Ah summer. The birds are back, the bees are back, the birds and the bees are back - life thrives. Even New York City is in the middle of its annual mating dance where council members, the Mayor and his jester (technically the same position in this administration) waggle their arms at each other and discuss how to get rid of taxpayer dollars left over from the Macy's explosion party. Truly, love is in the air.
Today, my community garden received a request. This year's ritual has attracted a new competitor, a group of tax-payers/city-employees/ "protestors" (the plebescite? Can I use that word?) have occupied the space outside City Hall and are demanding at least $1 billion reduction in Police funding (yes, please!). While staying on site, these people are generating food scraps and reached out to the garden to ask if we could accept their compost. Because we are not the City of New York and still understand that composting is an essential service that can be done safely and while maintaining social distance, the answer is yes, we can, but we also have concerns about their ability to sort food before delivery.
As some background, one of the challenges of implementing any sort of organics collection program is educaitng the people who use the service as to what can and cannot go into the collection bin. Some of you may have heard of places that don't compost meat and dairy; others may be used to tossing everything into a bin that is picked up and taken to a facility that can break down that material. Being on the smaller side, our garden requires that anyone who sends us their food scraps keep meat and dairy out of the bins.
Technically, someone could still can send us things that we can't compost, but if they do, we need to go through it and pick it out by hand. Today I picked out an aluminum can from our compost collection site (editors note: aluminum is not recyclable). That said, the Occupy City Hall group schedules regular lessons to educate the crowd on a variety of subject matters; it wouldn't be hard create a quick lesson and explain how we process compost and why and then arrange a service to pick up from the site and process at our garden.
Which leads me to my next question: Why is New York City so laughably bad at anything involving community building? I mean, really, we're terrible at it. We have a great library for research, yes, but not so much for organizing. Branch libraries scramble for funding. Community gardens struggle to maintain their space as developers eye their lots. After thinking about it for a bit, I'm starting to suspect no one powerful in New York City really wants strong communities.
Real estate developers don't; tightly networked communities can organize against new development that doesn't serve existing needs in the community. Bad for business. Organize too much and communities might start discussing the fact that 25% percent of New Yorkers skipped their rent in May - if it's 1 out of 4 people who aren't paying rent, why not make it 1 out of 3? Bad for management companies. Organize too much and vacant lots that are being held while real estate companies wait for property to appreciate might start turning into used parks. Bad all around.
I suppose there are other forces in New York City, but I'll let you stretch your imagination to ask yourself if they would be in support of stronger, more self-sufficient communities.
Self sufficiency is dangerous, but fear not, New York City is far from there. We import our food. We export our sewage sludge for landfills. We borrow renewable energy from Hydropower upstate or in Canada, and what we can't import there, we borrow in the form of carbon that we will ask future generations to pay off. We depend on a network of others who provide us with our needs, and hoo-boy do those others make bank off our city. Which is only fair, given New York's role in extracting the nation's wealth to funnel into its own real estate industry and back to government.
Am I proposing a conspiracy theory* in which the power dealers of New York City sit around each year and discuss how to keep more sufficient communities from forming?
*alternate vocabulary = "coherent explanation"
Yes. But it doesn't look all that bad. It looks like regular city government, chugging along and spending money on programs that don't have the support of the communities in which they exist. I hope I'm wrong. I hope this city realizes that investing in communities saves resources in the long term as the needs of the communities decrease. Compost is a great example because it's so simple - a community that composts has the ability to produce more of its food, reducing the costs of inputs, and reduces its waste, reducing the costs of landfills. For the price of one functioning outreach program, we save money. I chose to speak about compost because it's what I know, but I don't think we're in a unique situation; other community based programs can likely share similar examples.
Hopefully, new voices asking for these changes will get what they want. It seems simpler, to me. Maybe we can ask Occam what he would do.
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