study guide

1� Progressive PlaNNiNg

A Manifesto for Progressive Ruralism in an urbanizing World By Keith Pezzoli, Kerry Williams and Sean Kriletich

I n the Winter 2010 issue of Progressive Planning, Peter Marcuse suggests three strategies for criti- cal planning: expose, propose, politicize. We are using each of these strategies to advance progressive ruralism and bioregional interdependence in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills. Our work: (1) exposes the paradox of poverty within resource-rich rural environments; (2) proposes an approach to rural sustainability that takes into account urban-hinterland relationships; and (3) politicizes progressive ruralism through coalition-build- ing, networking, advocacy planning, research, educa- tion, cultural events and multimedia communication.

Mainstream scholarship advocating sustainability at a city-region scale focuses almost entirely on metropolitan regions, thereby missing important aspects of urban– rural linkages that are essential to sustainability. Our concept of progressive ruralism, outlined here, addresses this oversight. Progressive ruralism is a globally-minded bioregional framework for promoting sustainability that interrelates rural and urban challenges and advocates a land ethic that values community, diversity and justice.

Expose: The Impoverishment of Rural Wealth

The Sierra Nevada Region is a contiguous mountain range that extends 400 miles along the eastern flank of California and the western tip of Nevada. It contains one of the world’s greatest concentrations of natural resources and biological diversity. The Sierras con- stitutes roughly one-quarter of California’s land area, including habitat for two-thirds of the state’s bird and mammal species and forests that provide between one-third and one-half of the state’s annual timber supply. The Sierra’s watersheds provide 65 percent of the state’s developed water supply—the great bulk of which is used outside of the region for residen- tial, agricultural and environmental purposes. The region is home to approximately 600,000 people in 212 communities dependent on natural resources for jobs in forestry, agriculture, ranching and tourism.

Today, many Sierra Nevada communities face difficulties including the threat of catastrophic wildfire, unhealthy forest ecosystems, degraded watersheds, decline of family farming, loss of rural cultural heritage, aging populations and high levels of unemployment. We refer to this condition as the impoverishment of rural wealth—where wealth includes social capital as well as living and non-living natural resources. This is not an uncommon situation. In rural areas and hinterlands around the world the abundance of wealth, including human ingenuity and labor power, is often exploited in ways that generate poverty and environmental degradation as well as affluence. Conditions in rural areas challenge us to re-value how we understand, measure and utilize wealth, its stocks and flows. The Carnegie UK Trust

Keith Pezzoli is the director of field research and a senior lecturer in urban and regional planning at the University of California San Diego. He also directs the Global Action Research Center (The Global ARC).

Kerry Williams lives in Amador County, California, where he promotes progressive ruralism by drawing together his career experience in affordable housing, community development and social and human services.

Sean Kriletich is founder and director of Manzanita Ridge, a 33-acre research-education facility and permac- ulture farm located in Amador County. He also works for the University of California Cooperative Extension.

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captures this point well in its 2009 Manifesto for Rural Communities:

“In an increasingly fragile world, rural areas should be recognized as resource rich; places where assets are stewarded for the nation as a whole. After decades where rural areas have just been seen as hinter- lands to large urban areas and city regions, this imperative places rural communities at the heart of policy- making for the nation as a whole.”

Amador and Calaveras Counties, where two of the co-authors (Williams and Kriletich) live and work, is typical of the problems fac- ing rural America. Together these two counties comprise over one million acres south of the Lake Tahoe basin including large tracts of public lands (e.g., Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and California State Parks) and private industrial forests and other juris- dictions. Other than remnants of the cattle industry, the agriculture tradition barely survives in Amador County. A growing number of families and youth have to leave to find jobs and housing. The only population increase is from in-mi- gration of older people with discre- tionary incomes to spend playing golf, drinking wine and making purchases in boutique shops and upscale restaurants. The increasingly popular bourgeois vineyard, the county’s largest “agricultural” activ- ity, gets marketing support from the Chamber of Commerce for attract- ing much needed revenue through “agri-tourism.” Meanwhile, the food production and distribution system is failing to provide healthy food to lower income groups. Very few

families participate in the local food system that operates the farmers market and the food-buying clubs. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups have limited eco- nomic resources to use for market- ing and therefore have limited reach.

The emergence of New Ruralism, which attempts to unite the con- cepts of smart growth and sustain- able agriculture, indicates that city dwellers are beginning to think critically about the impacts of urban encroachment into rural lands. But New Ruralism does not challenge the values, political economy or institutions at the root of unsustain- ability. New Ruralism might even lead to a gentrifying commodifica- tion of landscapes at the urban-rural edge (e.g., by packaging the rural imaginary as a nostalgic commod- ity for consumption by privileged tourists, or as a site for wealthy urban refugees). We need a coun- tervailing vision to challenge the pervasive metro-centric bias that takes the hinterland for granted.

Propose: Permaculture and Progressive Ruralism

The economic difficulties facing rural areas, including the lackluster performance of markets to generate new jobs, means that community- based approaches to sustainability will become increasingly important (this includes community-owned food distribution systems, com- munity-owned renewable energy generation, community gardens, community-owned trucking). In this section we propose using Manzanita Ridge as an exem-

Manzanita Ridge, Amador County, Sierra

Nevada Foothills, California

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plary model of community-based progressive ruralism in action.

Sean Kriletich is the founder and steward of Manzanita Ridge, a 33-acre research and community education resource center and farm located in Amador County. The goal of the ridge is to foster regional interdependence through education on and research into sus- tainable interconnected systems.

1� Progressive PlaNNiNg

To reach this goal, Manzanita Ridge began with research about how to produce food with locally available resources. Manzanita Ridge, a steep- sided ridgetop not well suited for cultivating fruits and vegetables, was turned into a small permaculture farm/research and education facility. A standard approach to this situation would have dictated removal of all of the native forest and application of tons of imported topsoil. Instead, over a five-year period, the garden area was selectively cleared, leaving 30 percent of the oak-dominated brushland intact. During this period, topsoil depth was increased by a factor of twenty, primarily through in situ composting of forest wastes and no-till practices. As of 2010, just five years into the project, this 1.5 acre garden and orchard already produces over 12,000 pounds of nutritious marketable food each year. Significantly, this food production is accomplished using only local resources (from less than ten miles away) and with human labor equiva- lent to one full-time person. At the same time Sean and his partner have learned to produce 90 percent of their own dietary needs from the ridge by working with animals and eating acorns, the native nuts.

The methods practiced at Manzanita Ridge are often referred to as per- maculture, a philosophy and practi- cal approach to sustainable land use, agriculture and the design of human settlements that emulates ecological and biological systems as models for meeting human needs (e.g., composting organic waste as a way of creating soil; using con- structed wetlands to treat sewage). Permaculture can be applied across

scales, from a single building and its immediate landscape to a neigh- borhood, farm and bioregion.

Manzanita Ridge’s successful re- sults to date show that community- scale permaculture is viable, but this is only the first step in foster- ing sustainable rural development and regional interdependence.

Politicize: Connecting the Dots and Scaling Out

Raising awareness within the larger community of our own power to sustainably provide for our- selves through a planned system of regional interdependence is the next step in scaling up the work of Manzanita Ridge. Debunking long-standing myths regarding ag- riculture, economics and the media by pointing out the global yet lo- calized successes of permaculture and progressive ruralism, of which Manzanita Ridge is one example, is critical to this education work.

Our approach to this work is based on what we call “solution-based activism,” i.e., identifying problems and their root causes but then fo- cusing on solutions, not problems. Focusing on solutions is especially important when talking to/working with people of varying political per- suasions because it tends to bring us to a common ground of what is possible and positive for all involved. To accomplish this we continue to deepen inter-connections with lo- cal and regional communities and national and global networks. We encourage urban and rural children and adults to come and interact with

Manzanita ridge practices permaculture—

a philosophy and practical approach to sustainable land use, agriculture and the design of human

settlements that emulates ecological

and biological systems as models for meeting human

needs. For example, composting organic waste as a way of

creating soil and using constructed wetlands

to treat sewage.

Drip watering system

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Manzanita Ridge to learn and take lessons back to their communities. At the same time we work with our community to educate and build a sustainable agri-economic system. Results already include a farm- ers market in Jackson, California, a year-round multi-farm CSA and implementation of progressive agri- culture zoning in Calaveras County. We believe in the power of com- munity communication and to this end work towards the creation of local community media outlets. A full-power, non-commercial edu- cational FM station, KBLU, will soon be operating and will serve to multiply regional grassroots ef- forts to build bioregional interde- pendence. In this politicizing phase Sean has also taken a position with the University of California (UC) Cooperative Extension in order to achieve wider influence in the community by “putting the tech- nical in the service of the just,” to use Peter Marcuse’s words.

Both Manzanita Ridge and the local UC Cooperative Extension par- ticipate in the Amador-Calaveras Consensus Group (ACCG), which has a holistic connect-the-dots ap- proach to dealing with the danger of catastrophic wildfire, high un- employment, threats to watersheds, waste of forest material, air quality impacts, renewable energy genera- tion and Native American Heritage sites. The range of ACCG par- ticipants, which include public land managers, state-level authorities, forestry practitioners and contrac- tors and job training and environ- mental non-profits, makes it an organization capable of scaling out the innovative work taking place in

the Sierra Nevada foothills, focus- ing on job creation, healthy food systems, fire-safe communities, forest restoration and a renewed local economy within the Sierra’s critically important watersheds.

Looking to the Future

With the aim of joining forces with others locally, regionally and globally through knowledge-networking and solution-based activism that links rural and urban-metro sustainability in a new bioregional progressivism for the 21st century, all three co- authors are involved in building The Global Action Research Center (The Global ARC). The Global ARC provides network access and infrastructure of connectivity for rural and urban initiatives (http:// theglobalarc.org) and is creating a host of tools, including an online Regional Workbench for mapping and spatial analysis, a sustainability solutions database, a global knowledge commons for planning, multimedia archives and social networking applications for science communications. The Global ARC, together with UC San Diego’s new Center for Global Justice, is organizing a food justice summit that will focus on Manzanita Ridge and related projects (Spring 2011).

Significant cultural, political and economic obstacles thwart the progress of those of us working to- wards bioregional interdependence. One of the more serious concerns is the rising power of the property rights movement, eroding the insti- tutional capacity of progressives to plan for the larger common good.

Progressive ruralists are faced with the challenges of re-framing and re-imagining solutions to problems in ways that can capture popular support and garner resources not just in the rural foothills but in the urban areas as well. This is why we emphasize the importance of a pro- gressive ruralism that is place-based but also cognizant of urban-hinter- land interdependencies and global- ization. Rural communities have a vital role to play in developing and managing sustainable socio-ecologi- cal systems at a bioregional scale.

Leaders of the progressive ruralist movement can frame their value- added contributions in a larger context that speaks to pressing lo- cal as well as regional and global challenges—for example, renew- able energy, carbon sequestration and climate change, foodsheds and food justice, watersheds and water supply/quality, working landscapes and jobs, conservation of rural com- mons and biodiversity and culture change and a new land ethic for the 21st century. As Gottlieb and Joshi note in their 2010 book Food Justice, community-based struggles seeking food justice (where, what and how we eat) have “the potential to link different kinds of advocates, including those concerned with health, the environment, food qual- ity, globalization, workers’ rights and working conditions, access to fresh and affordable food and more sustainable land use.” P2