After reading Damian Duffy and John Jennings’ Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower in a graduate seminar, our professor asked us to write a blog post that imagines the Earthseed community surviving in 2035, that is, eight years after the end of the Parable and 15 years ahead of us. We were to build on the novel and write a News story from the future about this utopian community, focusing especially on issues and questions of ecology and the environment
Aerial shot of the community of Acorn (this drawing is a work of collaboration between myself and Ashley Harris - A black woman who is an undergraduate student at UCSD- I give her credit for helping me imagine this space unto paper)
News Anchor: Today we venture into the Acorn community which has been a ray of hope for Northern California. Our viewers will remember that Last week we brought you a story from the Mendocino swapmeet where Acorn’s community harvest was the source of much excitement to the extent that it caught the attention of our Newsroom. Patrons shared with us their delight at witnessing and participating in the actual manifestation of a dream to produce our own food and to be in these trade relationships with each other. Today we reveal to our viewers how Acorn has managed to achieve this in the face of the environmental crises that have touched all of us.
As we toured what seemed to be a very sophisticated community, we got more and more interested in hearing not just about their productive capacity but how the ethical philosophy and socio-economic ideologies helped them imagine and create this community. Our reporter sat down with Lauren Oya Olamina co-creator of the Acorn community; take a listen to what she shared with us:
(***screen changes to show reporter with Lauren at Acorn)
Reporter: Lauren, thank you for giving our reporting team permission to enter your community today and for allowing us to tour this incredible community you’ve created at Acorn. As you know, our newsroom is always trying to highlight those who are paving paths and providing insights into how we can not just ethically be in relationship with human beings but in harmony with the natural environment. Tell us some more about this community. What made the harvest that was the talk of the town last week possible? How do we move toward food security?
Lauren: thanks for coming and thanks for this question. Our community has been on this journey of co-creation for a little under a decade and what you see manifested here, or even in the market is the result of collaboration rethinking our relationships to each other and to the natural world. I think the starting point is an abandon of organized religion that even if unintentional, more often than not has divided us. So Earthseed - as an ethical philosophy is supplanted and it esteems life and rebirth and justice, it holds the historically marginalized, it understands that all living things and people are relational- it’s a radical democracy. Because this was our starting point, and having lived through the literal and metaphorical burning of our lives as we knew them- we had to imagine and create something different- something that would have a very different consequence for the environment and just for the quality of all our lives. And we knew it wouldn’t be easy. When we got here, this land was an empty space save for the literal bones and spirits of loved ones - but we recognized that this clearing, this sacred land we are now on was offering us an opportunity to create the change that we so desperately needed. We started with the seeds we managed to save from before the fires of the 2020s, a few tools, our hands, and a strong desire in our hearts.
Reporter: you know as we were walking earlier I could feel the sense of closeness among the people here- old and young and also noticed how diverse of a group this is. How is it possible that you would have created this community in the face of all the violence that was differently impacting groups - whether that was about race, gender or class.
Lauren: you know, that was not easy. At first, it was only a few of us who had in some way or another helped each other to get away from the fires. In the beginning, we all didn’t feel the same way about what kind of work needed to be done or how we were even going to do that work. We recognized when we were surrounded by the fires though that we were all equally vulnerable in those moments and I think having made it through those dark moments together, each of us finally got into the same boat about what needed to be done. The community was extremely vulnerable to attacks when we just got here- we had to set up different teams to monitor the grounds and guard what we began to create. In the face of that vulnerability though, non-violence was a preferred way of interacting with those who did come. And more and more we were able to engage the very people trying to steal from us and eventually they too became actively engaged in building this community.
Reporter: Tell us more about what you mean. How were they involved?
Lauren: well for example, as you saw on the tour our houses are actual crates - I mean these were crates that were used for international shipping but they sort of became obsolete in the global crisis and were essentially just all over the place as waste. It was the idea of some of the folks who had been listening to the goals of our community that we could recycle these crates and use them as homes, they connected us to some folks from Mendocino who became our partners in moving some of those crates onto this hillside. This meant we didn't have to worry too much about the cost of construction - which in itself can be very wasteful and damaging to the land; there was less of a need to cut trees for wood. So I guess what I am pointing to as well is how we have been deliberate about repurposing and restoring relationships to non-human beings as well as objects. We exist in this cycle and that’s part of how the repurposing and restoration features in this.
Reporter: It sounds like you are also offering up a way for our society to “grow people” - by cultivating relationships and not domination through force and exploitation.
Lauren: Exactly. I mean honoring relationships with those around us- human and nonhuman is key to our sustained presence here on this earth. When I think about the power we have found just by being attuned to nature and listening to hear how we can work with it to meet our needs, the results have just been incredible. The water and the air are not separate from our food, from our bodies - You saw our production plant, water well and learning land- And we were like, these things we have, and new technologies emerged out of how we were thinking together. Back in 2020 we weren't thinking as a broader society about how we could hook up a well like a dam since dams are also used to generate power via the potential energy. And we did that and now have a reliable source of energy. Our friends who joined our community after moving from SoCal told us about the windmill farms that were still out there, but because of mobility issues we ended up using some of what was leftover from solar installed in homes that were now abandoned to bring us additional energy by connecting them to capacitors for storage and for future use. We now have the water mill and three reclaimed metal drums converted to capacitors to store the energy. I don’t mean to keep going on with this question but everything that we do we are thinking about what that means for us and the land and our future. When we first got here there was so much pain and mourning- all of us had lost loved ones to the violence and the burning and we planted trees to honor our dead. This is ritual for us. Now we have memorial and cremation space. Burials take space and people will always die so we thought about what burials will mean for the value and use of the land for cultivation. The Ash from our cremations are reinjected in our community as fertilizer for the land and we see this as giving our ancestors even more time and space to continue to add value and contribute to our community even after their death. We plant trees in their memory...those trees continue to bring us food.
Reporter: So Lauren, where all this knowledge comes from and what have you put in place to make sure this education continues to move us forward.
Lauren: Well, I’ll tell you this and again remember our learning land? So much of the education here is about the doing, it's completely away from the traditional classrooms and schooling and are just emphasizing the things that we need to know to keep thriving. In our community center we are teaching history and agriculture and civics; our learning is about the tools to sustain and maintain this harmony with the environment. It has been very important for us to teach the history of the climate crisis that has brought us to this point- to show its rootedness in capitalism, a system that necessarily isolates and separates us. One of the critical thinkers who we keep coming back to, who was writing in the heights of the crisis- Alexis Gumbs - helped us recognize how it is not the crises that divided us but that the division is what led to the crisis in the first place. When we teach that history we see that coming together is the only solution, that our infrastructure that we create from here on must hold us together to prevent another crisis. So it is the evidence of the harm of that division that is keeping us so close together here at Acorn and the Harvest that brought you here is reason to give up that false story about the bounties of capitalism. Our education is about relearning this closeness and we do it through a combination of this history and like Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her loving book, Braiding Sweetgrass recommends we do the “teachings of plants”. The Harvest is our proof of concept, it shows what we are able to do through relation. The harvest is not just the fulfillment of our vision for food security but the antithesis of what we were all running from; It is a challenge to the lies we have been socialized to believe over centuries.
Reporter: I hear that. I am still curious though who are the teachers and where is that expertise coming from?
Lauren: We are all “the teachers” really, all of our experiences of the world past are impacting how we are with each other in this moment. Nobody’s knowledge is more valued than the other in fact often when we talk about how it is the artists who have become the wise men...both the artists we have here at Acorn but also folks who have been writing songs and poetry over decades. There is this song coming out of the Caribbean that you should take a listen to by Jah9 and Akae Beka when you get a chance- it's called Greatest Threat to the Status Quo and it's sort of our Anthem. The song is a reminder of what our hands can create, the power of the divine feminine- a lot of the suffering, oppression and destruction we have experienced is the manifestation of unchecked competitive, controlling masculine energy. So as a counter to that, feminine energy which is creative, nurturing and collaborative is what has emerged even among the men in the space. adrienne maree brown talks about this with mushrooms and how it takes something toxic and completely changes it and it becomes something useful and even healing….that's the divine feminine energy, it's in our education and more broady in the governance of Acorn- how we nurture and utilize the different experiences we have had for learning as opposed to seeing the different perspectives here as offensive and demanding some kind of negative consequence. Am i making sense?
Reporter: *nods*
Lauren: So yea, while there are people here who by virtue of study have particular insights into when for example we should be planting particular seeds, or what herbs are useful to fight off infections, we listen to our children and we listen to our peers and we let music and poetry and dance from all over the world tell us things about what has made our lives so difficult and unsustainable and we see how we can avoid making the very same mistakes.
Reporter: Very interesting. On the point of sustainability and i guess diversifying food production, how do you imagine this community can continue to see these results?
Lauren: you know its interesting, i think one of the things we are realizing from our study of the climate crises is that wealth generation and accumulation runs counter to not just the sustainability of human connection but the sustainability of the environment as well. We therefore had to look seriously at what our economic model would be...something that makes production continuously viable while simultaneously strengthening our relationships with each other. Bartering came up as the practice of our ancestors that we saw as the key here as well..as people need things they are shared. One of the things we have grappled with is unlearning the capitalist business model right- our sales are not for profit or at least thats only to the extent that those “profits” help us further strengthen our community support. I think part of the excitement at the swapmeet with our harvest is because a couple years ago we made the deliberate decision about the alternative economic model that required that we brokered relationships with neighboring communities to supply us with seeds with a promise that our produce would not be sold at the exorbitant prices that have become common in these parts of NorCal. That was essentially a good faith establishment of a trading relationship and I mean it had its glitches because we were facing off with Monsanto because of their patenting situation that basically made cultivation of natural non-gmo seeds illegal. You know earlier I talked about how this community also “grows people”, we really saw it here too because we started organizing against this rather ridiculous practice of patenting things that could impact how all of us are living. And here again it became even more pronounced how capitalism has ruined us and our ability to care for each other, why would you not want people to have access to life saving food and drugs? Anyway that fight is not quite over but we did manage to get a few restrictions lifted that has allowed us to trade with communities in this way. We will continue these advocacy efforts because it is so very important. Oh, and I should have also said that part of our arrangements with communities is also about labor right...so some folk will come in and help us tend to crops knowing that when the harvest comes in their families will also be fed.
Reporter: I am just so impressed with how you guys have thought deeply about how everything is connected, i mean we came here to talk about food but this conversation is so broad...connecting everything from food to governance to the environment to our relationships with each other...all these things that we probably did not think had any serious bearing on each other. It's fascinating.
Lauren: Isn't it? And i know you have to go but the last thing i would want your viewers to hear about our community which hasn't really come up to this point, but is totally inline with how we have been talking about the poetics of relation, is how animals have been harmed in the pre-existing model. Our physical location on this hillside presented mobility issues but also considering how much damage toxic emissions from vehicles have wrought on our environment we rescued and domesticated some of the cattle left over from the CA dairy industry that serves the dual function of helping with farming and transportation. Liberating the livestock is also about restoring our relationships with animals- a process that will take a very long time but is definitely something that we are committed to doing. And finally i want to have them think about how space has been organized in the past to further the dispossession of certain populations and how we have spatially organized our community to reflect our relations . As our farmland is on the hillside, we consider that Veg. of different climates via altitude change can be grown but we also deliberately constructed our sacred space overlooking the remaining contributions of ancestors past so we dare not forget and our kitchen is at the center of the community as food is the communal foundation.
Reporter: amazing, just incredible. Lauren thank you so much for this conversation. I know that other communities will learn from this road map for creating the world in which we can all breathe.
*** back to studio
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