In World War II, Americans were urged to plant Victory Gardens wherever they could — in backyards, on rooftops, in school yards and public spaces — so food could be sent to our troops and our allies abroad. By 1943, these grassroots efforts supplied 40% of the vegetables and produce for the entire country. Canning and pickling, root cellars and easily dried crops like storage beans, helped ensure that ordinary people had food year round.
I remember my slender young mother looking through the rationing books and working the garden where she, my younger brother and I, lived at the far end of a dead-end road in upstate New York in a family cluster of three houses, while our 30-something father was away in North Africa and occupied Europe. When we visited our grandparents in Portland, Maine, the windows had to be covered with thick black cloth every night, because German submarines were just off the coast. To a small child, though, meeting the emergencies of the day was not a hardship, just a way of life.
Today, war, terrible as it is, is a lesser threat than the devastation coming at us with global climate change. Consider food supply: until recently, the Central Valley of California has been the source of a large portion of the fruit, vegetables and nuts consumed by our country’s growing and increasingly urban population. With the prolonged droughts of the past 10 years, the ability of the Central Valley to continue to feed the rest of us is now radically reduced.
Likewise, for corn, wheat and meat production, eight key Midwestern states draw water from the Ogallala Aquifer: here, too, the future will be very different from the past. For thousands of years, this shallow aquifer has been recharged each summer by slowly melting snowpacks in the eastern Rockies. Now there is less precipitation in the Rockies altogether, and with a warmer climate, increasingly it comes down as rain instead of snow, and runs off quickly instead of gradually as it used to.
Serious food shortages are coming to the United States in the near future. Blueberries from Peru? Avocados from Mexico? Beef from Argentina? Cheese from Europe? At what cost, and for how long?
So … what is to be done?
In addition to everything else needed to minimize the devastations of climate change, we must revive the Victory Gardens of yesteryear. Let’s call them Tomorrow Gardens. Let’s use today’s best practices in food growing and nutrition — soil-building, no-till, pollinator-friendly, organic, nutrient-dense, dispersed, adaptive, regenerative — to stave off serious food shortages, as best we can. It won’t be easy but consider the alternative.
Calculating New England’s reliance on food produced elsewhere is tricky, but data from the ongoing New England Feeding New England study at Brandeis suggest we import more than half of our vegetables, and even more of most other things we eat.
Yet we are blessed to have the land, the rain and the warming climate to do so much more. As some forward-looking folks have been saying, yes! buy local, and grow food everywhere. New England’s commercial farmers will do all they can, just as they did during World War II. However, we can’t expect them to meet all our needs in the hard times ahead.
Tomorrow Gardens will help ensure the best possible outcomes, given the difficult givens, for ourselves and for the children of the future. Let’s make Tomorrow Gardens, big and small, town by town and county by county, a conscious, can-do way of life.
Beginning now.
Sue Bridge lives in Conway and is the founder of Wildside Gardens.