I write extensively about living in a small city in a rural context, particularly from a "sustainability" perspective. Every once in a while I'm reminded that what I see as a continuum – from deep rural to deep urban – is experienced by others as a great divide: the city on one side, the country on the other. An example is the exchange that took place in the "comments" section after a post by Janine de la Salle and Mark Holland here at CITinfoResource.com
Does it have to be this way? And is the perception of a rural/urban divide standing in the way of the kinds of transformations we need to see, in both urban and rural landscapes and communities?
Two romances...
There is a romance to rurality. Give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above. Give me a ride-on mower and chainsaw to manage it – and a four-wheel drive pickup to drive to town in. Above all, do not fence me in with the language of the town or the city or with pretty words about "protecting the environment" at the expense of my livelihood (and with it, your urban standard of living, by the way).
On the urban side, the romance is about the pastoral idyll or untouched wilderness. All that open land and starry skies stuff is there to be enjoyed for its own sake – as an aesthetic respite from urban life, and as the source of ecological services (water, air) that make sustain our human settlements. I'll hug the trees – and protect the future of your kids and mine, rural and urban.
Romance and reality
These are generalizations. But the reality of living in rural BC does mean being close to the source of the province's historical wealth; it means living with logging, mining, the mess and dirt and smell of farming. But this dirt isn't a smudge on the rural romance; it's "honest dirt," the mess and muck of producing livelihoods for families and a high standard of living for the entire province, urban and rural.
As much as many of us are becoming aware of how destructive our rural resource extraction practices can be, our communities – including our urban communities – are still hugely dependent on them. As city dwellers, we still want our high standard of living; many of us also want to "protect" the beauty of the hinterland; and all of us have an interest in sustaining the natural systems that provide clean air, water, and mitigate the impact of climate change.
A shared – but complicated – romance?
In recent years I've seen some closing of the distance between the rural/urban divide. It's not that the romances have changed; it may be that a new romance is emerging, one built on food.
Urban dwellers have complained about the completely natural odour of their agricultural neighbours at times. But I've noticed a sea-change in how people look at even this issue, at least in my region. Nowadays there is a certain cachet in being reminded of food production in the neighbourhood. I think it has to do with the new "foodism" – a combination of concerns about "food security," "food sustainability," health, and gourmandism.
George Penfold has much to say about our recent interest in food. He's been a farmer, and he's widely esteemed as an academic and professional involved in rural and agricultural land use issues across the country. He's written for CITinfoResource on these topics, in May of this year and in September 2009. What he says isn't always that easy to stomach for someone, like me, who grew up in a rural context, worked on farms, but is now loving and living a much more urban foodie life.
George's comments are echoed by people like Gary Rolston, an agricultural consultant on Vancouver Island. I interviewed Gary in 2009 about "food sustainability and the Comox Valley." Our region is one of two major agricultural centres on the Island. But Gary suggested that our recent ag renaissance is a bit shakey. For one thing, locals who say we support increased local food production are, by and large, entirely unaware of what this will mean for demand on our already taxed water resources. We also have an over-developed imagination when it comes to how much food can be realistically produced. And, as George's comments on "food self-reliance" make clear, we will always be trading for many staples – unless we dramatically change our eating habits (dried fish and salal berries anyone?).
An urban/rural rapprochement based on food is, then, not without it's problems. It's a good thing to support our farmers' markets and local food producers; but this really doesn't get to the heart of what ails our agricultural economy. And as George and Gary's insights suggest, a lot of our new-found urban foodism is a cleansed urban romanticist version of what food production is really about.
Having said all of that, I still believe that our faddist foodism is a potential bridge between urban and rural ways of looking at the land and our communities. Contact with food producers is opening our eyes somewhat to the messiness of production and rural life. There is an exoticism to this of course, but even as exoticism, it means we may be starting to appreciate the experience of rural food producers – and maybe, through them, their experiences as loggers, miners, etc. In short, food becomes a doorway to an interested rural/urban conversation, something that wasn't there a generation ago.
The rural/urban divide is a problem of conflicting romantic stories about what "rural" means. It's also a problem of invisibility. Our busy and self-contained urban lives don't have much of a view of the rural areas on which we depend for food, fresh water, our ecological systems of support, not to mention the resource industries that support us financially. Typically, our trips into rural areas are about recreational or spiritual retreat: we want and see only the pastoral idyll that gives nourishment; we ignore or reject the messiness.
People from outside the city are often also afflicted with a blindness – not to urban ugliness, but to the many good things that cities and urban neighbourhoods have to teach us about living together and about sustainability. Our shared romance with food (on both the consumption and production sides) is creating an opportunity to actually see a richer, more complicated relationship between urban and rural realities. If we're serious about the future of our communities – urban and rural – we need to be looking for this richness in each other's realities and in each other's romances.
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