To be productive, to change, to accept and to grow

What would a productive downtown campus look like? This is a question I have begun asking myself, as I become more fluent in the concepts and theories of permaculture.

It's interesting how the meaning of productive has been changing and deepening, at least in my lexicon, over these past few months. It has broadened to encompass the landscape I find myself in, the relationships I'm part of. At the same time, I'm working to lose the original meaning, or at least the one I got ingrained with, the one that burdens, that eliminates humanity, that narrows existence down to simple questions of quantity regardless of quality, dare I say it, the capitalist's definition. It's what resonated with me on the last page of Rowan Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall (discussed in my post last Wednesday).

"The sun's disk touches the western hills. Shadows reach toward infinity across my meadow. I let it go wild this year. In the past I brush-hogged it every summer, but now that i know how many bumble bees make their homes in the tussocks of thick grass, I couldn't bear to do it. If there's one thing I've learned by paying attention to bees for a while, it's that we need to get rid of this false dichotomy between productive land and unproductive land. There's no such thing as unproductive natural land. There's only a failure of human insight to recognize the ways it contributes, a failure of human imagination to recognize what we need."