City-Grown Food
Novella Carpenter rents the top floor of a two-story house painted pink, where she enjoys pastoral farm life and the rich diversity of urban living. She’s shared her porch with baby chicks, turkeys, ducks, bunnies; she milks her Nigerian Dwarf goats in the pantry; and they scamper up and down the green staircase to her back door. (She explains that goats, instinctively on the watch for predators, like to survey the scene from a high place.)

Novella’s goats are pets; they’re milked once in the morning and have the rest of the day for play and leisure. The kids stay with their moms. One adolescent goat, nearly as big as her mom, abandoned any pretense at dignity to get down on her knees for a snack of milk — until the youngster butted hard, and mom took off.

Novella’s book Farm City tells how she first began farming on a vacant lot next to her apartment. She planted a garden, and acquired bees for pollination and honey. Today, chickens roam freely, pecking at delicious treats among the straw. Fuzzy bunnies sleep away afternoon heat. Novella loves and tenderly cares for her animals — each is valued as an individual personality. But even as she works hard to give her animals good lives, Novella conscientiously plans a good death for any pig, chicken, turkey, duck, or rabbit that is to become food.

When piglets grew into 300 pounders, Novella’s affection cooled slightly, perhaps because the effort to feed them was so exhausting. These immense eating machines required vast infusions of food which she scrounged from dumpsters of pricey restaurants. She hauled bushels of good if slightly wilted gourmet veggies, fish guts, and other delicacies. Still the immense animals tugged at Novella’s shirt tails, as if trying to pull her down as an addition to the proffered feasts.

No hobby farmer, Novella’s crops and livestock are a major portion of her family’s food; plus she donates a some to charitable organizations, and shares with friends and neighbors — many from countries where urban farming is normal.

Farm City details her joys and difficulties as a novice urban farmer at Ghost Town Farm, named for the many abandoned buildings in her part of Oakland, California. Besides Novella’s experiments in animal husbandry, the book tells of her delight in cooking fresh farm food. After recounting the high drama of the pigs’ slaughter, Novella studied traditional meat curing and house made charcuterie, with the chef of a tony Berkeley restaurant.

On a sunny August day I visited Ghost Town Farm, sampled goat cheese Novella made, olives she cured, and a tomato she grew using the dry-gulch method, in compost enriched by cleanup after the farm animals. The tomato was a flavorsome gem, not the watery-tasting sort usually sold in markets.

Now a touring speaker and teacher, Novella plans a second book of traditional farming how-tos forgotten by most urban dwellers today. It’s Novella’s goal to inspire a new generation of urban farmers, to enjoy simultaneously the rich resources of cities with the hands-on intimacy and skill of producing homegrown food: to consume, to share, to add layers of resilience to city living.

Novell writes a blog, click here; and in the video below she gives her view of the ethics of raising “edible pets.” Not for everyone, she is advocating a responsible, humane path for those who choose, or need, a carnivorous diet. Please skip this video if you find the subject distressful.

Mary Ruwart’s Healing Our World in An Age of Aggression is a gift to every person on the planet. With a loving heart and a scientist’s (Ph.D., biophysics) unflinching analysis, she dissects destructive human behavior and finds one common denominator: and one deceptively simple but elegant solution to nullify it — peaceably and practicably.

In Part One Ruwart examines the confusion of private and public morality. She uses everyday examples and a rich harvest of quotes; among them, “…slavery, apartheid, Stalinist, Nazi, Maoist purges were all legal. Clearly legality alone cannot be the talisman of moral people.” – Walter Williams, Economist.

Ruwart shows why the near-universal belief in force of law cannot create a world of peace and plenty, but always backfires and destroys both. She explains why a nation’s prosperity arises from “the self-determined thoughts and creativity of its populace,” not from its government.

“Amnesty International’s list of human rights abuses shows a pattern where those nations with the least respect for human rights are also the poorest. By contrast those with the greatest respect for human rights tend to be the richest.” — Williams

America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights sparked a magnificent leap of liberty that allowed the highest level of freedom and prosperity of any country. But colonial America was tainted by a culture of aggression. Even when slavery was outlawed, the predilection for aggression continued, gradually undermining the founding principles, until today liberty is threatened by an aggressive government and the culture that supports it.

In Part Two, Ruwart documents how nations create poverty in a world of plenty. She shows the harmful consequences of aggression: to health and the environment; destruction of jobs, businesses, currencies, economies; promotion of monopolies and cartels with transfer of wealth to a ruling elite; degradation of education and morals by indoctrination of unthinking allegiance to the State.

Ruwart gives detailed examples of ways a peaceful culture can remove incentives for crime, without becoming a police state where we lose not only peace but all rights. “The first step in putting an end to aggression is to stop teaching it by example.”

Part Four shows how the cost of criminality outweighs the cost of productivity when there are unlimited opportunities; and why jailing wrongdoers accomplishes nothing positive. Instead, a system in which aggressors must right their wrongs takes the profit out of crime, and teaches self respect and respect for others. And Ruwart gives practical solutions for a society to police aggressors without using aggression.

art to the right, www.umintsuru.com
In Part Five, she looks at the principle of non-aggression applied to the world, addressing environmental resources, peace, respect and maximum tolerance for diversity. Kindall and Louw, nominated three times for the Nobel peace prize and co-authors of After Apartheid, penned the forward to Ruwart’s book.

She tells of their study which found that Switzerland is the nation that best exemplifies the ideals of non-aggression, and how that country achieved the distinction. She also lists international organizations working for those ideals.
Photo left, www.johnehrenfeld.com
Ruwart ends her book with the vision of our world as a joint creation. She urges each reader to identify an aspect of non-aggression appropriate to his/her talents, and to offer this as “a gift to yourself and others,” for healing our world and making it a better place for all.

Still little-known but growing in influence, Healing Our World has been reprinted three times. Due to small print runs, it’s $25 new at Amazon, but they offer it used at lower cost. The wisdom in this book can illuminate your life – read it as an investment in your future and the future of the world.