Blog: Breaking Up With the Farm?

My feelings for the Occupy Gill Tract Farm have rollercoastered like a sudden love affair. In just a few short days I've gone from a smitten "YES!" to a sober "it's complicated..." Just as a new lover's casual callousness might run a red flag up the mighty mast of love - so have I stepped back from my first mad embrace with the newly laid community farm. 

The red flag that's causing my reluctant retreat are published comments from farm organizers who blithely dismiss the question of the  - some of whom have families to feed. 

The UC system may have "plenty of land," which is something I've heard the farmers say, but UC is also a bureaucratic system. It is unrealistic to expect that Gill Tract researchers can shift their projects to other areas at short notice, as those other pieces of land have probably been reserved in advance by other researchers. 

Yesterday, when I texted Effie Rawlings about my concerns for the researchers, based particularly on the , she agreed we needed to talk more about this matter but noted that "he didn't seem very interested" in collaborating. My thought - why would he? He's just been given an unexpected pink slip by people who have occupied his 20-year workspace. Frankly, that's not usually the way productive collaborations start.

So I was again dismayed to read another example of callousness, published in Wednesday's Albany Patch article, "." Ashoka Finley was quoted in the article: "Our position is that we don't really need any more corn research."

"Our?" Who is "Our?" Where's the "We" in all this? Red flag again.

How many times have occupiers of all stripes laid down autocratic rules and policies for the rest of us to like or lump? While I have no love for the university's leadership, which also speaks with opaque plurality and often runs roughshod over the people and environment of communities where it reigns supreme - I can't help noting a similar power dynamic in the above statement. It seems to convey, "We're here. What we are doing is for your own good. You're welcome to participate, but only on our terms. We will accommodate you, if we feel like it." Much like corporate planners for development of university parcels.

What is it about human beings, anyway? We are terrified of intimate engagement, in every way. We occupy our bodies instead of inhabiting them. We occupy our relationships, instead of feeling each other's pain and joy. Public spaces, public discourse, and crucial decisions - all are made from positions staked out, protected, and deemed immovable. Positions that are occupied through fear and ego, desire and greed. Yes, we can be greedy even for social change. 

But like Bertholt Brecht wrote, "All of us or none." And so that carefully cultivated organic carrot grown in the Gill Tract soil will taste like dust to me if I know that a family has lost its livelihood as a result of that carrot's cultivation. And should the Gill Tract farmland go under the knife for any other kind of development, those Whole Food carrots will be equally unpalatable. And I say this knowing full well that we all consume human misery with every bite of corporate food, often without thinking twice. And so I do believe collective, community farms can be a source of tremendous healing as well as nourishing food.

The Gill Tract farm is an opportunity to embark in healing as well as planting. But it can't be done with callous disregard of the fate of those humans already entwined in its soil. In the planting of a flash farm, the Occupy consciousness must shift from "occupation" (suitable for humanizing corporate and concrete spaces) to "habitation" (suitable for the earth and the web of human relationships). This means being in and of the community, even if you're new to it, becoming good neighbors, taking the karma of your deeds and entwining it with others who are already here. It's the kind of thing that my ancestors emphatically did not do in coming to this land - and just look at the resulting mess. This disregard is something we can no longer afford. It has cost us all too much, and our future generations will continue to pay for it.   

If we set out to make a new world with new things in it - in response to global warming and climate change; environmental destruction; multitudes of social injustices; post-peak oil economic devastation; homelessness; corporate food production; gross economic inequities; privitization of "the commons" of water, air, and soil; and so on - then let our new things be made with every bit of the best of us. Compassion, connection, respect and regard, nonviolence. This must hold true for acts of civil disobedience as well as more permanent initiatives. 

As so, using a phrase from the Free Speech Movement, "I ask us to consider" the complexities of relationships attached to this land. In particular, I would like to see the Gill Tract farmers rearrange their carefully laid plantings in order to make the necessary space for the researchers. And I would like to see farmers, researchers, UC, City of Albany officials, residents, and all stakeholders collaborate on a gradual transition plan to shift the use of the land to community farming, consistent with the City of Albany Climate Action Plan, the Transition Albany process, disaster planning efforts, and other green and environmental projects already underway. 

I would like to see respectful co-existence and regard as a requirement for moving the Gill Tract Farm from an act of civil disobedience to a genuinely viable resource for Albany and East Bay residents. Eventually the Gill Tract should be a place for us all to inhabit, not just a place for a chosen few to occupy or develop.

As for me, I'm not sure if I'm breaking up with the Farm yet. We need to talk.