St. Rose’s Garden

Day 2 Blog Post

This post is in response to the St. Rose Garden project. More links to find out about the St. Rose Garden located on the Bronx campus can be found here and on the Facebook page.

As a commuter who’s main campus is FCLC, the idea of having access to freshly grown organic produce at a fraction of the price it costs at Whole Foods is very enticing. However, the St. Rose’s Garden is located at the Rose Hill campus. If there were a way to bring the produce down to Lincoln Center – sort of like a “fresh direct” or peapod approach – I’m sure the FCLC students would happily embrace the $16/share idea, and there would definitely be an increase in the amount of student supporters of this initiative.

One problem arises, though; the act of transporting the locally grown produce by truck (or some other carbon-based method of transportation) essentially negates the green initiative of this project. I suppose if students took some form of public transportation (subway, ram van) and brought the food back down themselves then the system would be pretty green; however, getting kids to go up to the Bronx campus for any reason other than having class is a struggle in itself.

In regard to connecting the St. Rose Garden practicum to the reading, “Agrarian Philosophy and Ecological Ethics,” I must say that nowhere else can one see the validity of the statement “the natural environment is intentionally modified by human beings” more. What I mean by that is that in seeing all the work that goes into maintaining an urban garden no larger than a typical suburban backyard, it’s easy to see how interacting within the man-made environment (everywhere you see concrete rather than dirt ground) is, ironically, becoming second-nature. The traditional definition of agrarianism says it’s “a social or political movement designed to bring about land reforms or to improve the economic status of the farmer.” Others, however, place a more moral role on the movement/way of life. One idea that’s interesting to take away from this reading is that “moral codes evolve over time to fit the way that ‘patterns and action allow a given group to cope effectively with the challenges of its environment’;” for example, the old hunter gatherer societies moralized sharing because their lifestyle – the way they interacted with their physical environment – was in such a way that not sharing meant less living. This is key: the environment shapes the moral landscape of society; “norms that are passed down are those selected by the environment by virtue of their capacity to feed people.”

In reading this, it just seemed like human history made so much more sense. The reasons of interaction and mentalities behind every emerging culture obviously sprouted from their relationship to the world around them and beneath their plows. Most economists and philosophers argue that value is derived from human use of nature and natural entities (like rivers, forests, etc.), however environmentalists believe that value is an intrinsic feature of sentient creatures, living organisms, and self-reproducing systems (like species, ecosystems, planet earth itself). The idea of “new agrarianism,” however, is a “popular movement emerging out of various attempts that small farmers and community organizers have made to develop an alternative food system, loosely organized around the notion of ‘land-health’.” And what better example of “new agrarianism” than none other than our St. Rose’s Garden.