Welcome to our Innovative Neighborhood: A Blueprint for Texas’ Stewardship Amendment
By Farmer Skip Connett
Less than a mile from where we started Green Gate Farms in East Austin in 2006, the groundwork was laid for the nation’s Green Building Movement. On the wooded campus of the Center for Maximum Building Potential Systems, a two-story green demonstration building — radical for its time in 1992 — was showing Austin a more sustainable way of designing and manufacturing our homes and offices.
In addressing the need for more energy efficient, environmentally friendly building practices, Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori, the Center’s founders, were reaping the scientific insights and gains of the environmental movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s. For the past 50 years they have been applying them, often brilliantly, to what might be thought of as a green blueprint for reducing the carbon footprint of the built environment. Improving energy efficiency, using local materials, cutting product emissions and waste, planting native landscapes — these were the climate-friendly solutions they studied and promoted long before the science of climate change rewrote the blueprint for smart growth. Today, the U.S. Green Building Council has inspired more than 30% of the nation’s office buildings to meet its green building standards.
This Saturday evening, 30 years since the Council’s founding, the founder of the Green Amendments movement, Maya van Rossum, will be our guest speaker as we celebrate the 120th birthday of the Bergstrom farmstead. Recent successes and momentum in her efforts to win constitutional protections for the environment offer inspiration — and hope — at a time when the perils and challenges of the climate crisis feel overwhelming.
Like the founders of CMPBS, van Rossum is riding on the shoulders of earlier visionaries and activists. She has seen more clearly than most how environmental legal challenges in this country increasingly hit the walls of a regulatory framework designed to protect and maintain business as usual. She is shouting what most of us only dare to mutter in private: undoing the wrongs of environmental injustice and preventing further degradation of earth’s life support system won’t scale up fast enough without protecting our rights to a clean healthy environment at the constitutional level.
During my pre-farming journalism career, I witnessed how outspoken visionaries, and the media attention they captured, could sway public opinion, change policy, and win lawsuits. This summer we saw this tipping point in action when 16 youths, protected by Montana’s long-established yet untested green amendment, won a lawsuit against the state for not protecting them from the damages of climate change.
I didn’t appreciate how unfairly pro-business rules and regulations are written until coming up against them personally. In less than two years, an explosion of unplanned industrial manufacturing, tunneling, and mining has upended our lives and livelihoods where we farm along the Colorado River in Bastrop County. Texas law allowed these disruptive and irreversible land-use changes without granting neighboring landowners that most basic right — a public hearing to voice their concerns. What van Rossum concluded from more than three decades leading the Delaware Riverkeeper Coalition was that the deck is so stacked in favor of corporate and special interests that most of us give up and accept defeat. Those who don’t too often assume their states provide protective rights to a healthy environment when, in fact, with the exception of Montana, Pennsylvania, and now New York, they don’t — at least not to the extent we are led to believe.
It was our good fortune that the founders of CMPBS were looking for organic farmers when we moved back to Austin in 2005. The one acre of good ground they offered us to launch our Community Supported Agriculture program was surrounded by a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang atmosphere of mad-cap innovations — in appropriate technology, permaculture, and smart growth — new tools and lenses for guiding decision-making. Lunch was served in the Green Demonstration Building, where the stove, fridge, and, yes, even the kitchen sink, could easily roll out the door to create a makeshift meeting room. Interns in eco-dynamic architecture from around the world spiced our discussions as we feasted on food harvested from our fields and prepared by the resident chef and ceramist.
Our early grounding in what Fisk often refers to as “serious commotion” is that we took with us when Green Gate established its business and mission at the Bergstrom farmstead around the corner on Decker Lane. The drafty 1902 farmhouse we would lease for the next 15 years is where we grew not only our family but a strong community of local food supporters. Farm meetings and events often spilled over into the Swedish mule barn where the original cedar shakes are still visible under its tin roof.
When writing the Bill of Rights, our founding fathers never imagined the scale and speed at which industry and invention would literally change the face of the earth. In safeguarding our right to private property that Texans hold so dear, it was inconceivable then that the nation’s vast resources and abundant wildlife would be depleted one day. Even in the nearly 20 years we’ve been back in Austin, we never foresaw the unmaking of the bucolic, wild landscapes we took for granted. Responding to these pressures has forced us to push back where we could, adapt where we couldn’t. This was the long yet rewarding path that led to the making of Village Farm, the first of its kind agrihood, with more than 100 tiny homes surrounding the farmstead.
Our innovative neighborhood includes not only green building and agrihood farming, but also new approaches to homelessness and education. On the Swedish farm site across from us off Decker Lane, Community First has demonstrated how the sweet spot of private and public collaboration can create a model to address our continued failings in homelessness. A mile south, in what were the abandoned offices of the old Austin State School Farm Colony, Austin Discovery School is approaching its 20th year offering students a nature-based curriculum where growing food and exploring the nearby river ecology are seen as essential as the three Rs.
These innovations were not radical, knee-jerk, anti-growth responses to our changing world. And neither is a state constitutional right to fresh air, clean water, and a climate friendly environment. Like the Green Building Movement, it is a more careful and caring alternative to the chaotic race for growth at everyone’s expense —a stepping-back to reassess our assumptions, address our excesses, seek a more harmonious balance with the rest of Nature. The gate at Green Gate Farms has always been open to new possibilities while honoring our the past. It is this spirit of innovation, adaptation, compromise — and hope — that we celebrate Austin’s rich farming history while we all work toward a more sustainable future.
