figured someone should read it. comment with thoughts if you like. situations are different now then in the winter, but thats ok. enjoy...

Looking out my window, I see a blanket of snow covering the lawn, the apple tree, the gardens, and the cars out front. I'm sure that it's covering the many burned out houses, empty storefronts, and the abandoned school in the neighborhood as well. It's winter here in Detroit, which for me is a time of sharing meals and stories with friends in our living room, reflecting on the last year and filling my head with new dreams for what is to come. This year will be I'll be getting settled in a new neighborhood. It will be my sixth new address (and zip code) in as many years. That seems somewhat ironic for someone who's grown to value fidelity to people and place over almost any other thing. Perhaps more challenging, I'll be living in yet another temporary living situation. There is tension in my soul between relocating to learn and experience new things and rooting myself to make a lasting covenant with a people and a place. For the most part, I have tried to be purposeful in my choices to travel. I left Michigan six years ago to do internships and live in different communities. I've met so many amazing people and learned so many important lessons and skills. This has also helped me avoid the debt that enslaved many of my peers that have pursued a full college education. The people that I have met and the places I've been on my pilgrimage thus far have completely reshaped my perspective and allowed me to see the place where I was raised in a new light. There are always more life lessons to be learned, more places to see, once in a life time adventures to be had, and more people to meet. While this line of thinking contains much truth, there is a certain insatiable quality that reflects the consumer culture in which we live. As William Cavanaugh notes in his book Being Consumed, consumerism is less about an irrational attachment to material things (read people and place!), and more of a detachment from anything and everything. There is a certain addictive thrill and intrigue that comes from whatever is newer, bigger, better, smarter, and sexier. It allows us to consume goods, people, and places without ever asking what they may require of us. I've yet to find a ten step program to help me break free from this addiction. Fidelity may be one of the most meaningful and affective forms of cultural resistance against consumer culture.


In her book Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, Old Testament theologian Ellen Davis explores the Hebrew Bible's concept of nachalah (נַחֲלָה). The word is often used to describe the land inherited from a previous generation, and is most likely rooted in the Exodus story. The Hebrew people were to understand the land as belonging to God, and it was to be passed from generation to generation. This is an agrarian imagination, which contrasts greatly with the imperial agriculture of ancient Egypt and the industrial agriculture of our day. There is a certain quality to this understanding that exposes the folly in a way of life based on extraction, rather than observing the delicate cycles of nature where soil is a graveyard and a continual site of resurrection. All of Creation is a complex cycling of the elements that sustain life. Death for one becomes food for another and life continues. Our lives and the life of the earth itself rely on our willingness to obey and participate in this cycle, or else the nachalah received by the next generation will be a curse rather than a blessing. We inherit the gift of land, but also the responsibility that comes with that continuity.

During my time in Camden I designed a medicinal herb garden in an abandoned lot that I hoped could heal our bodies, and perhaps the brokenness of spirit. The overgrown lot was situated in an area surrounded by drugs and prostitution. The garden seemed like it would add some color and solace to the chaos all around. It seemed a simple task. All I would do was build a few irregularly shaped raised beds and plant the herbs that I had started in the greenhouse a month or two earlier. I soon found that the soil was too polluted to grow anything in, so I decided to dig out much of the soil and put in a barrier to prevent the roots from making contact with the polluted soil below. After getting nowhere with a shovel, a generous neighbor lent me a pick ax. It would be weeks of long days in the sun until I was ready to construct the garden beds. I hated almost every minute of it. This piece of land sucked. It wasn't my fault that there was pieces of building foundation in the soil, not to mention pieces of cars, drug needles, and huge chunks of metal. People waved at me as they walked by, sipping their forty. Rarely did anyone stop to help, though a few did. It wasn't my fault Camden is so desolate or smelled so terrible. Why wouldn't they help me make their neighborhood better? Would anyone even appreciate this? It didn’t take me too long to see the futility in my aspirations, and at times I sort of wished I had a forty of my own. Nonetheless, I pressed on.

While nachalah usually refers to inheritance, the word also means heritage and entitlement. It seems fitting to look for “my nachalah" in Detroit. Many generations ago, my family came to this area to start a new life as farmers. The [white] people of Michigan desired statehood. Land was given away cheap to whoever would settle it, and so they came. My family came to the so called "New World" with the Pilgrims several generations before that. That sense of entitlement to land seems in keeping with the Hebrew conquest of Canaan, though it gives me a deep discomfort. Manifest Destiny is a way of thinking of entitlement similar to consumerism: it takes what it wants while assuming divine right, without asking what is required of the settler (including "we don't want you here!"). As a post-modern, ecologically homeless nomad, I feel that perhaps now I can at least begin to ask the unasked questions of previous generations.



As I move to this neighborhood, I am in a sense a cursed man inheriting a cursed place. Like all of us, I am inheriting the curse of Cain, the first farmer, murderer, and builder of a city. Like any urban farmer, I'm inheriting soil that could be toxic. More than that though I am inheriting white privilege and entitlement. If we’re going to claim ‘relocation to the abandoned places of empire’ as a mark of our movement, it is important to remember that we are not entering a land without persons or history. While I get excited about cheap houses and tons of arable land, there are ghosts haunting this place. Why are houses so cheap? How did a populated neighborhood become an urban prairie? And though I am excited to ask the land and the river what it requires of me to be an agent of healing, I must also ask my neighbors what they require of me. What if they don’t want an urban farm or me in their neighborhood? Perhaps first I need to see and treat them as my neighbors. Hopefully in time we can learn to trust one another, and see our well being reliant on one another.

I don't know if the herb garden in Camden ever brought anyone in the neighborhood healing. I can say that a transformation happened within me. While I wasn't responsible for the condition of Camden, I realized that my family line might have unintentionally created "Camdens". Harder to swallow, I realized that my way of life was definitely creating "Camdens" in other people's communities around the world. Though the work was fairly miserable, I found joy by understanding it as penance. My life now is a continuation of that. I didn't choose white privilege. I didn't chose to be born without connection to place and people. I can choose to work to overcome them. The garden in Camden was completed and made more beautiful by others in the community after I had moved away. Likewise, it’s likely I'll spend the rest of my life working and living in Detroit for something that I will never see completed. My hope is that the nachalah that I leave for my children one day will be a gift rather than a curse.

two longish videos from a conference I attended a couple weeks ago

These were good talks. One was with the director of Food Inc and the other was with some of the leaders of the urban ag movement here in detroit among others.

Corporate farming in Detroit...

Many months ago, a major business man here in Detroit John Hantz announced his plan for a giant commercial urban farm that he pledged $30 million of his own money to create. I was instantly skeptical and mostly against it, but considered that maybe there was space in the city for both the grassroots urban farming movement that I am part of and hantz's plans. I think in the end, the city and community and many folks in the suburbs are commited to small local agriculture, and it would win out. I stumbled across a CNN article from about a month and a half ago thats converted me into a fierce opponent to everything that Hantz represents. From his hyper-capitalistic reasoning, to his technocratic life destroying & culture-less methods, to his arogant attempts to create a legacy for himself that will be remembered always...I just can't stand these plans.

Here's a gem of a quote: "...Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Where there are row crops, Hantz says, they'll be neatly organized, planted in "dead-straight lines -- they may even be in a design." But the plan isn't to make Detroit look like Iowa. "Don't think a farm with tractors," says Hantz. "That's old."


Read the whole article

addicted to plastic

I stumbled across this film online, and I felt it worth the watch. Though they point to new scientific innovation as a solution to the "plastic problem", this film certainly made me trust technological innovation less and reaffirmed thoughts about making as much of the things that you need to live as possible.

If it only plays half the video...just remember the time it stops at and come back to it a little later. Im not real sure how this website works, but at least its free.

Visit documentary-log.com for free online documentaries!

ohhh 2009

Well...its 2010. What can I say? 2009 was a very full year. A year full of difficulty and joy, hope and disappointment, confusion and new found clarity. I'm grateful t have made it out alive and well and felling excited, optimistic and energized for the next season of life. We're moving in about 3 weeks. Go to my Flickr page if you'd like to see some of the pictures of this past year. Here's a taste...

Wendell Berry Poem

I've been reading quite a bit of Wendell Berry poetry lately. There are many that I have fallen in love with, but I think that this one may be my favorite. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

Some Further Words

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places
is an "environment." And a house
for sale is not a "home." Economics
is not "science," nor "information" knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a "leader."
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
"Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore."

The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this "progress."
So is the cowardice that calls it "inevitable."

I think the issues of "identity" mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a "fetus" is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?

I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself of life impoverished go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don't like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world's body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
"Get out of there!" as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body's life is its own, untouched
by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time
to the old. I don't want to live
on mortal terms forever, or survive
an hour as a cooling stew of pieces
of other people. I don't believe that life
or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it

"Intellectual property" names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved. We
who do not own ourselves, being free,
own by theft what belongs to God,
to the living world, and equally
to us all. Or how can we own a part
of what we only can possess
entirely? Life is a gift we have
only by giving it back again.
Let us agree: "the laborer is worthy
of his hire," but he cannot own what he knows,
which must be freely told, or labor
dies with the laborer. The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air.

I don't believe that "scientific genius"
in its naive assertions of power
is equal either to nature or
to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions
of the nuclei of atoms and cells
and this world's every habitation
have not brought us to the light
but sent us wandering farther through
the dark. Nor do I believe
.artistic genius" is the possession
of any artist. No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not "human genius"
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead--
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but --
to those who have it more dear than life.

And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and their homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them, and fewer
of us learn them, year by year.
These affections are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds,
like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals,
every one truly what it is:
gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made
of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how
to live in the places where they live.
And so I would like to be a true
human being, dear reader-a choice
not altogether possible now.
But this is what I'm for, the side
I'm on. And this is what you should
expect of me, as I expect it of
myself, though for realization we
may wait a thousand or a million years.

New book...

I ordered this a couple weeks ago from the Cathedral Bookstore (I'm trying not to use amazon for brand new books anymore), and it finally came. I started reading it the other night and I really dig it so far. She has a section at the end on the urban agriculture movement here in Detroit, which is pretty sweet. She's trying to fuse the agrarian writers (prophets) of the Hebrew scriptures with the contemporary writers, namely Wendell Berry. I've just begun, but so far I really like her perspective, and I'm excited to see where she takes it. I read ahead a little and she actually addresses the anti-city narrative of the Hebrew bible, including Ellul's Meaning of the City, and she neither embraces or fully denies the validity of this view and is more interested in engaging the reality of what is rather than what should be. I'm excited to read it. I'll have a review in the next Still Small Voice zine.