Writing

My article on the teen gardeners of Anathoth Community Garden just appeared in World Ark magazine of Heifer International. You can read the full article here.

The teens who arrived each Saturday morning had been charged with various minor offenses: shoplifting, drug possession, carrying a knife to school. Our work with them was part of Anathoth’s mission, which came from the book of Jeremiah: “plant gardens and eat what they produce … and seek the peace of the place to which you are sent.” I had no trouble teaching teens how to plant gardens and eat what they produced, but I struggled with the peacemaking part. My patience was stretched by youngsters like Mohammed, who enjoyed shocking himself on our electric deer fence; or the three boys who snuck off to the woods to smoke an illegal substance; or Bassie, the young man who played in a punk band (“it’s basically a wall of sound coming at you with offensive song titles”) and who told his mother before coming to work with us, “I don’t care if they’re curing cancer out there—I’m not working at Anathoth!” Read More

A new essay of mine is out in the April issue of The Sun magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

THE VIRGIN CRESTED THE HILL, and a man emerged from his doorway and gave a shout. Others rushed from their huts. Perched on a dais borne on the shoulders of four men dressed in leather sandals and white tunics, she descended the narrow dirt trail toward the Mexican village. Behind her a long procession unfurled over and down the hill. Musicians marched in front, playing wooden harps and guitars and child-sized violins that looked like they had been carved with a hatchet, which they had. A lone trumpeter announced the Virgin’s arrival, his notes bearing no particular relation to the melody.

Excerpt from Could Acacia Trees Solve Africa’s Hunger Problems? Christian Science Monitor,
Dec.24th, 2010.

Instead of offering the hungry a sack of grain each year, thus making those people dependent on the whims of an outsider’s benevolence, faith-based groups working in Africa can offer them something much more valuable that can break the cycle of
dependence and famine: knowledge. Specifically, agroecological knowledge. Instead of yearly inputs of grain hand-outs, petro-chemicals, or “miracle” seeds, agroecological knowledge puts farmers in control of their own farm and increases their chances of staying on that farm.

Excerpt from– Farmed Out: Wes Jackson on the Need to Reinvent Agriculture, The Sun, October 2010. Read full article

We’ve been told that our food system is broken, and the fix is to grow food organically and procure it locally. The organic farmer eschews pesticides, spreads compost instead of nitrogen-based fertilizer, and sells her Hakurei turnips at the Saturday-morning market. All big improvements, says Jackson, but ones that stop short of a solution. They are answers to problems in agriculture, when we have yet to address the problem of agriculture, a ten-thousand-year-old bad habit that Jackson believes is humanity’s original sin.

Excerpt fromFarm School: Sharing Horticultural Skills with the World, Christian Century
Jan. 26, 2010

On the flight into Fort Myers, Florida, I looked down on a vast, oil-driven network of fast-food chains, malls and suburbs, little fiefdoms of fancy destined for ruin in the low-carbon future. Standing an hour later at the Global Farm sponsored by ECHO, the Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization, I felt that the contrast couldn’t have been more stark. It was like stepping into the Nigerian village I grew up in as a missionary kid, albeit one with lots of white people. Instead of running on oil, this place derived its energy from contemporary sunlight; aside from a golf cart here and there, everyone walked or rode bikes.

Excerpt fromThe Forest Gardens of Quintana Roo, Nourishing the Planet website, Worldwatch
Institute, March 5th, 2010. Read full article

Mayan villages and their ancient agricultural arts are not just vestiges of a lost way of life; they are crucial models that could teach us “moderns” how to farm in ways that work with, not in spite of, our surrounding ecosystems.

Excerpt from Martyr’s Mirror, The Sun, June 2009. Read full article

Two shotgun-wielding sheriff’s deputies barred our entry through the gates of the naval transmitter station, but our group of twenty-one protesters radiated the assurance of the overly prepared. We had trained a whole month for this moment. Though the deputies couldn’t tell from looking at us, we were skilled in the art of moral jujitsu. We took a step forward.

Excerpt from The Field at Anathoth—A Garden Becomes a Protest published in Orion, July/Aug. 2007. Read full article

Agriculture offers a way for churches to seek the salvation, the shalom, the welfare of the place to which they’ve been sent, which is what I think the gospel writers were describing when they spoke of the Kingdom of God. Live locally, eat locally, serve God by serving your neighbor. This is no Earth-shattering revelation about how to Achieve World Peace or End Poverty; rather, it’s a small act of witness, a way of living in place that, if practiced, might begin to repair some of the damage we have inflicted upon our neighbors, the fertile soil, and ourselves.

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