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Permaculture Garden Dedication
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September 29, 2011
Good afternoon, everyone!
There are many ways to decipher the word ‘perma-culture’: agriculture that is self-regenerative and so is permanent.
The part we might take for granted is ‘culture.’ But that is a very important part. Societies are based around food customs, and foodways. What we are is what we eat, and how we eat defines how we are, from religious and cultural identity, to the health of a population and whether a society is sustainable.
When you change the way people eat, you change a culture. This can happen slowly over time, or rapidly, in the form of revolution. This permaculture garden is part of a revolution, in the name of ecology, of health, of locavorism, of sustainability. A revolution in farming is as much a social experiment as it is an agricultural one.
So it’s only fitting that UMass Amherst, ‘Mass Aggie’ of old, founded as an agricultural school, would have the wisdom and the acumen to blaze a trail for a revolution in farming.
College campuses are experimental, intentional communities: they are utopias where ideas get tried out and tested sometimes before they are embraced by the public. Couple that with a farmer’s knack for problem-solving, and you have a movement on your hands.
This new garden, envisioned, initiated, reclaimed, its half-a-million tons of earth moved by the hands of students, is a unique and empowering embodiment of our already green profile. It is leadership like this that has brought us into the top 20 national research universities for campus sustainability.
We are justly proud to value sustainability at UMass Amherst: through our green building guidelines, our new energy-efficient power plant, the fact that 30 percent of the food served to this populous campus community is locally-grown, our Sustainable Food and Farming major, and, above all, an enlightened student body that cares about the environment and the future!
While the garden is at present a little small to feed a campus of 30,000 people, it shows the way we might go toward our pledge of achieving complete carbon neutrality by 2050. And with students like ours, who are shovel-to-soil activists, I would not rule anything out.
If you didn’t get to taste the garden’s produce at the World’s Largest Stir-Fry, you can find it in the Friday UMass Farmers’ Market. I personally can vouch for the quality of our permaculture tomatoes!
UMass Amherst has a philosophy of green, of grow-your-own, of being a local hero by being a locavore. I commend all of UMass’s local heroes of the day: Ryan Harb, Ken Toong, Nathan Aldrich, and all of the UMass students, as well as students from the Five Colleges, who have brought this garden into being, and who are going out into the world to teach about it. They are visionaries of a small planet! This day is for them, and for the future!
