JenniferOladipo.com

Eight years ago, ankle-deep in piles of compost and dirt, I wondered who on earth would eat food out of this vacant lot that once housed a car-repair shop in a sketchy Savannah, GA neighborhood. Turns out today, thousands of people would.

Check out this week’s LEO for  my interview with Will Allen, who for the moment seems like the national poster boy for urban farming - I mean really urban, like vacant house lots and old industrial sites. And really farming, like enough for people to live, like fish farms in green houses. He doesn’t want you to just fix the food system, he wants you to be the food system. And as far as agricultural poster boys go, he is definitely not the norm.

How does a year sneak by like this?

Well, no reason to dwell on it. Better to post a few recent writings and move on. May I recommend a look at a local movement to make green political color and an irreverent examination of Earth Day. More to come, of course.

So I got curious about the feasibility of green-collar jobs in Louisville, my fair city. It turns out there’s potential, but not necessarily momentum. Read the results of my asking around in this week’s Louisville Eccentric Observer.

The Green for All’s conference on green-collar jobs was a great place to learn about efforts all over the country to make them a reality. I wrote a round-up of the experience posted at Grist. I’ll continue to report on the subject, including an upcoming piece about what’s happening in my own city.

A fun article I wrote for Get Out! about Leave No Child Inside. It’s a clever play on you-know-what, spawned by the efforts of the guy who brought you “Nature Deficit Disorder.”

Get Out! is a great webzine covering outdoor lifestyle the Ohio River basin with utter disregard for geopolitical borders.

New! Check out my essay on environmentalism and diversity in the current issue of Utne Reader, originally published in the November/December issue of Orion Magazine.

See other recent work in the ‘This Just In‘ section of this site.