Chris Uhl with the bee hives that he maintains in the vacant lot behind his house, with his garden in the background. Photo by Lucy Green

by Lucy Green

The word “sustainability” is everywhere nowadays—on the covers of parenting magazines, on the labels of laundry detergents, in college course titles.

It speaks to the needs of this cultural moment, when nearly 600 gallons of oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico every minute, the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent and the average American generates 4.5 pounds of trash a day.

It speaks to Central Pennsylvanians, who on average require 20.5 more acres of ecologically productive land to support their lifestyles than is available in Centre County.

But sustainability is also a word that speaks to a hope for change.

Some local people have translated their ideas of sustainability into a way of life, one that involves growing organic food using methods that work with nature rather than against it, while reducing waste and fossil fuel consumption.

A way of living

Husband and wife pair Bob Flatley and Kelle Kersten run Ahimsa Village, an intentional living community near Julian, Pa.

As a teenager, Kersten checked out a book by Bill Mollison and began her lifelong fascination with “permaculture,” a combination of the words permanent, culture and agriculture. It refers to small-scale, intensive farming based on observing and replicating natural patterns, arranging components in relation to each other and the landscape and minimizing the use of manufactured energy.

Flatley and his college roommate Greg Martin dreamed of starting an intentional community since their days at Dickinson College.

The three founded Ahimsa Village in 2006 to create “a space that exemplifies the joyfulness of life while serving as an educational center for sustainable and compassionate living.”

Today the 68-acre property boasts a garden and an orchard containing 69 fruit and nut trees, 25 raspberry bushes and 100 strawberry plants and is designed according to permaculture principles. Flatley and Kersten also maintain bee hives, harvest maple syrup and grow shitake mushrooms on the property.

Several energy-saving projects are underway, including a solar-powered water pump, a solar hot water system, an Amish-built wood-burning cook stove and “humanure” toilets that allow human waste to be composted.

But for Flatley and Kersten, permaculture goes beyond food production.

“We look at it as a whole system of living which includes the physical, the spiritual, the mental and the emotional,” Flatley explained.

Both also practice Engaged Buddhism.

“It’s not just the meditation—looking in—but it’s going out into your community,” said Kersten, who serves as director of Appalachian Zen House.

The pair facilitates a “Wisdom Circle” that focuses on nonviolent communication, and Kersten leads a summer camp at Ahimsa Village for 8 to 15-year-olds, which focuses on creating a deeper understanding of and concern for the natural world.

“I think we’re entering…a period of the spiraling down of the Western culture, the whole system that’s built on the erroneous idea of constant growth,” said Flatley of the need for a place like Ahimsa.

“It’s just the sense of doing for ourselves and not being so reliant on the fossil fuel culture,” Kersten added. “It’s some sense of security and a sense of accomplishment.”

Thinking across time and space

Years ago Jackie Bonomo and her husband Jack Weldon bought 105 acres in Jacksonville, Pa., hoping to start a community much like Ahimsa Village. Their dream slipped away when Weldon was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1987.

Bonomo said that when she moved into a house in Lemont with her mother 10 years ago, she came back to the dream.

“I said, ‘This is important to me, and I just need to follow it where I am,’” she said.

In 2002 she got a chance to use the principles and skills she had learned at a 1995 permaculture design course hosted by founder of the Penn State Center for Sustainability, Barbara Anderson. Bonomo created a permaculture plan for her property and submitted it to the design competition at a Green Design Conference held at Penn State.

Much to her surprise, her hand-drawn plan beat the computer-generated designs submitted by college students to win first place. She used the prize money to build an arbor over her front walk, the first step in making her design a reality.

Today Bonomo’s yard provides her with fruits, nuts and vegetables from kiwis to hazelnuts to asparagus. She gives her friends bags of homegrown popcorn at Christmas time and enjoys fresh berries for breakfast in the summer.

“It’s a different thing than an annual garden where you put things in, and it’s one season,” she said. “[With permaculture], you’re thinking across time and space.” Over the years, she has adjusted, expanded and worked the permaculture plan she designed eight years ago.

Bonomo’s garden design carefully takes into account annuals, ground covers, shrubs, trellised vines, under story and high tree crops. She inter-plants fruits and vegetables that benefit one another and strives for the ideal placement of each crop, such as the peppers she planted next to her house to absorb heat reflected from a south-facing wall.

In her garden and in her life, Bonomo said, she strives to become less dependent on fossil fuels. She collects rain water in barrels and stores beans in a mini-cellar made from a broken freezer buried in the ground. She rides her recumbent tricycle to work at Tait Farm where she is a co-manager of edibles.

Bonomo also serves on the steering committee for Transition Towns State College, which brings together organizations and community members with the goal of reducing dependence on non-renewable resources and promoting the capacity to meet more needs locally.

This mission applies to her garden too.

“People don’t understand they’ve lost touch with the rhythm of the seasons,” she said. “The flavor of home grown foods is so stupendous compared with something that has to be picked unripe.”

 
Tania Slawecki, right, prunes a peach tree in her back yard in Lemont. In the background is intern Rebecca Roth. Photo by Lucy Green

Food security

When Lemont residents Tania Slawecki and Gene Bazan signed up for a weekend workshop on bio-intensive mini-farming in 1997, they thought they knew everything there was to know about organic gardening.

Both had been learning about gardening since childhood, but Slawecki said the material presented by John Jeavons, founder of Ecology Action, “totally knocked my socks off.”

Bio-intensive gardening involves preparing soil two feet deep, using compost, spacing plants closely, pairing crops that benefit each other and the soil, planting crops that produce lots of carbon and calories for the amount of space they take up and collecting and saving seeds.

In principle this type of small-scale farming nourishes the soil, produces high food yields in small spaces, requires less than half as much water and fertilizer as traditional gardening, reducing the problems fossil fuels and chemicals are used to solve.

Combining this system with some elements of permaculture and winter harvest techniques, the couple has transformed their backyard on the slope of Mount Nittany into a mini-farm with 26 garden beds of vegetables, beans and berries, more than a dozen fruit and nut trees and several compost heaps full of rich potting and planting soil.

With the help of a 10-by-28-foot unheated greenhouse Bazan designed and built, they produce 90 percent of their vegetables and 40 percent of their fruit for the year. They don’t aim to grow only what they can eat.

For four years Bazan and Slawecki have run a consulting business called Neo-Terra, helping others interested in “living lightly” to incorporate food production, housing retrofits and alternative healing into their lives. Each year they also take on several interns who want hands-on experience in bio-intensive mini-farming.

“I do this because I don’t want to eat industrial food,” said Bazan, a former Penn State professor with a doctorate in city and regional planning. “This is not a lifestyle. This is not a hobby. This is about creating a way of living that’s healthier for the earth and ourselves.”

“When you look at our lack of long-term food security, a prospect for food security lies in cultivating foods more locally, particularly in backyards,” said Slawecki, a materials scientist and former director of the Center for Sustainability.

Bazan, who said he spends an average of 12 hours a week in the garden, emphasized that bio-intensive gardening isn’t for everybody, but said he prefers it to “pumping iron in a stuffy, sweaty gym” and “spend[ing] a lot of time driving to supermarkets and shopping in aisles.” Other health benefits include medicinal tinctures, from cold and flu remedies to sleep aids, that they derive from garden plants.

Bazan said they enjoy the intellectual challenge and the pleasure of being in close contact with nature, but what they love most is the food: classic crepes filled with ripe strawberries or one of their original recipes like the root of culinary burdock, thinly sliced and sautéed with carrots, parsnips, honey and sesame seeds.

A Conversation Starter

Five years ago Penn State professors Chris Uhl and Dana Stuchul decided they wanted to be less car dependent and more in touch with land, earth and air. They moved out of their second-story walkup in Bellefonte and into a house on Pugh Street in State College.

A neighbor owned the vacant lot behind their house, and they knocked on the door to ask if they could use it for a garden.

“She looked at us and said, ‘I don’t see why not,’” Stuchul said.

With little gardening experience, the couple began digging and planting, relying on organic gardening books, trial and error and conversations with experts like Bazan.

Now the lot is home to a 2,800 square-foot fruit and vegetable garden with rows of plants, inclunding garlic, beets, potatoes and raspberries bordered by peonies, sunflowers and amaranth. They also resurrected an existing grape arbor and apple tree and added beehives for honey production.

In their own backyard, they maintain a chicken coop which supplies them with fresh eggs, and they built a wood-fired bread oven that can turn out thick-crusted, European-style breads.

In their steeply sloped front yard, they constructed terraces that contain a profusion of parsley for their next door neighbor, a trellis of climbing sweet potatoes and rows of basil and fennel. Between the sidewalk and curb is a “three sisters garden,” containing the Native American crops of corn, beans and squash.

“Having something which catches people’s attention—like living, edible plants right next to the sidewalk—is a conversation starter,” Uhl said.

His motivation for maintaining these gardens, he said, includes “a yearning for community, for a substantive relationship with the people who live near.”

Another reason, he said, is that “we spend our lives with all these intermediaries between us and the food we eat—we have no idea where the food was grown, how it was grown, the social and environmental costs of what we eat.”

Uhl and Stuchul identify as “vitalitarians”—people “who delight in food which is alive, which is vital.”

Uhl said that tending his garden “fulfills this deep human longing to nurture and to care for the life around us.”

“My vision is that the American suburb, which is rightly viewed by ecologists as vastly unsustainable, might some day in the near future be turned into major food producers for the urban core,” he said.