Gil Friend and David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

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PLOWBOY: The idea of an urban community producing and distributing a large part of everything it eats must have seemed pretty farfetched to a lot of people when you originally introduced the idea. Did you get any negative feedback?

MORRIS: Some. When we first talked to our neighbors about decentralization and local self-reliance they laughed at us . . . literally. They thought it was Pollyannaish and going backward a hundred years. Some friends even sent us newspaper stories about back-to-the-land movements . . . as if we were raising sheep and pigs in the city!

FRIEND: Over and above that, we also scared a lot of people when we talked about "local control". Most individuals who heard that phrase for the first time were immediately afraid that their neighbor would soon be sticking his or her nose into their kitchens . . . and their bedrooms!

PLOWBOY: How did you convince the worried individuals that what you were trying to do made sense?

FRIEND: Well, it wasn't difficult once we had rephrased society's problems in city terms. Our neighbors understand the city, because that's where they live and where most of them will continue to live. The city is where they eat their food and where they produce the waste products which, in any sane agricultural system, would be recycled back to the land and used as fertilizer to produce more food.

Right now, you know, we city residents import what we eat from the country . . . sometimes from hundreds of miles away. We ship our food in at great expense and then we spend even more money on costly processing which often hurts its nutritional value. Then we turn right around and export our wastes long distances—again, at great cost—and dump those wastes into our rivers and lakes . . . which are killed in the process.

Once we had explained this so that people here in Adams-Morgan could see how it affected their lives, the rest was easy. Our neighbors became receptive to the ideas that we could shorten the pathways which brought our food in and took our wastes away. They understood that "local control" meant having a bigger say—individually and collectively—in how our community handled the food it ate and used the energy it needed.

The rest followed naturally and, before long, we had a core group interested in growing fresh food-food which, because it was fresh, had a higher nutritional value—right here in the neighborhood. And that led us to thinking about how easy—and natural—it would be to recycle our wastes back into our gardens. This is the way nature has worked for billions of years, as you know. All we're doing is trying to reproduce that natural cycle on a local level. We're just shortening the pathways of what we eat and what we expel into self-sustaining and permanent loops. Loops which we directly control on a neighborhood level.

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