Mr. Homegrown Evolution had a dream earlier this week in which we sold our crumbling Silver Lake bungalow (to an entertainment industry schmuck? see ad above) and moved into an apartment. The owners of the apartment building had torn up the parking lot and had converted every spare bit of space into a mini-farm. There were impressive rows of cabbage and other greens all planted in plowed rows. The crops took up so much room that there was, in fact, very little space left to even walk. It seemed, at first, a pleasant dream of a utopian future of efficient urban land use with an emphasis on growing tasty and healthy food. But when I awoke I realized that this idyllic vision was actually a nightmare. Those rows of crops were there because they had to be there. The proverbial shit had come down and desperation had set in.

The dream capped a week of gloomy news both personal and national. My 83 year old mom broke her sternum in an automobile accident, making her yet another victim of a city designed for cars that forces everyone to drive, even for distances of less than a mile. After the accident, many hours were spent dealing with doctors, auto body shops, insurance companies and the vile Automobile Club whose lobbyists, by the way, are busy in the state capital pushing for the auto-centric planning that ruins our cities and victimizes our children and parents.

While I dealt with the phone calls and paperwork, record breaking hot temperatures challenged our vegetables and chickens. A symptom of global warming perhaps? Yet another reason to suggest that the car-centric planning might not be a good idea?

To continue ranting, this played out against the background of rice rationing at Costco and Wal-Mart stores due to poor harvests and food price inflation in Asia. How about the continuing unraveling of Wall Street’s depraved casino, not to mention food riots and energy shortages?

Solutions? I’ve got some ideas, but after seeing this reprehensible ad from Farmer’s Insurance it’s obvious that there’s a hell of a lot of work to do. It will be hard to counter the status quo without, as James Howard Kunstler puts it, “appearing ridiculous, like an old granny telling you to fetch your raincoat and rubbers because a force five hurricane is organizing itself offshore, beyond the horizon.”

And yet I don’t want to fall into the gloomy, apocalyptic trap of some of the other folks in the urban homesteading movement. After a enjoyable evening last night at a fundraiser for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, my dark mood lifted as I was reminded that good things are happening out there. Change comes slowly, one step at a time, requiring great patience. Like gardening, bread baking and home brewing there will be mistakes and setbacks. But there will also be a slow accumulation of knowledge, a gradual revolution. Someday, perhaps, that apartment mini-farm seen in my dream will become reality for all the right reasons.

Loose chickens in Houston

A neighborhood whose demographics fall somewhere between the extremes of the crack den and the country club presents just the right level of civic inattention to allow the urban homesteader to get away with many of the illegal projects profiled in this blog: greywater, backyard poultry, and front yard vegetable gardening, to mention just a few. Ideally you have a balance between order and disorder–neither gunfire nor the prying eyes of city inspectors. Where I’m staying in Houston, with its flocks of loose chickens, packs of feral dogs, and broken down bungalows seems just about right. Our neighborhood in Los Angeles is seeming less ideal with the news from Mrs. Homegrown Evolution, that we’ve earned our first citation, an indicator that our neighborhood is tilting dangerously towards the country club side of the demographic equation.

Nine years of dog ownership have gone by with no problems until this week, when a new neighbor decided to report our dog and several others in the neighborhood to animal control for barking. We have to buy a $100 dog license (while not a Ron Paulista, I tilt libertarian enough to not want any stinking licenses), and wait fifteen days to see if we need to go to a hearing, all for an elderly and well behaved Doberman who spends most of his time indoors, has no access to the front yard and goes promptly to sleep at 10:00 p.m.

Thanks to an alert teen just down the block, we know the identity of the uptight yuppie who ratted us out. Now the neighborly and gentlemanly thing to have done would have been to come over, knock on the door and have talk to us face to face. We’d be happy to work something out–keep the front window closed perhaps. Most of us on the block know each other and have never had any problems getting along. But it’s also Los Angeles, a car-centric city where people lead lives of isolation and rage, locked in metal and glass cages, braving hellish traffic on the way to twenty hour a day shifts churning out sitcoms and bad movies. Los Angeles has the community spirit of an anonymous internet chat room, with meaningful dialog replaced by never ending flame wars.

It’s also America, where the majority of the population is clinically depressed. And one of the indicator behaviors for depression is an irrational fixation on minor annoyances, like barking dogs, leaf litter, raccoons and group bicycle rides. Go to any neighborhood meeting, and you’ll see medicated NIMBYs lashing at all of life’s minor indignities.

Our homes and neighborhoods need the liberation that comes with a creative and healthy level of chaos. Visionary Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who passed away recently, conceived his life’s work when faced with the task of making safer streets in a small Dutch town that had run out of money. He fixed the problem with the radical idea of removing almost all the traffic lights, signs, curbs even the lane stripes, creating a concept known as “shared space.” Monderman asks, “Who has the right of way? I don’t care. People . . . have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains.”

When we have to think for ourselves, we cooperate, solve problems, and come up with creative solutions. A healthy dose of chaos is always the best place to start.

Above, the image of a “Vegetable Caterpillar”, an unlucky hybrid between vegetable and insect, from an essay by Lily Pepper on the implications of animal/vegetable hybrids brought about by advances in genetic manipulation. Read this excellent essay in the current issue of Steps Magazine here.

Due to a set of circumstances too ridiculous to describe, we’ve got to change the name of our website yet again. We’re dropping the “R” and the overused and no longer meaningful word “Revolution” to become Homegrown Evolution. In short we’re evolving and we feel this word better describes the gestalt of our eclectic activities and our desire to move things forward as best we can.

This humble blog began as a sort of diary, a way to keep track of and integrate many disparate activities that all together are what used to be called “home economics”. A publisher, the bold and creative Process Media, spotted us and asked us to write a book, The Urban Homestead, thus beginning an unexpected course, which has forced us to consider things such as branding and marketing.

Like all children of the late 20th century we’re inescapably linked to a “mediated” culture, to a world of appearances defined by mass media in all its many forms. In the midst of having to figure out a new name for ourselves, along with the incredibly frustrating task of finding a matching domain name not already being squatted on by speculators in Turkey, we discovered a remarkable book, Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita. Zengotita argues that the media surrounding us is oriented towards what he calls a “flattered self”, thus things like blogs, Facebook, even the weather channel are all ultimately all about “me”. Furthermore the sheer volume of media we are exposed to, compared with the past, changes the way we relate to each other and the world, resulting in a pervasive mediascape, which Zengotita refers to as the “blob”, that is impossible to escape. For us the lesson of Mediated is the inescapable nature of the “blob” was liberating rather than depressing. It’s our job to navigate, not try to escape, this post-modern house of mirrors.

In this spirit of blobby navigation, we present the new and improved homegrownevolution.com. The old url will still work, as will homegrownevolution.org (take that squatters!). We’ve added the Homegrown Evolution Store which will feature items we find useful. Purchases will help defray our mortgage. Please be patient as we make the changeover. And remember to update your links!