“Right smack dab in the middle of town/

I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof/

Up on the roof. . .Up on the roof. . .”

-The Drifters

Rooftop farm at the Uncommon Ground restaurant in Chicago, IL.

Along with the cultivation of vacant lots, rooftops represent the single greatest opportunity for expanding urban food production.  This is particularly true in dense urban cores, where vacant land is less available and adequate light for ground-level food growing is limited by the shade of tall buildings and street trees.  Most urban roofs can support some container growing and, with some engineering assistance, many roofs can actually support significant food production capacity.  The following survey of rooftop food-growing in Philadelphia and elsewhere reveals some of the possibilities.

ROOFTOP FARMING

The potential for rooftop food production in cities is tremendous.  GIS data from PASDA reveals that there are 162,000 buildings in Philadelphia with a total rooftop area of over 16,000 acres.  According to Peleg Kremer, who is completing a dissertation on food production in the city, if even 0.5% of this area were adapted for food production, it would “exceed all the urban farms and community gardens currently in use”.  New York Sun Works has estimated that there are 14,000 acres of unshaded rooftops in NYC that could feed up to 20 million people if converted to hydroponic food production.  I suspect that their estimate doesn’t account for the actual suitability of the roofs for that usage, but even a small percentage would result in a very impactful increase in urban food self-sufficiency.  Gotham Greens recently won first prize in New York’s Green Business Competition and is currently in the process of constructing a 12,000 SF hydroponic rooftop farm that is expected to produce 30 tons of fruit and vegetables a year.  To a Permaculturist, of course, hydroponic systems scream out for polycultures with accompanying fish production.

The Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn, NY.

Rooftop food growing needn’t be as expensive or energy-intensive as Gotham Greens’ 1.4 million dollar venture.  It can be as simple as placing a few planters or containers on your roof.  Last year I assisted a family in setting up a container garden on top of their garage.  Although the property did include a small backyard, it was too shady for vegetable production- a very common problem in the city.  We set up a series of containers all along the load-bearing walls, with a total combined planting area of around 60 SF watered by a drip irrigation system on an automated timer.  The roof was planted with a variety of vegetables and herbs and even a couple dwarf blueberry bushes.  The whole installation was completed for no more than a couple hundred dollars in materials costs.  Although it is recommended to consult with an engineer before any rooftop installation, most roofs can handle a minor addition of weight in the form of a few planters.

The Philadelphia Rooftop Farm (PRooF) partnered with the Community Design Collaborative (CDC) this year to explore the possibility of farming a diverse assortment of residential roofs in the city.  The idea being pursued by PRooF is the conversion of otherwise wasted residential roof space into food production, with the homeowners receiving a share of the produce and the rest being either sold or donated to emergency food services.  The CDC’s team of architects, engineers, and designers created a detailed report on all aspects of the project’s feasibility.    This included a design for a prototype self-watering container constructed from corrugated polypropylene boxes (available commercial versions are prohibitively expensive for a project of scale).  It also analyzed 10 proposed residential roofs in the city and found that rowhomes, which comprise a majority of Philadelphia housing stock, have much greater potential for rooftop production than twins or singles.  The report includes several alternate designs for residential rooftop farming, employing both containers on the roof and beds built into roof decks straddling party walls.

Productive rowhouse rooftop garden created by PRooF founder.

My overall conclusion from reading the CDC’s report for PRooF is that the costs and difficult logistics of such diffuse production are likely prohibitive for a commercial or even non-profit venture as proposed.   However, the detailed report should be useful for homeowners looking to produce on their own roofs, for whom legal and accessibility issues are less of a challenge.  Additionally, the strategy can and should be easily adapted from single family homes to use on larger structures, like commercial, industrial, and apartment buildings.  Such are more frequently over-engineered for rooftop capacity, often have much easier existing roof access, and present a more efficient concentration of larger production space.  NYC already features two such rooftop farms of over an acre in size, the Eagle Street Farm in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Grange Farm in Queens.  Milwaukee is the home of Community Growers, the world’s first rooftop CSA.  There is certainly great potential for this in Philadelphia. Besides all the buildings in use, the city also features the low-hanging fruit of more than 700 abandoned factories.  These relics of the Philadelphia’s industrial past are begging to be re-imagined with rooftop farms and floors of aquaculture, mushroom, and vermicompost production, perhaps combined with mix-use residential, artistic, and commercial loft space.

The roof of Philadelphia's Noble restuarant.

ROOF-TO-RESTAURANT

It is a natural fit for restaurants interested in the local food movement to begin to enhance their cuisine with produce from gardens located above their patrons’ heads.  Chicago’s Uncommon Ground restaurant supplies their kitchen from a half-acre mini-farm on its roof, the first ever certified organic rooftop farm.  Although the produce grown there represents only a fraction of the total used in the kitchen, it is not an insignificant contribution and has generated considerable interest and awareness with the public.

Grace Wicks, a Philadelphia garden designer, has been developing rooftop food production with a series of restaurants in Center City.  I visited a couple of the roofs with her earlier this fall.  If you look up from the dining area at Noble, you can see some of the garden beds framed in the skylights.  The roof features 3 long herb beds of approximately 15 feet by 2 feet, each with a different theme: lemon (lemon grass, lemon verbena, lemon balm, etc), herbes-de-provence, and edible flowers (calendula, borage, nasturtiums, etc).  There are also a series of individual containers in which tomatoes, basil, and a variety of peppers are grown.  The garden is tended by the cook staff and its produce is incorporated into the menu.  Once a month the restaurant hosts a small private rooftop dinner with a special menu created by the head chef based upon the flavors of the roof.

Wicks has also worked with the 4 Seasons, a large luxury hotel featuring the fine dining Fountain Restaurant.  The engineering department at the hotel has made some interesting strides towards sustainability, including using co-generation from its natural gas heating to provide 30% of the building’s total electricity use.  A hotel-wide composting program was instituted in 2007 and last year their own compost filled a series of raised beds on the ample roof of the building.  Besides a wide variety of herbs and vegetables, the roof plantings include strawberries, blueberries, and hardy kiwi vines.  The head chef is also the head gardener and works the produce into restaurant specials (rooftop blueberry pancakes, sky salad, etc).

Up on the roof at the Four Seasons hotel.

THE ENGINEERED APPROACH

New buildings can be engineered to hold additional rooftop weight, thereby allowing a significant increase in urban food production by moving it overhead.  I recently had the pleasure of designing rooftop gardens for Sheldon Crossing, a new platinum-LEED townhouse development in the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia.  In addition to geothermal heating, solar panels, and other green features, the homes were engineered to support the weight of 15” of soil.  This is enough depth for genuine gardens, including a native grass lawn, perennials, shrubs, and even small trees.  I created 15 alternate plans for the site, varying from entirely edible landscapes to Japanese gardens to modern minimalist styles.  Unfortunately LEED standards credit only all-native plantings and this limitation was imposed on the final plan installed on the show unit.  The final design included a mostly open lawn of native grasses in the front section overlooking the city and a walled stroll garden of native plantings in the back.  The back garden does include a Juneberry (Amelanchier), admired for its ornamental qualities as well as its fruit.  Another 15 units are proposed and I’m hopeful that some of the more edible-intensive designs will be chosen by some of the buyers.  One would also hope that the LEED standards are revised at some point to also recognize the environmental value of edible landscaping.

Rooftop garden at the platinum LEED Sheldon Crossing.

Interestingly, Philadelphia also features a remarkable historic rooftop garden.  Architect Clarence Siegel designed the Garden Court Plaza in the late 1920’s.  Four tall, opulent towers were intended, connected by a large parking garage with a private park for residents on the roof.  Only one of the towers and the parking garage were completed when construction was halted by the stock crash in 1929.  I recently visited the rooftop park with a friend who lives in the tower and one can imagine it as it was, with wide lawns, trees, gardens, and an ornate central pond.  The roof totals more than an acre in size and appears to have at least 18” of soil.  A couple dozen of the residents currently grow vegetables and flowers in garden plots on the roof, but it is primarily used for cookouts, soccer games, and recreation.  A few ornamental cherries remain and ducks visit the pond seasonally.  Certainly there is potential for a great deal of food production there and if this could be engineered in 1929, the possibilities for today seem encouraging.

Historic rooftop park at Philadelphia's Garden Court Plaza.

BEEKEEPING & ROOFTOP LIVESTOCK

Folks have been beekeeping on urban roofs for centuries in Paris, London, and the other capitals of Europe.  Honeybees are the most sensible livestock for urban rooftops.  Cities are actually surprisingly excellent places for honey production because of the diversity of landscape plantings, weeds, and high pollen availability from the preponderance of male trees.  Urban honey indeed fares well in taste tests.  Housing bees on rooftops keeps them largely out of the way of humans- I’ve been beekeeping on a friend’s rooftop in West Philadelphia for a year and no neighbors have noticed or commented.  It seems eminently feasible for cities to be self sufficient in honey production.  Of course, bees also provide many other benefits including free pollination services, wax, and other value-added and medicinal products.  (See my previous article about urban beekeeping for more information).

Harvesting rooftop honey in West Philly!

There’s been an explosion in hobby (small scale, non-commercial) beekeeping in recent years.  The Philadelphia Beekeeper’s Guild was formed about a year ago and membership is now approaching a hundred, the majority of whom are new beekeepers.  In West Philadelphia, a gourmet food shop called ‘Milk & Honey’ started an initiative this year in which customers signed up to host hives in their yards or on their roofs.  Some of the honey was given to the hosts and the rest is sold at the store, with a percentage of profits going to support the Philadelphia Orchard Project.

Honeybees are not the only viable livestock for roofs.  One of my favorite stories from a friend’s recent visit to Havana was of a rooftop meat farm.  Rabbits and guinea pigs (commonly eaten in parts of the Caribbean and Latin America) were being raised on a rooftop, largely fed by grass clippings from a baseball field across the street.  There is also a culture of raising pigeons on urban roofs in NYC and other cities- perhaps these should be considered for potential food production.  Worms for vermicomposting would seem another definite rooftop possibility, although perhaps a better choice for cellars.

WHY ROOFTOP FOOD-GROWING?

The more food production that can be accomplished within cities, the more outlying areas can be retained or restored to the natural ecologies that support us all.  Urban food production results in multiple ecological benefits.  The more locally food is produced, the lesser the environmental impact in terms of transport and the lesser the degradation of nutrient density due to transport time.  What could be more local than the roofs over our heads?  Rooftop food production is also by necessity primarily small scale and intensive, thus avoiding the devastating environmental impacts of industrial, large-scale farming.

Veggies and herbs on a garage roof.

Expanding our food self-sufficiency will become increasingly essential as our present system of global, industrial food production becomes increasingly costly and unsustainable due to increasing demand and declining fossil fuel supplies to support it.  Cities are defined by their population density and this ratio of people to land makes them especially food insecure and vulnerable to future disruptions in supply.

Although cities are unlikely to ever produce all of their own food, significant contributions are certainly possible.  During World War II, urban victory gardens provided 40% of the produce consumed in the United States.  This is not an unreasonable number to attain again.  Following the collapse of the USSR and its sudden plunge into a post-industrial economy, Havana Cuba experienced years of hunger and difficult transition to a more self-sufficient agriculture.  The city now produces the majority of its own food in 30,000 community gardens and numerous rooftop gardens.  Cities across the globe need to undertake a similar transformation before it is forced upon them.  Rooftops are important place to start, as they represent a unique opportunity to expand food production without displacing other important urban functions.

BACK-TO-THE-CITY MOVEMENT?

In an overpopulated world straining the limits of its natural resources and carrying capacity, one can argue that the most important function of cities is to house as many people as densely as possible.  The more people that can be housed in cities, the more outlying areas can be shifted to food production and/or natural(ized) areas that provide the ecological functions that support us all (clean water, clean air, sustainably harvested wood, wild foods, etc).  Dense cities also allow for significant per-capita energy savings in personal transport through walkability, bikeability, and the feasibility of public transit systems.  These energy savings are compounded by reduced heating and cooling costs due to larger building sizes, smaller living spaces, and shared walls.  In fact, as the most densely populated piece of land in the United States, Manhattan ranks dead last in terms of per capita energy consumption.

If you are not a farmer of manager of natural lands, it is probably better for the earth if you live in a dense settlement.  The suburbs are for the most part an ecological disaster or, as James Kunstler proclaims, “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of civilization”.   If we are to attempt to transition to a post peak energy world, I would posit that now is the time for a genuine Back-to-the-City movement.  Such a movement has already begun, as evidenced by the recent revitalization of many urban cores and the slowing and even reversing of urban population loss in many American cities.  These cities need creative urban farmers and thoughtful Permaculture designers to rebuild and renew them and make them as livable and self-sufficient as possible.

Alternate edible landscape design for Sheldon Crossing rooftop.

PERMACULTURE GOES TO WASHINGTON

For the next six months, Permaculture will have a prominent place in the nation’s capital, right under the noses of the 110th Congress.  I’ve just returned from a rare opportunity: designing and installing an edible forest garden on the National Mall, within sight of the Capitol Building.  The installation is a representation of the work of the Philadelphia Orchard Project, which was invited to participate in the US Botanic Garden’s One Planet annual display program.  At its prominent position on the front terrace of USBG, the forest garden is expected to receive more than 1.7 million visitors between May and October.

The multi-layered USBG Orchard with the Capitol Building as backdrop.

ORIGINS OF POP

A city of great needs and great opportunities, Philadelphia is ripe for Permaculture.  It is the poorest major city in the United States, with 25% of the population below the poverty line and 50,000 chronically hungry children.  There are also 40,000 vacant lots in the city, a legacy of 20th Century deindustrialization.   Indeed, some neighborhoods in North, South, and West Philadelphia have more abandoned land than buildings standing.  This combination of vacant land and hungry people makes for some very basic math for a Permaculturist.   The Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP) has introduced a simple solution to address both problems: the transformation of neglected urban spaces into vibrant community orchards.

Edible water garden at the USBG Orchard.

Paul Glover and I arrived in Philadelphia at about the same time in the Fall of 2006.  A long time activist, Paul moved from Ithaca where he’d founded Ithaca Hours, the nation’s most successful alternative currency, and the Ithaca Health Alliance, a health cooperative providing an alternative to our broken health care system.  I moved from Brooklyn where I had developed and managed an urban farm at the historic Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum.  At a forum on sustainable food, I came across Paul’s flyer for the first Philly Orchard Project meeting.  From its humble beginnings as a series of potlucks last winter, POP grew quickly from a vision into an organization.  Paul claimed to have biked down every street in the city, spreading the word about POP to anyone who would speak to him.  From this came a core of volunteers, a functioning non-profit board, and countless requests from communities around the city for orchards to be planted.  A press release resulted in articles in every newspaper in the city, spots on local TV and radio, and even an article in the NY Times.  It was this last article that led directly to the USBG invitation.

Note: Paul Glover now runs Green Jobs Philly (greenjobsphilly.org).

THE POP PROTOCOL

The Philadelphia Orchard Project is intended to function as a highly efficient force for the rapid expansion of permanent, sustainable agriculture in the city.  Essentially, we assist existing community groups to plan and plant orchards on vacant lots and other underutilized spaces in their neighborhoods.  We feel the strength of our strategy lies in its truly bottom up approach and efficient use of existing resources in the form of both community and organizational partners.  POP’s strategy is defined as a series of steps in our protocol document, summarized below:
Original protocol ellipsed here as it no longer accurately represents the operating procedures of POP.  Please visit www.phillyorchards.org for up to date information.

A Philadelphia Orchard Project planting.

PHILADELPHIA: THE NEXT GREAT ORCHARD

POP planted three orchards in the fall of 2007.  In Spring of 2008, we’ve planted seven more and expanded a couple of the earlier plantings.  We’ve planted all over the city in neighborhoods in North, South, West, and Center City Philadelphia, primarily in low-income areas in need of greater food security.   We’ve worked with a wide range of partners: youth-led urban farms, community gardens, elementary schools, a community development corporation, a museum, and a community center.  We have a large waiting list of interested potential community partners in various stages of evaluation for the fall.

An Edible Forest Garden.

The orchards POP plants are edible forest gardens, with diverse plantings designed for relatively low maintenance demands and for both short and long term production.  A wide variety of fruit and nut trees, from pears, plums, and cherries to figs, persimmons, and filhazels.  Understory plantings of berry bushes and multifunctional perennials and groundcovers.  Vines covering walls and fences.  Eventually we would like to expand the scope of the orchards to include other whole cycle features including neighborhood composting facilities, water harvesting, greenhouses, beekeeping, and small animals.

We expect these orchards to have a multiplicity of beneficial effects for the surrounding communities.  Fresh produce that improves nutrition and health and expands local food security.  Business opportunities for communities and individuals through the sale of produce and value-added products like jams, juices, and canned goods.  Environmental benefits including reduction of stormwater runoff, absorption of carbon emissions and other pollution, mitigation of urban heat, and reduction of fossil fuel use for food production and distribution.  Attractive green spaces that bring communities together and boost neighborhood pride.

Philadelphia and other cities that suffered much with 20th Century deindustrialization are ironically now well suited to adapt to the challenges facing us all.  Ten urban eco-orchards now planted and 39,000 to go.  Each orchard will rise individually from the needs, hopes, and efforts of neighborhoods and communities.  Philadelphia will rise as a new 21st century city, a thriving center of urban agriculture and green economy.

In the densely packed urban environment of NYC, land is at a premium.  It can be difficult to acquire the space to create an effective Permaculture demonstration site.  Thus it becomes essential to develop relations with other established cultural institutions whose missions align with Permaculture principles.  At the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, I’ve been able to push a Permaculture agenda based upon the historic sustainability and self-sufficiency of local agrarian life from the 17th Century through the early 20th Century.   Over the last three years we have reconstructed the farm landscape and developed an active Community Demonstration Garden program. Similarly, Claudia Joseph has recently started a relationship and a garden at the Old Stone House, another historic house museum in Brooklyn.  This sort of programming at historic sites may prove a valuable model in other communities.

Kitchen garden at the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum.

Located amidst a vibrant Caribbean neighborhood and an industrial zone, the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House (circa 1652), is the oldest structure in New York City and a National Historic Landmark.  The Wyckoffs farmed the 75 acres surrounding the house for nine generations, until 1901.  Thanks to great soil left by a glacial stream during the last ice age, Brooklyn (historically Kings County) contained some of the best farmland in the United States.  As late as 1880, Kings County ranked second nationally in production of agricultural goods; adjacent Queens County ranked first.  By 1940, however, urban Brooklyn had expanded to cover the last sizeable tracts of productive farmland.  As the most significant remaining artifact of this proud but neglected agrarian history, the Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum and its 1.3 acre park serve today as a uniquely powerful tool to reconnect Brooklyn to an era when it was a vital part of the local food system.

The reconstructed landscape of Wyckoff House Park and its Community Demonstration Garden are not intended as a simple historic recreation, but as a dynamic community center for sustainable living.  I had the good fortune to assist Landscape Architect Rachel Kramer of NYC’s Parks Department in designing the Landscape Reconstruction project installed last year.  The park now includes an apple orchard of historic varieties, an extensive berry garden hedgerow, and a kitchen garden featuring heirloom vegetables and fifty varieties of historic herbs.  This year’s 7000 SF Community Demonstration Garden, appearing as the fields of the Wyckoff Farm, serves as both market and demonstration garden.   A variety of sustainable techniques are employed, including sheetmulching, polycultures, and water harvesting.  The breadth of locally viable crops are also demonstrated to inspire the local community to grow more of their own food.  Over 40 different vegetable crops and 10 herb crops are grown in the garden and sold at a Sunday farmstand, along with additional fruit and vegetables from a pair of upstate farms.   Access to fresh produce is very significant in a community that has no other vendor of local or organic foods or any other community gardens.  Three local high school students are involved with the project as paid interns, learning gardening and entrepreneurial skills in the process.   The garden also hosts a series of free community workshops, eleven this season, on topics from cooking to composting.

Landscape and urban context of Fidler-Wyckoff House Park.

Although the Wyckoff Farmhouse landscape, limited by historic considerations, does not include a typical forest garden or other standard features of Permaculture demonstration sites, Permaculture principles have guided my hand in the development of the site since the day of my arrival.  One small indicator of the success of this endeavor has been the change in the avian life in the park.  I don’t believe I saw any birds other than pigeons, starlings, and an occasional seagull in my first year here.  Now we have a resident pair of mourning doves, masses of housefinches, and a wide variety of migratory birds.  I believe we are making similar progress in making the Wyckoff Farmhouse an oasis of sustainability and permanent culture in its present day context of highly urbanized Brooklyn.

On a cold, rainy day last winter, I visited Jackie Brookner’s studio in SoHo.  Jackie is a sculptor and professor at Parsons School of Design who has pioneered some unusual sculptural forms that employ plants as part of their surface textures.  She was introduced to me by my aunt Ryan, who has lived in the Village for almost thirty years and knows an astounding array of artists and unusual characters.

Jackie’s space was filled with the quiet energy of creation and a sense of serenity uncommon in the city.  She seemed a patient and positive soul and certainly a welcoming host.  We sipped tea and compared our personal histories: we had both been raised in the same neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island.  I described to her my project at the Wyckoff Farmhouse in Brooklyn and she suggested some sources of historical information.

We soon moved on to the studio.  The space was filled with sculptures of different kinds; I was surprised to find myself as much drawn to the other pieces as to the biosculptures I had come specifically to see.  Her explanation of each group of sculptures unfolded as a narrative, revealing the evolution of the biosculpture concept.  Jackie’s art had always been about the intersection of earth, nature, and culture.

Prima Lingua is a monstrously large tongue that licks the polluted water in which it stands.

The biosculpture process began with a project called “Of Earth and Cotton”.  This involved Jackie’s travelling through the South, interviewing aging cotton pickers and molding sculptures of their feet from the very fields they had once worked.  The clay/earthen theme carried through another sculpture series in which she fashioned earthen chairs in the shape of giant tongues (these were amazingly comfortable to sit on!).  A friend of hers had then suggested growing moss on the chairs and from this idea, biosculpture was born.

There were five or six different biosculptures in the half of the room closest to the south-facing windows.  For these projects, Jackie had explored her interest in biology; she worked closely with a number of experts in the field.  Essentially, the idea has been to create living sculptures that through biological processes function to purify polluted water.  Jackie places mosses, liverworts, and other moisture-loving plants so they take root on an earthen form.  When water passes over the sculpture’s surface, the plants and associated bacteria clean the water of pollutants.  The sculptures are biogeochemical filters that function ecologically, aesthetically, and metaphorically.

This biosculpture™ is based on microscopic structures called lamellae that are found in some mosses.

There were a number of different biosculptures on display, each an experiment with different forms, plants, and water delivery methods.  The largest, titled “Prima Lingua”, again the shape of broad tongue, displayed a mosaic of different plant species which created a painting in shades, tones, and textures of green.  Stunned by the aesthetic charm of the arrangement, I asked her if the mosaic had been designed.  She replied that the pattern had evolved on its own, her only input being to trim back the more aggressive species occasionally.  Some of the other sculptures, in a series called “I’m You”, took the form of unusual ringed shapes that looked vaguely like six-fingered hands.  She explained that these shapes were based upon the microscopic cell formations of some of the mosses growing on them!

As we arrived at each sculpture, Jackie turned on the recirculation system to demonstrate the different ways in which the water was delivered.  It was fascinating to observe water creep across the surfaces, tiny rivulets causing the mosses in their path to bloom into life.  She passed me a magnifying glass to examine the process more closely.   I commented that children must love the sculptures and she replied that people of all ages seemed to be entranced by them.  Once she came across an old man staring motionless at a particular spot on one of the biosculptures, as if he had become transfixed there as a young man and grown hunched and old under its spell, like some strange character from Greek myth.  At the same time there had been a group of children playing where the water was dripping into the collecting pool at its base.

The Gift of Water functions as a part of a constructed wetland filtration system.

After we had finished the studio tour, Jackie described to me some of her biosculpture projects, completed and pending.  In 2001 the town of Grossenhain, Germany (near Dresden) commissioned her to create a work she titled “The Gift of Water”.  This biosculpture of two mossy, cupped hands is part of a remarkable new public swimming complex where the pool water is filtered entirely by wetland plants without the use of chlorine or other chemicals.  One of her latest endeavors is part of a biofilter for the Salway Park Wetland and Stormwater Filtration Project in Cincinnati, Ohio.  There, working with a variety of partners, she is creating a series of biosculptures and wetland habitats that will filter runoff from parking lots, sidewalks, and ballfields before it enters Mill Creek.  After collecting in a small plaza, the stormwater will pour into a stream of biosculptures, over “schools of hands that gradually transform into fish as the stream flows toward the creek.

In West Palm Beach, Florida, she is contributing “Elder’s Cove”, a thirteen foot biosculpture, to the redevelopment of Dreher Park.  Paying homage to Seminole history, the sculpture will be a focal point amidst eight acres of interconnecting lakes and dry retention ponds being built to catch, hold, and drain stormwater within this large regional urban park.

Finally, here in New York, Jackie is working on a proposal for a large outdoor wall sculpture- to filter stormwater runoff from adjacent rooftops- that will be a centerpiece of the developing Jardin del Paraiso community garden on the Lower East Side.  The image of the sculpture will incorporate the same hand-like microscopic moss structures as in “I’m You”.  These will be mixed with elements based on the hands of children from the garden community.

Jackie and I discussed our feelings about the global environmental crisis and discovered similarities in how we perceive our role in its possible resolution.  While Jackie brings practical ecological function to art, I see an opportunity, through my background in landscape design, to bring art and aesthetics to the permaculture movement.  In this way, we are both edge-dwellers, providing larger communities access to the world of ecological design through the use of art.

I would like to posit that Jackie Brookner is one sort of person the permaculture movement would do well to “form strategic partnerships with,” as Michael Kramer suggest in his “Challenge to the Movement.” (PCA #49).  Her work or the work of other ecological artis would make a powerful focal point for any permaculture demonstration site.  Good art can successfully convey a message or sway minds and hearts where words and abstract ideas might fail.  We desperately need to make a greater impact on American society; art is one way we might hope to do so.

“The major theme of my work is that humans are part of larger natural patterns and are dependent upon the natural systems that support our lives.  The images I use are intended to foster conscious understanding of this and to instill an emotional connection to nature and a sense of literal kinship.”      –Jackie Brookner