Bee Kind

Bugs make the world go around. Well, bugs and fungi. And bacteria. And algae. And…ok, it’s all important. We humans rely on many tiny neighbors, and now more than ever, their future relies on us. Come along on a visit to Pittsburgh’s Garfield Commnity Farm, and travel back to the Cretaceous to learn about the origins of flowers. Featuring the farm’s Community Engagement Coordinator AJ Monsma, youth farmer Israel, and Israel’s friend Tommy the Bee.

Visit garfieldfarm.com to learn more about Garfield Community Farms. 

Watch the companion We Are Nature video series here.

Episode Credits: Produced by Taiji Nelson and Michael Pisano. Field Reporting by Di-ay Battad. Editing by Michael Pisano. Music by Mark Mangini and Amos Levy.

Thanks for listening! Follow Carnegie Museum of Natural History on Instagram,  Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop on the latest news from the museum.

Transcript

Israel (00:00):
The bees pollinate, which makes webs and stuff, so the farmers could sell it so they can make money. And, the bees are the same. While they're at it, they eat the food.

Di-ay Battad (00:19):
The bees are the same?

Israel (00:20):
Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (00:20):
They also want to sell their honey.

Israel (00:23):
Yeah, yeah, but they can't, because the $1 bill is bigger than their whole head.

Di-ay Battad (00:28):
That's true.

Michael Pisano (00:46):
Welcome to We Are Nature, a podcast about natural histories and livable futures presented by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I'm your host, Michael Pisano. Today, we're talking just a smidge about food, a little bit about faith, a lot of bit about bugs, and about how cultivating empathy for lives that don't resemble yours is an essential foundation of climate action. Back in the summertime, we sent field reporter Di-ay Battad to visit Garfield Community Farm, a two-ish acre urban farm in Pittsburgh's Garfield Neighborhood. The farm's focus on regeneration, education, and community access is helping create loving connections between people and non-human life. It's also a meaningful asset to Garfield's resilience to the changing climate. All that plus a big dose of arthropod natural history and more on today's episode. Stick with us.

AJ Monsma (01:45):
Yeah. My name is AJ Monsma. I'm the community engagement coordinator at Garfield Community Farm. I live a block away, and I've been here since 2014.

Di-ay Battad (01:55):
What made you interested in being involved with the farm?

AJ Monsma (01:58):
So, I, after college, went to Rwanda with Peace Corps, and I loved it. I lived with nuns in this Catholic compound, and they were incredible. I got started with food security and agriculture in Rwanda. I ended up staying another year, because I didn't know what I wanted to do when I came back yet. Then, my third year, I worked with a group of street kids and did kitchen gardens and enjoyed it so much that I knew when I came back, that's what I wanted to do. At first, I thought, oh, I'll just study agriculture, horticulture, something along that. But, the more I talked with folks and thought about it, the piece I really liked was how the kids just really came together and got really cohesive around this food project. I wanted to go into some sort of community building, conflict res schooling, but then surrounded with about food. So, Garfield Community Farm was kind of a marriage of both those things. I had a friend who knew about it, told me about it. And, it was something that I could do community building around food, centered around food.

Di-ay Battad (02:58):
Awesome. So, for someone who's never heard of the Garfield Community Farm, can you give a brief overview?

AJ Monsma (03:06):
Yeah. Garfield Community Farms is a little over two acres in almost the top of Garfield Neighborhood. It's great, because Garfield Neighborhood historically was a very agricultural neighborhood. So, if you're walking around, you still see remnants of apple trees and gardens. There's just a really strong history of that in this neighborhood. So, when Garfield Community Farms first came here, this land was just torn down housing, and it was very desolate. It was an intentional choice to show folks what can happen if you steward a place faithfully over the years in restoring health. I love that that's our beginning, because that's what we try to do with people, with land, with our relationship with food, with each other, and with the Earth, is just that restoration. So, Garfield Community Farm physically is a place where we want that to happen on many levels, that piece of restoration and healing.

Di-ay Battad (04:01):
Great, and what is the mission of Garfield Community Farm?

AJ Monsma (04:07):
The mission of Garfield Community Farm is, along with our neighbors, to grow food and to learn about food and the earth. There's three big parts of that mission. So, there's the education piece. There's the actual growing food and distribution piece. Then, the third piece is actually very much related to how this was started under a church and to show that through stewardship, God can really restore health to a place that was not in good shape when you got there.

Di-ay Battad (04:38):
Yeah, can you talk about how this work aligns with your faith?

AJ Monsma (04:42):
How this aligns with my faith? Yeah, definitely. The farm itself started as a ministry of a church, Open Door Presbyterian Church who intentionally didn't want to buy a building. They wanted their money going towards something else than just the building. They wanted to pour money into the farm. Faith was behind that in one, again choosing that space that was desolate and not just picking a flat place with beautiful soil to example how God can restore. Then, in having a permaculture approach, which is a word I don't love, because it has a lot of white colonial strings attached to it, but we are a permaculture farm.

(05:24):
The thing that's great about permaculture are those three core ethics. So, it's people care, earth care, and fair share. So, when we look at our resources, when we look at our people, when we look at our food, we want that to be equitably distributed among those things, which very much lines up with faith. We're not here just to grow food and hand it out. We're not here just to have fun events. We're here really for that healing and restoration in a very holistic way, which is all about the story of God and Jesus and the faith story through the Bible.

Di-ay Battad (05:57):
Yeah, and along those lines, what are some of the ethics that guide your work?

AJ Monsma (06:01):
So, permaculture-wise, of those ethics of people care, fair share, and earth care are to leave the space in a better position, better shape than when you came here. In every interaction with people, with earth, with animals, you want it to be better, to leave better, for both those parties to leave better. So, it's honoring all of those things. Then, being intentional when we look at our budget and when we look at where our time is spent, just asking us those hard questions of, are we putting too much of ourselves into one thing and not being fair to another thing? So, just that equity is really important with ethics.

(06:44):
Then, the faith side of that is just having this place be a place where everyone feels safe, no matter where they're coming from, whether that's physically, mentally, spiritually, but they know they can be here and find sanctuary, whatever sanctuary means to them. A lot of that for us, I think, has been at this point kind of stepping back in certain ways so that folks can fill in the space how they need to fill it in. That's helped us, I think, stay an asset to the community. Each year, it's growing in that way.

Di-ay Battad (07:16):
Awesome.

Michael Pisano (07:30):
Many cultures and faiths all across the world practice devotional care of the land. Many explicitly recognize and revere the divine within every single living being. I personally love knowing that right across town, AJ and her friends at Garfield Community Farms are finding fellowship and remediating and caring for our land. To me, Garfield Community Farm's mission speaks to hope for the future. I don't share every aspect of their faith, but I don't feel excluded from their space or their mission either.

(08:04):
Their inclusivity is an important reminder about working together. It can be easy to fall into in-fighting along religious or political or other partisan lines. That in-fighting is a very real threat to the entire planet. There is just so much that keeps us divided. Every moment spent arguing with or avoiding people who are on some perceived other side is a lost moment to mitigate and prepare for climate change. We need every moment.

(08:34):
Personally, I find spiritual fulfillment and fellowship being immersed in the forest, the feeling of walking under trees, being surrounded by enumerable living things. That is absolutely sacred to me. The more time I spend out in the woods, the more I'm inspired to learn about the world. The more I learn, the less I perceive the barrier separating me and other earthlings. Those moments of immersion and interconnection offer me peace and awe and purpose. That spiritual nourishment feeds my own faith in the future.

(09:13):
Now, in a very literal way, climate breakdown is coming to sack my temple. Whatever your religion, politics or relationship to nature, it's coming for your temples too, because all the temples are here on this one planet that we all share. In mitigating climate breakdown and building resilience against the inevitable changes, we care for each other. Humanity is plagued by isolation and division. A great shared defense of the temple would bring us back together. A very real part of that, which we must attend to now, is reviving the land that keeps us.

Di-ay Battad (10:00):
Can you tell me about how the farms have been restoring land through the community?

AJ Monsma (10:06):
Yeah, so again, this was all housing that was torn down. In Pittsburgh, that's just collapsing the building into the basement and then throwing an inch of dirt on top. So, when we first came to the space, it was just all invasives, and nothing really good was growing, and there was a lot of rubble. In just that very basic sense of restoring the land, the first couple years was just hauling things out and then bringing in compost and manure and building up healthy topsoil. So, now in certain areas, the farm will have a foot or more of healthy topsoil. As we've done that, we've brought in native plants, but also native plants were just kind of waiting for the conditions to be better and have come up. So, there's a lot healthier biodiversity, which for people, one, just aesthetically being here and seeing the diversity of flowers, of birds, of pollinators, is just such a peaceful thing and can be really filling spiritually and emotionally.

(11:00):
Then, just for the space, one of our staff members is really into birds, so he can tell you after three years of doing this work, it was the first time he saw a Scarlet Bunting, which is a migratory bird stop here on its migration, because we finally had enough biodiversity for the bird to want to stop here. So, restoring the health to that place, and then I've noticed when I work with kids or other people coming up here, they just don't feel like they're in a city. Maybe they don't have any land where they are, or there's an apartment or another place where they've not grown stuff. So, to be here and to see all the different plants and just the wonder and the awe that that brings to them, it just kind of takes you to a different spot, which is really special. Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (11:46):
Absolutely. You mentioned soil health. Can you talk about what that is and why that's important?

AJ Monsma (11:54):
Yeah. Soil health is the foundation, if you want to grow anything good. In Pittsburgh, soil health in Pittsburgh, I've heard there's a lot of heavy metals, especially lead in the soil. So, one, there's a lot of remediation that has to happen. So, before you even put anything in the ground, you have to test your soil and that's seeing if there's harmful things in there, but seeing the beneficial things in there as well. Yeah, so soil health is the foundation for all health and all food, and it's something that we do a lot with the kids, because it's fun to look at just the structure of soil health and what part the bugs play and the worms play, but the fungus inside of there and the bacteria and all those living things, which is why compost is very important and something we take seriously here.

(12:37):
We get compost donations from other people in the city and are always putting composts back in the earth and those living things back in the earth. But, it's very diverse. So, I am a little biased against aquaponics and hydroponics, because they don't capture everything that's actually in soil. But, building healthy soil is the, I guess, easiest way to guarantee that you're going to have nutritionally robust food and healthy, happy things. Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (13:07):
Absolutely. On the site too, it talks about ecological design and how it can contribute to biodiversity.

AJ Monsma (13:14):
Yeah. So, that's, I guess, with permaculture too in that design piece. It's just mimicking how indigenous groups planted a long time ago. Let's look and see what works and then try to do agriculture in that way. So, being intentional about design, working with what you have, so we're on a site that no traditional farmer would've picked to farm on, because it's a hill, because of all the clay in the soil, because of all the rubble in the soil, so many things, all the invasives. But, you work with what you have. So, part of that design piece is, hey, we're on a hill. There's ways that you can farm on a hill to prevent erosion, to keep most of those minerals and nutrients intact, so doing things like berm and swale beds, doing things like terraces. It's trying to restructure and use what resources you have so that you don't have to bring in a lot. That's an approach here, is just trying to create those closed systems, which exist naturally. No one goes into a beautiful forest and messes with it so that it keeps existing.

(14:17):
So, it's trying to create those closed systems that take care of themselves. If you do that well, and the biodiversity that results from that, that also helps continue that. So, the more diverse flowers you have, the more diverse pollinators, the more birds that are coming in. You get that cycle of your good bugs that are going to get your bad bugs and all of that. I've been here now five years, and each year is different with bugs. We get certain bugs. Harlequin beetles were really bad this year, but overall as the biodiversity's increasing, we're seeing things balance each other out.

(14:58):
In my first couple years, maybe aphids were really bad outside, but now it's not a problem at all outside, but maybe only in one of our indoor spaces. So, things like that, as you give nature what it needs to then do its own thing and just kind of sit back and let that happen and prune out stuff that's going to hinder that, but just let it organically grow. That's gone over to how we've interacted with community and people too, is just here's the space. How do you want to use it? And, just kind of sit back and see and monitor what happens.

Di-ay Battad (15:34):
Really quick sidebar, what are those? I think they're black and bright orange little bugs that look like they're shaped like stink bugs.

AJ Monsma (15:43):
It's the Harlequin beetles.

Di-ay Battad (15:44):
Those are?

AJ Monsma (15:45):
They're terrible this year. They're terrible this year, and we even got them on our mustards and lettuce, which we've never had. They're always on our kale and collards, and we're an organic farm, so we don't use ... Everything we use is organic. There's one spray, Captain Jack's Dead Bug Brew, that is somewhat effective, but you just kind of have to handpick them. So, they were really bad this year. I've heard, because our poison ivy is getting really bad, certain things. I've talked to some people who've told me anecdotally, it's because of climate change. So, I'd have to look more into that, but with climate change, with more rain, those things are shifting. Things aren't doing what they have done in the past. So, you have to be resilient and know those things and adapt. Yeah, so bugs are going to change as the climate changes among many other things, but yeah.

Di-ay Battad (16:39):
For sure.

Michael Pisano (16:51):
Bugs are indeed changing along with the climate. First, to AJ's point about pests, several recent studies have confirmed that warming temperatures and more precipitation increase the populations, ranges, and metabolisms of agricultural pests like aphids, locusts, white flies, and corn ear worms. We can see it in the fossil record from past periods of global warming, and we can see it happening in real time on farms all around the world today. This proliferating pest problem is absolutely linked to climate, but ultimately the boom in agricultural pests is a symptom of outdated human agricultural practices. Say it with me, "Monocultures stink." Huge monocultures are susceptible to huge infestations in ways that smaller distributed polyculture systems are not. The global movement of food and material and people is what introduces invasive pests. Introduced pests can spread and multiply aggressively in new environments. Replacing native plant communities with crop monocultures or other monocultures like manicured grassland hurts native animals' ability to compete with and munch on agricultural pests.

(17:59):
This is partly why Garfield community farm's approach to regenerating land to support healthy soil and diverse native plants is really impactful. It creates a much needed habitat. The farm also gives people the chance to experience bugs firsthand. When bugs are in the news, it's pretty much always news about infestation or disease or pestilence. You almost certainly heard about that 100 square mile locust swarm that devastated crops across the Horn of Africa in 2020. Stories that feature bugs are more likely to paint them as a plague than as partners. But, that's only a very small part of a much more complicated story of interrelationship and interdependence between bugs and people and pretty much every other living thing on the planet. Bugs are so diverse. We have named one million insect species, and the latest models suggest that there might be another six million waiting to be discovered. That doesn't count spiders, mites, worms, snails, springtails, millipedes, centipedes, and other small terrestrial invertebrate friends that I'm lumping into the bug category. Altogether, bugs make up most of the diversity of animal species on earth.

(19:14):
By the way, of those one million known species of insect, only one to three-ish percent of them are considered pests. Bugs have been around for a long time. Examining the fossil record, the first terrestrial arthropods came out of the ocean to start colonizing land at least 500 million years ago. It's around the same time that we observed the first mosses and lichens leaving the water. During those 500 million years, bugs have built deep, deep ... I mean deep relationships with other organisms. Bugs and plants rely on one another. They work together, same with bugs and fungi, bugs and microbes. The natural world, including us, rely on those collaborations. The incredible and myriad symbiotic relationships between our tiny bug neighbors and those plants, fungi, bacteria are what turn detritus into fertile soil. They directly feed fish, birds, reptiles, humans, and generally provide the foundation of our food web.

(20:21):
That brings us to how our so-called good bugs are being affected by climate change. In short, many, many bugs are in trouble. Populations and local species diversity have been declining for years, especially in places with heavy industrial agriculture. Clearing land, spraying huge amounts of pesticides, it's all taken its toll. Now, the speed of the changing in climate is also forcing bugs out of their native ranges. It's also messing up their life cycles. It's displacing and destroying populations of plants, fungi, and other organisms that insects rely on, they have obligate relationships with.

(21:03):
The declines in many species are so bad that some scientists are calling it the insect apocalypse, or "insect-ageddon." Whatever you call it, the problems with bugs are problems for us, destabilizing all those intricate interrelationships that took hundreds of millions of years to put together, that puts our ecosystems in danger of collapse, real danger. This is an essential problem to solve to keep our landscapes and our food system stable.

(21:47):
It's also a moral imperative. We have to save as much biodiversity as possible from extinction at the hands of climate breakdown and archaic human industries. Biodiversity is essential to human resilience to climate change. Biodiversity is also essential to our quality of life. Preserving it is a commitment to the intrinsic value of living things. To save biodiversity and to save our souls, we have to save our neighbors in the undergrowth. So, what do we do? How do we save bugs? Well, alongside the material solutions like cultivating insect habitat, which we'll talk about, there's also a need to cultivate a better relationship with bugs. And, that can start in a place like Garfield Community Farm.

Di-ay Battad (22:35):
Introduce yourself. What's your name, and how old are you?

Israel (22:38):
I am Israel, and I just turned 10.

Di-ay Battad (22:43):
Just turned 10, and where are we?

Israel (22:45):
We are at the Garfield Community Farm.

Di-ay Battad (22:50):
Can you tell me about this place?

Israel (22:51):
It is very natural, cool. The food is delicious, and there's a lot of bees and animals.

Di-ay Battad (23:06):
So, the first time you came to this farm, what do you remember seeing?

Israel (23:11):
Flowers.

Di-ay Battad (23:14):
Do you remember how you felt?

Israel (23:15):
Scared of bees.

Michael Pisano (23:21):
I am a complete and total and unabashed bug nerd. I love bugs. I can trace my whole interest in science back to an ant colony in my parents' backyard. Yet, even I understand and relate to the visceral fear of bugs. Most of us probably remember our first bee sting or our first fire ant bite. I'm still liable to let out a little yelp when just an unexpected flying friend land somewhere on my body. Bugs are undeniably alien, strange, sometimes threatening. But, I think it's incredibly important to learn to see beyond that, to see them as more than that, to learn about what they do for us, and to learn from them about resilience and interconnectedness. It's important to see life at other scales besides your scale, to imagine experiences outside of your own experience. We have to care about each other. When we say, "Each other," I think that has to reach beyond the easy boundaries. In my experience, firsthand exposure to a busy patch of flowers can go a long way in the right direction.

Israel (24:32):
That's the bee I pet when I was here. Hi, Tommy.

AJ Monsma (24:36):
Yeah, they're pretty nice.

Israel (24:36):
His name is Tommy.

AJ Monsma (24:37):
Oh, that's Tommy's the bee?

Di-ay Battad (24:42):
So, the first time you came to this farm, you were scared of bees?

Israel (24:45):
Yes.

Di-ay Battad (24:46):
And, now you're petting bees?

Israel (24:48):
Yes.

Di-ay Battad (24:48):
How did that happen?

Israel (24:50):
I learned if you're not afraid of the bee, the bee won't be afraid of you.

Di-ay Battad (25:00):
Why are bees so important? You seem to know a lot about bees.

Israel (25:04):
Pollination, honey. They're part of the food chain. They give us good stuff, more flower species, and stuff like that and honey.

Di-ay Battad (25:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why is pollination important?

Israel (25:29):
So they could keep bees alive.

Di-ay Battad (25:32):
You have more flowers?

Israel (25:34):
Yeah. It's not a farm without flowers, right?

Michael Pisano (25:44):
The first flowers were underwhelming. They weren't big and weren't that colorful. There weren't a whole lot of them. Sometime in the Cretaceous, flowering plant diversity exploded. They became brighter, more colorful, larger, more fragrant. Wildflowers likely predate the Cretaceous. The fossil record shows an unprecedented boom in their spread in diversity, and this starts around when we think bees appeared. Now, beetles and other animals were pollinating plants on a smaller scale before the Cretaceous. What's unique about bees is that they specialized as pollinators. They became so effective that flowering plants radiated and prospered.

(26:28):
Today, there are more types of flowering plant than any other plant group with over 350,000 known species. That's around 90% of the world's known plants. Of those, three quarters are pollinated by insects. The majority of pollination is done by bees, but not just honey bees. No, there are over 20,000 species of bee in the world, and most pollination is done by wild native species like carpenter bees, bumble bees, and sweat bees. Birds, bats, butterflies, beetles, ants, other animals act as important pollinators too, but hold on. We'll leave that for another time. You might think of bees as social animals, but many don't ever see the inside of a hive. In fact, less than 15% of bees live in colonies. The rest are largely solitary, meaning that they spend their lives alone or in small, semi-cooperative groups. Regardless, most bee species embrace the same general lifestyle.

(27:29):
Female bees lay eggs in a nest. They stock it with pollen and nectar and then wall the thing up so their young will have a safe place to grow. This is similar to wasps, almost all of whom are predators. Though, many wasps will also eat protein-rich pollen or sweet nectar. Their shared behavior gives us a clue to bees' origins. We think bees branched away from the wasp family tree around 130 million years ago during the Cretaceous. The basic idea is that wasps were hunting prey on plants, and some of that prey had pollen stuck to it. It turns out that much like a spider or a caterpillar or another common wasp snack, pollen is rich in protein. It makes a great substitute food for developing young wasps when prey is scarce. So, gradually some of these wasps evolved to fully feed their kids on pollen. Before insect pollination, plants reproduced and spread their pollen through wind dispersal. Crops like corn, wheat, rice, as well as many trees still do this today. But, for many plants, wind dispersal is not a very effective way to reproduce.

(28:43):
The first pollinating insects were probably snails or beetles that ate pollen. And by visiting multiple flowers, these bugs would've fertilized plants. This little collaboration was so much more reliable than hoping the wind would blow pollen to and fro the right spot that somewhere along the way, flowers started evolving traits to become more attractive to pollinating insects. This competition drove the specialized adaptation of bees, including hairy bodies and little baskets on their legs to collect pollen, longer tongues to reach nectar deep inside plants, and behaviors like honey production to preserve nectar and pollen over winter. Over millions of years, plants and pollinators continued co-evolving for mutual success. The resulting boom in flowers really changed the game. It deepened the relationships between bugs, plants, and other organisms. For example, there's a species of mite that live in a special structure of hairs on some bees' bodies. The mites hitch a ride from flower to flower where they eat a fungus that can attack pollen. The mutualisms go deep, and countless small interrelationships like this arguably form the foundation of every ecosystem.

Di-ay Battad (30:04):
What about people? Are they good for people?

Israel (30:08):
Yes. The bees pollinate, which makes webs and stuff. So, the farmers can sell it so they can make money. And, the bees are the same. While they're at it, they eat the food.

Di-ay Battad (30:28):
The bees are the same?

Israel (30:29):
Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (30:30):
They also want to sell their honey to make money.

Israel (30:32):
Yeah, but they can't, because the $1 bill is bigger than their whole head.

Di-ay Battad (30:37):
That's true.

Michael Pisano (30:45):
Our food system is reliant on bugs. One in three bites of food that we eat on any given day was pollinated by an insect. Other bugs eat pests and fungi that attack crops and livestock. Bugs are essential to turning waste into healthy soil. And, bugs feed birds and other organisms that help spread seeds, fertilize fields, and otherwise fill a niche in a healthy food bearing habitat. So, yeah, we rely on bugs. Increasingly, their future relies on us. How do we return the many favors that bugs do for humans and simultaneously keep our food and ecosystems resilient against climate breakdown?

(31:25):
First up, we've got to change the ways we grow food. We've talked about industrial monoculture a lot this season, particularly during the episodes called "Carbon and Cattle" and "Food is Nature." So, go check those out if you haven't. The short version is that a huge waving field of corn or soy destroys and fragments habitat. Monoculture destroys the soil with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And, these huge fields are inviting to big populations of diseases and invasive pests. Big agribusiness operations run on petroleum. They emit crazy amounts of greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane. As we've seen during the last three years, pandemic, war, and natural disaster, the monoculture based food system is vulnerable in ways that make food more expensive and more scarce. By contrast, smaller polyculture setups like Garfield Community Farm can more easily regenerate soil and habitat and food for bugs. They can sequester carbon in the ground. They can avoid harmful fertilizing and pesticide practices. They help connect people to their food and help people connect human health to healthy food, to a healthy environment.

Di-ay Battad (32:50):
So, do you think this farm is a good thing?

Israel (32:50):
Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (32:50):
Why do you think it's a good thing?

Israel (33:01):
Because, it provides places to eat, and there's animals. They keep the animals well fed. They're keeping flower species alive, I guess.

Di-ay Battad (33:15):
That sounds good, sounds like it's a good thing. What's your favorite thing that you've done here at the farm?

Israel (33:23):
Eat.

Di-ay Battad (33:25):
So, there's food here?

Israel (33:26):
Yeah. Well, you make the food from the farm.

Di-ay Battad (33:31):
Did you learn how to cook here?

Israel (33:32):
Yes.

Di-ay Battad (33:34):
You did?

Israel (33:34):
Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (33:34):
Do you cook at home now?

Israel (33:35):
Yes.

Di-ay Battad (33:35):
You do all the cooking?

Israel (33:38):
Only when my mom needs me to. I've made chicken for my mom and my brother and my sister.

Di-ay Battad (33:48):
Really?

Israel (33:49):
Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (33:49):
I didn't learn how to cook until last year.

Israel (33:55):
Do you know how to cook hot dogs? They're really easy.

Di-ay Battad (33:58):
I'm pretty sure I know how to cook hot dogs. Then, do you cook things that they grow here?

Israel (34:06):
Yeah.

Di-ay Battad (34:07):
Do you remember your favorite thing to cook here?

Israel (34:11):
The garlic thing that AJ said.

AJ Monsma (34:14):
Oh, pesto.

Israel (34:15):
Yeah. I like pesto.

Di-ay Battad (34:16):
I love to make pesto.

Israel (34:19):
It made my breath stick, but it was good.

Di-ay Battad (34:24):
Awesome. That's definitely true. So, what would you say to someone who's never heard of this place, didn't know this existed?

Israel (34:38):
They should check it out.

Di-ay Battad (34:39):
Why should they check it out? How?

Israel (34:41):
Because, it's pretty darn cool.

Di-ay Battad (34:43):
It is pretty cool. Why would you say it's pretty cool?

Israel (34:52):
Look around, nature, food that provides nature. I mean nature that provides food.

Michael Pisano (35:11):
So, supporting a shift away from monoculture based agriculture via policy change, redirection of subsidies, and supporting decentralized climate smart agriculture would be huge in supporting bugs and people. It's time to get loud and let your politicians and your policy makers and your neighbors and your coworkers at your local grocery store let everybody know the solutions to our broken food system exist, and we want to invest in them. We will get back to AJ and the sweet summary sounds of Garfield Community Farm in just a moment.

(35:46):
One more aside first about another monoculture that harms bugs, the grass lawn. A NASA study concluded that almost 80,000 square miles of American land is devoted to turf lawns. Grass takes up more real estate than any individual food crop. Not only is grass lawn crummy habitat for bugs and native biodiversity, it also requires lots of fertilizer and pesticide and gas powered machinery for upkeep. American homeowners are estimated to use 10 times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre than the average farm. Gas powered lawnmowers produce way more emissions than gas powered cars. As with agricultural monoculture, the grass lawn is bad for biodiversity and bad for the climate. So, if you've got some sort of control over some grass covered space, look into alternatives. There's tons of great regional guides to bug friendly groundskeeping. While landscaping isn't going to save the world on its own, I think it has a part to play.

(36:50):
Investing time and energy in regenerating monocultural landscapes at every scale is part of an important cultural shift. At the policy level and at the personal level, it can be a declaration of welcome, of inviting biodiversity back into our lives. For so long, Americans have striven to keep our landscape tidy and controlled, in line with this strange, seemingly meaningless traditions of long dead colonizers. Do yourself a favor. Look up the weird aristocratic history of the American grass lawn. It's an invention of 17th century Europeans who simply didn't know what we know now about climate science or our place in nature. It's a vestige of an old, outdated attitude about plants, bugs, nature, that the non-human world is scary or gross, weird or dirty, primitive, brutal. It's time to cast off the idea that nature is unruly and has to be dominated and that 300 year old upper class aesthetic ideas are still somehow relevant and worth the billions of dollars and countless hours they require to uphold. Instead, I hope we can approach land as an opportunity to start healing our relationship with nature.

(38:07):
It's also time to set aside the fear that we have done too much damage, that nothing can be done, that insect-ageddon is inevitable. We are all guilty of doomer-ism, and narratives like insect apocalypse reinforce that. But, we are only doomed if we hear these warnings and do nothing. We can start small. Starting small is almost always the first step to going big. By helping bugs in our community where we live, by paying attention and paying gratitude to the little things that support us, we assert that a better world is worth fighting for. If you're looking for a point of entry into this regenerative, collaborative, compassionate care for the planet, well, might I suggest spending some time with people who grow food?

Di-ay Battad (38:58):
Can you talk about why it's important to engage community members and youth in particular?

AJ Monsma (39:03):
Yeah, so I came here for the community aspect. I think food brings people together more than almost anything else. I've noticed with a lot of youth that we work with, that there's just a really broken relationship between where your food comes from and how food affects your body. I didn't grow up gardening, so I could understand that. This was all new to me when I first came. So, with youth particularly, just having them and exposing them to nature, to bugs, to wild things that taste good and understanding how there's diversity there, so when they look at leaves and plants when they're walking down the street, they can recognize, oh, that one's good for medicine. That one's good for food. Just nurturing that relationship, I feel like is the first step to just instill that care for the environment and just observe what's going on around them. That goes back to just that healing, those relationships.

(40:03):
Because, centuries and centuries ago, everyone knew all the plants, all the things. There wasn't that broken relationship there. So, with youth, starting young in that way and then with introducing cooking and stuff like that, is just as they get older, it's just more in their repertoire. They feel more confident. The kids we've been working with now for multiple years, they remember what we made the year before. They'll ask for it. They'll show younger kids. They'll make it at home. Those small things, those ripple effects are huge. It's really a privilege here in Garfield that we can be so local. We're not a citywide thing. We're not a national thing. We are Garfield Neighborhood, and we work with people from other neighborhoods, but with youth particularly. I live like a block away. It's kids I see when I'm walking. It's kids who walk by the farm on a daily basis. So, you can really just develop those relationships and that trust. So, that's particularly with youth. Then, when youth involve, their parents are involved and other adults in their life. So, that's an easy kind of connection piece.

Di-ay Battad (41:10):
Can you talk about the importance of collaboration and community in the work that you do?

AJ Monsma (41:17):
Yeah. That's key, right? My background is social work. Then, with being in Peace Corps, it was just hammered into me that if anything is going to stick and have value, it needs to be done with community. It was really good having that training just with Rwanda particular, because it's slow work. But, you'd know that going into it. If you train your eyes to see little things that happen, it's very encouraging along the way. It's just a lot of little things. Those add up over time, and you kind of just look back one day, and you're like, "Oh, look at this." Now, people know this place. Now, kids are telling their friends to come here. Now, teenagers will be up here shooting TikTok dance videos.

(42:06):
It just changes, and it's great to see. Those little things are huge if you know that and understand that. With that collaboration, it's worth it, I guess, just to take the time to get that feedback the whole way. Then, you get a lot of ... Buy-in is such a word that's thrown around a lot, but that's essential to stay relevant and to make sure that the organization is actually serving people, doing what it's supposed to do.

Di-ay Battad (42:38):
Okay, so I like this question. There's a lot of messaging on social media about individual actions that people can do to contribute to fighting climate change, things like zero waste lifestyles and sourcing food locally. Can you talk about the difference between that and collective action?

AJ Monsma (42:58):
Tonight is Thursday nights. It's volunteer night. We have folks who come up here every Thursday to weed or to pull things. I don't understand why they do it. I don't know that I would do that, but to be a part of the group, to collectively do something like that, and to understand the impact it has, even on a very small level, is such a hopeful thing. To do that while you're talking and joking is such a hopeful thing, of doing that in community and in collaboration. So, I just think the collective act of doing something simple, it's just the ... I don't know. The benefits of it are so much bigger than you would expect.

(43:36):
So, the individual act, some people come on their own and do stuff as well, but all those things add up collectively on the farm. But, there's just something really special about working with people and the hope that that brings, even if it's an easy thing like tearing out knotweed, which is one of our worst invasives. Some people, that's just what they do. They come and we knotweed or come so that our main wall is clear of weed so that when people walk by, they can read the signs that the kids made, because that makes people happy when they walk by. Food is great. The farm is great. Those things are happening because we're here, the farm, but it's really just about being with people and doing something beneficial.

Di-ay Battad (44:18):
When thinking about facing a problem like climate change, what strengths does your community have?

AJ Monsma (44:24):
Yeah, when facing climate change, Garfield Neighborhood is a very family oriented neighborhood, and it is changing. There's a lot of gentrification happening and a lot of new faces in the neighborhood. But, then there's also lots of homeowners and families who have been here for generations, and they're really close knit and tight with each other. I think having that strength of community is one of the best things moving forward with climate change, because your neighbors will help you, will bail you out, if you need a place to stay, if you need food. Having that social, I guess, network is going to be ... I think that's going to make a huge difference.

(45:07):
I think a lot of people saw that with COVID when it hit and were supposed to be isolating. I know for me personally, with my friend group, the family groups, the folks who seem to be most resilient were the ones who had strong relationships with their immediate neighbors or a community that was local. I think that's going to be the same thing with all that's going to happen, all the many things that will come because of global warming and climate change. It's just having strong relationships with where you live. And, there's a lot of folks in Garfield who do grow their own food and who know about that. There's a lot of openness to bartering and exchange. There's a lot of resilience, because it is a neighborhood that since the '60s has been primarily African American. Just being able to operate under the mainstream of doing stuff brings you resiliency. It brings you creativity in how you economize and do all that and your relationships and how you network. So, those are all going to be strengths.

Di-ay Battad (46:08):
What are your hopes for your community, maybe for this area in the next however many years?

AJ Monsma (46:18):
Just my general hopes for the neighborhood?

Di-ay Battad (46:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AJ Monsma (46:22):
So, I am a resident of Garfield. I am a member. My home church is in Garfield. Both my husband and I work in Garfield. We love this neighborhood, and we're very lucky that our lives are so small and provincial. I think because of that, we are very tied to the health of Garfield and our hopes ... We both work with youth. My husband's a teacher. I work with a lot of youth at the farm, is the safety of the youth and youth just having opportunities to engage in ways that are going to empower them and lift them up. The farm is one of those things that we can work with youth. As we're trying to make the farm more and more of a community green space that folks want to be at, and that's a healthy thing, always to have a safe green space where you can eat lunch, where you can bike, where you can walk around, so just the overall health of the neighborhood being tied to this and the green space of there.

(47:23):
But, just in general with gentrification happening, there's a lot of ... not fear or anxiety, but lots of hesitancy in how to move forward with our organization and how to honor old residents and new residents and moving forward. But, with all that change happening, I think my hope is that there can be a lot of cohesion that comes between neighbors, new and old, as we move forward, again because I think that makes our neighborhood much more resilient in challenges that come. So, just closer relationships and healthy outlets for youth to engage in would be the biggest hopes.

Michael Pisano (48:19):
Many thanks to AJ, Israel, and all the folks at Garfield Community Farms for the excellent work that they do. You can learn more about that at GarfieldFarm.com. Thanks also to Di-ay Battad for their field reporting on today's episode. And, of course, thanks to Taiji Nelson, Sloan MacCrae, Nicole Heller, Sierra Krist, and Bonnie McGill at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The music in today's episode was made by two of my most talented friends, Mark Mangini and Amos Levy. They also made the soundtrack for the We Are Nature Video Companion Series. We'll link to you in the show notes. Until next time, here are some wise words about kinship and action.

(49:08):
The United Nation says that climate change is nothing less than code red for humanity. It is already brutalizing many of the places we come from and rely upon. It is driving us apart, making us forget that we are not just interconnected, but interrelated. We are all kin, and if we're not careful, climate change is going to make us forget who we are, animals of remarkable intellect, capable of immense care and compassion, even when grave injustice has laid us low. So, my message to you is simple. Remember who you are. Remember that you have many relatives, human and non-human. And, remember that we all come from somewhere and that those places and the place called Earth need us to fight for them. That was Julian Brave NoiseCat from his essay, "How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse" in Emergence Magazine. I've been and hope to remain your host, Michael Pisano. Thanks for listening.