10.11.18

On Urban Sustainabilityty
IN ORDER TO CREATE A SUSTAINABLE CITY WE MUST RE-ENGINEER OUR THINKING
BY CHRISTOPHER NYERGES
Growing up in Pasadena, I did not have an immediate knowledge of where our
food and water came from. I turned on the faucet for water, plugged cords
into the wall for electricity, and went to the store for food. My city had been
engineered for me, and I was just mindlessly playing my role.
At a young age, I felt that there was something wrong with my ignorance. Even
worse, no one else seemed to be aware of our unawareness. Everything came from
somewhere else. One salvation for me was that my mother grew up on a farm and
would tell tales of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in which many people
had no food, and some starved to death. My mother’s family was poor by most
standards, but they had 51 acres in rural Ohio, and they fed themselves and many
others. My mother’s stories inspired me to become an ethno-botanist and learn
about how all plants were used in the past.
Though I did not pursue the path of “urban planning,” I realized that I had many
choices within the framework of my suburban existence with which I could ecologically
engineer my life.
PERSONAL CHOICES
My first teenage experiences were in backyard urban gardening and raising
chickens in a tiny space. I didn’t want to be dependent on commercial fertilizers
and bug sprays, so I learned the ages-old methods of agricultural, methods that
people today call “organic” or “perma-culture.” I learned that indeed anyone could
produce at least some of their food in a small amount of space.
Even in my late teenage years I had critics who told me it was not practical to
grow foods without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Really? I followed the path
of Fusuoka and his “One Straw Revolution,” and the Rodale family, and insisted
on growing everything with nothing artificial. I learned to keep down the bug
population with natural methods that had been practiced worldwide for millennia.
I knew that the so-called Green Revolution, based as it was on petroleum-based
fertilizers and pesticides, was partly a fraud and was not sustainable into future
centuries.
I continued my botanical studies by learning about the uses of wild plants of
the Native Americans. I found to my surprise that all the foods used by the indigenous
population could still be found throughout my homeland, though it was necessary
to hunt a bit more because of all the houses, roads and modern landscaping
that have taken over the land. The engineering of the concrete city destroyed
much of the terrain where these native foods grew, but they were not entirely gone.
I began to eat these wild plants which had sustained people for thousands of
years, and I incorporated them into my regular diet. When I first began to share
my excitement of these floral treasures with others, I was treated with mostly
apathy, sometimes scorn, and even pity. I was amazed.
RE-ENGINEERING MY OWN MIND
In the mid-1970s in Los Angeles County, I began publicly teaching and writing
about the practical skills of self-reliance and practical survival in the city. I was
not engineering the city, but I was working to engineer a new mindset that says we
can live ecologically (and economically) in the city.
Today, there is great interest in the knowledge of our ancestors. It’s never too
late to begin seeking our roots and to turn around some of the habits of ecological
suicide. I believe that we can solve many of our problems today by looking to the
past for some of our solutions.
Here in Southern California, we have barely gotten over a four-year drought,
which has finally inspired politicians and water department movers-and-shakers
CONTINUED ON PAGE 13
10 PASADENA WEEKLY | 10.11.18