Inkwell

Talk with authors, artists and other interesting people. Viewable by all on The WELL and the Web.

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Michelle Obama garnered praise for starting a vegetable garden on a patch of the White House lawn. However, it's unlikely that she ever encountered homeless scavengers, teenage gangsters, drive-by shootings, or ferocious junkyard dogs in the course of her gardening. And she certainly hasn't found herself scavenging chicken carcasses, fish guts, and bread from restaurant dumpsters to feed two ravenous pigs.

Novella Carpenter, on the other hand, has lived all these decidedly un-pastoral scenes and more in her quest to meld her back-to-the-land childhood with her life in one of Oakland, CA's grittiest neighborhoods. In Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, Carpenter tells the improbable tale of her quest to cultivate a working farm amidst a crumbling inner city neighborhood so derelict the locals have christened it "Ghost Town".

In the process, she touches on some of the most pertinent issues of our time -- environment, food security, industrial agriculture, sustainability, bio-ethics, energy independence, and more -- in a hilarious, literate, and sometimes surreal chronicle of her transformation of a garbage-strewn vacant lot in the ghetto into a real, productive farm.

Join Novella in the Inkwell as we discuss her post-modern Green Acres yarn.

Hosted by: David Adam Edelstein (davadam), Bruce Umbaugh (bumbaugh), Lisa Harris (lrph)

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