I live in Courtenay in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island. I write a lot about living in this small city in this rural context. It's where I was born, and where I've lived most of my 50 years. I love this place – the rural part of it, the small city part of it, and that it's not too far from the great urban experience of Vancouver. I am very fortunate to live with such a rich diversity of landscapes and social configurations close to hand. But every once in a while I'm reminded that what I see as a continuum – from deep rural to deep urban – is for others as a great divide: the city on one side, the country on the other.
Two romances...
There is a romance to rurality. Give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above. Give me a ride-on mower and chainsaw to manage it – and a four-wheel drive pickup to drive to town in. Above all, do not fence me in with the language of the town or the city or with pretty words about "protecting the environment" at the expense of my livelihood (and with it, by the way, your urban standard of living).
On the urban side, the romance is about the pastoral idyll or untouched wilderness. All that open land and starry skies stuff is there to be enjoyed for its own sake – an aesthetic respite from urban life, and as the source of ecological services (water, air) that make sustain our human settlements. I'll hug the trees – and protect the future of your kids and mine, rural and urban.
Romance and reality
These are generalizations. But living in rural BC does mean living with logging, mining, the mess and dirt and smell of farming. But this dirt isn't a smudge on the rural romance; it's "honest dirt," the mess and muck of producing livelihoods for families and wealth for the whole province, urban and rural.
We may not like how ugly and destructive our rural resource extraction practices can be, but our communities – urban as well as rural – are still hugely dependent on them. And here’s the lovely paradox or conundrum: as city dwellers, we want our high standard of living, but many of us also want to "protect" the beauty of the hinterland; and all of us have an interest in sustaining the natural systems that provide clean air, water, and mitigate the impact of climate change.
A shared – but complicated – romance?
I think there’s been some closing of the rural/urban divide in recent years. The romances haven’t changed; but we’ve started a new – and complicated one – built on food.
In the past urban dwellers complained about the odour of their ag neighbours. Nowadays there’s a certain cachet in being reminded of food production in the neighbourhood. The new "foodism" – a combination of concerns about "food security," "food sustainability," health, and gourmandism – is making a difference.
George Penfold, a friend of mine, a former Comox Valley resident, and currently BC’s Mr. Rural Community Economic Development at Selkirk College, has some interesting things to say about our recent interest in food. He's written on these topics, in May of this year and in September 2009 for a blog I edit and mange for the Real Estate Foundation of BC. What George says isn't always that easy to stomach. I may have grown up in a rural context and worked on farms as a young man, but today I’m loving and living a much more urban foodie life.
George's comments are echoed by people like Vancouver Island ag consultant Gary Rolston. I interviewed Gary in 2009 about "food sustainability and the Comox Valley." Gary suggested that our recent ag love affair is a bit shakey. For one thing, locals who support increased local food production are, by and large, entirely unaware of what this will mean for demand on our already taxed water resources. We also have an over-developed imagination when it comes to how much food can be realistically produced. As George’s withering comments on "food self-reliance" make clear, we will always be trading for many staples – unless we dramatically change our eating habits.
George sees several forces at play here: continued high dependence on food production that is subsidized by (short term cheap) fossil fuels, (short term) cheap access to land and water, a romantic and boutique approach to food purchasing, and a standard of living that supports the latter and is built on the former. The forces are at play; they may soon - as with Gary's water issue - be in conflict.
It's a good thing to support farmers' markets and local food producers; but this really doesn't get to the heart of what ails our agricultural economy. And as George and Gary's insights suggest, a lot of our new-found urban foodism is a cleansed urban romanticist version of what food production is really about. .
Nevertheless, I still believe that foodism is a bridge between urban and rural ways of looking at the land and our communities. Contact with food producers is opening our eyes (somewhat) to the messiness of production and rural life. There is an exoticism to this. But even exoticism can serve a purpose: it may be how we start to appreciate the experience of rural food producers – and their experiences as loggers, miners, etc. In short, food becomes a doorway to an interested rural/urban conversation, something that wasn't there a generation ago.
Getting visible
The rural/urban divide is a problem of conflicting romantic stories about what "rural" means. It's also a problem of invisibility. Our busy and self-contained town and city lives don't have much of a view of the rural areas on which we depend for food, fresh water, our ecological systems of support, not to mention the resource industries that support us financially. Typically, our trips into rural areas are about recreational or spiritual retreat: we want and see only the pastoral idyll that gives nourishment; we ignore or reject the messiness.
People from outside the city are often also afflicted with a blindness – not to urban ugliness, but to the many good things that cities and urban neighbourhoods have to teach us about living together and about sustainability. Our shared romance with food is creating an opportunity to actually see a richer, more complicated relationship between urban and rural realities. If we're serious about the future of our communities – urban and rural – we need to be looking for and appreciating this richness in each other's realities and in each other's romances.
30 June 2010
Note:
A version of this article was published here by the Real Estate Foundation of BC at CITinfoResource.com.
(cc) hanspetermeyer.ca / 2010. I encourage the reproduction of articles on this website non-profit educational purposes. Please notify me of all reproductions, including in-house (ie. photocopied) uses.
Hi Hans
ReplyDeleteWorking on blog design and testing ability to comments. Do you moderate all comments?
Tom
Yes Tom, I moderate all comments here.
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