Volunteers can begin Thursday helping at the IU Campus Garden initiative for the spring 2017 season.
Located at The Hilltop Gardens on 10th Street, students and volunteers can work within the IU Office of Sustainability’s edible gardening plot to provide educational opportunities to the Bloomington community and produce for the Indiana Memorial Union.
This amazing opportunity not only helps the community we live in but stresses the importance and benefits of community gardening and food system sustainability in general — something most people do not know enough about.
To many people, it’s common knowledge that energy production and factories negatively affect the environment. What is less universally understood is that the agriculture and factory farming industry represents one of the largest threats to the environment as well.
A study by the World Resources Institute found that the agricultural sector creates 14 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions: the most significant driver of observed climate change. To put this into perspective, the agricultural perspective produces more emissions than the entire transportation sector, which contributes 13.5 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.
What makes this statistic alarming is that this is the most conservative estimation, and that our current food system will become increasingly unsustainable.
Under our current food production system, the average meal will travel more than 1,500 miles from a factory farm and take seven to 14 days to get to your table. This combined with the United States’ meat-driven dietary preferences, which result in the most environmental damage, and a growing global population means environmental damage from farming has no end in sight. We need a change to our current food production systems.
This is where community gardens, and The Hilltop Gardens specifically, can help. First and foremost, community gardens help solve the problem of our unsustainable food system by simply educating more people that the problem exists. For anything to change, people must know that the problem exists in the first place.
The Hilltop Gardens succeeds at this goal by providing educational resources for youth, IU students and the Bloomington community. With workshops like “Getting started with backyard chickens,” The Hilltop Gardens also provides practical skills that help individuals promote sustainability.
Other than education, the Office of Sustainability’s edible gardening space strives to make material change one step at a time. By providing fresh, local produce to the IMU, this garden works to cut down on the 1,500 miles the average meal travels before reaching the end consumer and then forgoes a week-long shipment. Locally produced food contains more nutrients, thus making Bloomington a healthier place.
Community gardens are crucial to making change to our current unsustainable food sourcing practices. I urge all readers to keep in mind the benefits of locally sourced food, and to either volunteer at the Hilltop Community Gardens, or any other garden in your community.
sareynol@umail.iu.edu
