Last week I attended the 28th annual Ecological Farming Conference at the beautiful Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove (near Monterey), California. The first year I went to the conference was in 2002, just a few short months after 9/11. I don’t know if it was the fact that I came alone—or that the farm I had been volunteering for and fighting to save had just been sold to developers—or just the general mood of the country that year—but I left that conference feeling completely despondent. The world was going to hell and despite our best efforts as environmentalists, there seemed to be nothing we could do to stop this destructive, downward course.
But this year the mood is completely different. You can feel it. Hope and change is in the air. We are electing a new president this year. “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and “Fast Food Nation” have awakened a lot of people to the fact that there are changes happening in our environment and that it is imperative (and in our best interests) to get involved and make some changes in the direction we are headed.
The theme of this year’s Eco-Farm Conference was “Root Values: Connecting Ecology, Community, and the Land.” I was here representing San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project, a group of volunteers that came together 7 years ago to help save a farm that we loved from being sold and converted into a housing development.
San Diego Roots has grown in these past few years from a handful of concerned citizens to a community-wide effort. We have much to celebrate. We helped start and maintain a successful high school garden project at Morse High School and we are now in the process of buying a farm, WIllow Glen Farm, which will eventually serve the entire San Diego community as a working sustainable farm model and educational center.
Representing San Diego at the conference were fellow Roots’ board member & OB People’s Food Coop board member Doug Zilm, as well as David Solomon, Dashiell Kuhr & Erika Shickle from La Milpa Farm in Escondido. We left San Diego on Wednesday morning and made the 7 hour drive up to the Monterey Peninsula through rain and snow (at 4000 feet through the Tejon Pass)!
The first evening of the conference began with a keynote speech on sustainability by author Eric Schlosser. Schlosser didn’t really cover any new ground, but reiterated what he learned in writing his best-selling book Fast Food Nation.