The Simple Revolution

This past week I spent spring break in Sacramento working with an organization that is trying to ignite a revolution. It is a revolution that affects politics, culture, and our sense of community, and it takes us back to our roots. I’m talking about the local food revolution, which is picking up in cities across the nation, but particularly on the Pacific coast. Their ideas are radical, but far from new, and challenge the core values of what America has become, while speaking to our innermost humanity.

Ubuntu Green was founded last year, and has already received funding to carry out their mission of localizing food production. Working in low-income areas, they provide the service of building free home gardens for anyone who is willing to accept. Their plan is simple: target specific neighborhoods, teaching the skills needed to grow food, encourage inter-community dialogue to spread the knowledge, and finally to create a sustainable source of fruits, vegetables, and herbs that bypass the corporate food structure. They’re bringing it back home in the most basic sense, and they’re having fun doing it too.

The staff of Ubuntu is filled with energy, probably because they understand the importance of what they are hoping to accomplish. There is an easy charm in them that comes from working with the growing process that is hard to describe. I guess you could say they’re down to earth, literally. This is still a young organization, but already they have made an impact on their community. This revolution can only happen at local levels, and can be fueled by increased social communication technology and word of mouth. Ubuntu is hopefully the first of many like it, paving the way to deconstruct the food production mess we have gotten ourselves in over the last 60 years.

This highlights something seriously wrong with our culture. With more money than any other country (well, not anymore) and the best self-proclaimed inventiveness of any people, we still have to be encouraged to take care of our land and get to know our neighbors. Our culture promotes chasing high-end salaries and vacationing in third-world countries, but for how long can that really sustain happiness? Ubuntu showed me that taking care of the simple things is the quickest way to boost self-esteem and find meaning in life. Instead of chasing fantasy narratives of corporate escalation, take care of the land you live on and meet the people who live around you. There is nothing more important that being a good human being. Everything else is secondary.

-Sean McEvoy