Cool Planet

By Jennifer Andrews,

Campus Program Manager,

Clean Air-Cool Planet

Lately, I feel as though my personal and professional lives are simultaneously being winnowed down to a singular point of focus, and that focus is food.  More specifically, it’s the production, distribution, preservation, preparation and disposal of food.

On weekends and evenings, I am immersed in my role as chair of an area committee focused on local food and sustainable agriculture.  Our big project this spring (and summer, and fall, and probably winter!) is getting a community garden off the ground.

Community gardens are a trend that is taking off nationally, and while I wouldn’t want to be accused of being merely trendy, it’s an exciting challenge to be part of that phenomenon.  I’ve never thought so much about what it means to produce quantities of food locally, and am learning an awful lot about the trade-offs in (human) energy and time and resources that may be embedded in the attractive notion (some might suggest, increasing necessity) of local self-reliance.

So that’s my life “off the clock” (if you throw in, of course, just about enough time to procure and prepare food for my own family in between committee meetings and garden site visits); during office hours, I’ve been heading up a new initiative to create and pilot a CA-CP tool that extends the boundaries of our widely used Campus Carbon Calculator™.

Grounded in recommendations made by Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future after a thorough literature review, the new CA-CP tool will give institutions a way to gauge the impact of their dining services.  In order to facilitate the creation of said tool, I spend my days thinking and talking about every aspect of the dining service product life cycle—in other words, studying the business (and sociology!) of food and food systems.

So you could say I’m currently, well, rooted in a consideration of agriculture, food, and climate change—and that preoccupation may be part of why, at the New England Board of Higher Education’s Greening the Campus conference in Boston two weeks ago, none of the presentations piqued my interest as much as that given by Elaine Clark from the University of Maine as part of a panel on “The Business Case for Sustainability.” Clark is the Executive Director of Facilities, Real Estate & Planning at UMaine, which means she would of course be a natural, even predictable, choice to speak on “the business case.”  Her subject, though, was less predictable in the context of such a panel: “Agriculture at the University of Maine.”

Ms. Clark’s consideration of a broader business case—that of agriculture’s contribution to the region, and UMaine’s contribution to agriculture—was of utmost relevance.  The talk focused on the aforementioned concept of local self-reliance and the more basic one of economic output, both supported by UMaine’s cooperative extension; education regarding sustainable agriculture, and agricultural adaptation strategies; and research related to advanced biofuel technologies.  I believe all of these areas will only increase in importance as we get further down the paths of climate and economic disruption we are currently traveling.

That the University of Maine recognizes their agricultural education and research programs as important aspects of both their overall climate leadership and their own “business case” for such leadership is a testament to the power of colleges and universities to lead by example (though of course, many are doing so with their dining services as in other arenas).  It points to the way the education and research missions of universities, often touted as helping to solve the climate problem in very general terms, can in fact make very specific, very local, very vital contributions that are about concrete dollars and cents. And about real people with real livelihoods.

And about community gardens like the one I hope will feed my family, friends and neighbors this summer.  I’m counting on those UMaine (and UNH) extension agents to help us ensure that a good majority of the twenty flats of seedlings on my sunporch right now make it to maturity to be harvested from that community garden and distributed to those in need in our town.

I’m hopeful, too, that some of the agricultural research undertaken by UMaine can inform the life-cycle analysis tool we are creating at CA-CP—which could in turn inform the greening of the global food-supply chain.  Under the circumstances, it seems my obsession with food is likely to continue through the summer and far beyond.

Explore posts in the same categories: Food, Gardening/horticulture

This entry was posted on May 21, 2009 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Food, Gardening/horticulture. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: agriculture, community garden, food and climate, food sharing, foodprint, garden, locally grown, victory garden

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