120 121 Tomorrow. The answers are written in the ground Stefano Santangelo Echoing, for those familiar with these projects, is the resonance of the name of a forebearer of nonconformist cultivation techniques, in contrast to the intensive agriculture of the 20th century, whose name is almost never mentioned: that is Rudolph Steiner, the father of anthroposophy and biodynamic agriculture. Much like in Steiner's biodynamics, the focus turns to ancient agricultural techniques, and the core of this philosophy is the soil, its regeneration, its care. For those who despair as victims of urbanization, believing that the stone guest in metropolitan life is soil, there's a solution: Detroit. Once a city just reliant on the automotive industrial monoculture, it has now become a model for urban agriculture. Out of the ruins of the collapsing industrial empire, a thousand four hundred micro-fiefdoms in the form of organic farms and gardens have emerged, unified under the association Keep Growing, engaged in safeguarding – thanks to an army of twenty thousand volunteers, made up of those who had no means to escape elsewhere: the underprivileged – the city's food sovereignty. To mention the words of the bygone golden age of Detroit’s emperor, Henry Ford: «If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself». The Keep Growing warriors know that urban agriculture won't replace traditional farming, but they aim to complement it, producing enough food to feed half of the population. From reconquering soil through agriculture to regaining sovereignty, the step is as short as it is choral. Perhaps there's a missing question-mark in the title of what is undoubtedly one of the most significant documentaries, in recent years, on the topics of the climate crisis and the capitalist model crash. But it can only be removed twenty years from now, and only if we will truly be able to profoundly figure out what Charles Darwin meant when he stated: «It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change». Tomorrow (Demain), 118’, 2015 Directed by Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent Screenplay by Cyril Dion Produced by Bruno Levy www.fermedubec.com www.detroitagriculture.net Conceived and directed by the French duo Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent in 2015, the documentary Tomorrow (France, 2015) stands as an antidote to the apocalyptic, all-encompassing scenarios without an escape route, constantly churned out by the media as a conditioned response to the tolling bell of the environmental crisis; informational inputs that often leave the audience with chaotic anxiety or resignation as their sole outcomes. But there is another side to this story: it is the one grounded on positive reactions that can germinate from hope, able to inspire acting and planning – the side represented by Tomorrow. Across five chapters (Agriculture, Energy, Economy, Democracy, Education), and in a modern-day equivalent of Jules Verne's Around the world in eighty days, Laurent and Dion embark on a journey that takes them to places as far apart as the United Kingdom, India and San Francisco among others, on the lookout for possible alternatives – or rather, demonstrating that these alternatives already exist, some for decades. Speaking of the future is not a utopian dream but a concrete path that may take twenty years or more, hoping it won't bring us back to the starting point, as it was for Phileas Fogg's journey. Perhaps lacking a dedicated chapter on the reduction of consumption and its driving desires, Tomorrow still provides inspiring examples of how to economize land use in agriculture, minimizing the extension of territory torn from the natural ecosystem while increasing yield per hectare. In Normandy, particularly, Charles and Perrine Hervé-Gruyer, organic farmers, have launched a project that moves in the opposite direction to the industrial agriculture one. The latter relies heavily on nonrenewable energies and extensive land use, ultimately resulting in soil destruction and depletion. In eight years, this couple turned a land that was at the lowest fertility level, a rocky surface with barely ten centimeters of poor soil, into a lush garden, aided significantly by their complete abandonment of fossil fuel-powered machinery. Their orchard-garden replicates a natural forest, but with only edible fruit trees, operating as a fully self-sustaining system that doesn't require irrigation or fertilizers. Through the use of permaculture, combining plants that, as in the natural ecosystem, coexist in a symbiotic, balanced and only seemingly chaotic system, they achieved production levels unimaginable in traditional agriculture: fifty-eight thousand euros, to put it in the universal language of economics. This revenue was obtained from products harvested on a mere one thousand square meters, equivalent to what is typically produced from one hectare in traditional agriculture from crops of the same type. The goal is to demonstrate that if everyone were to apply agroecology – and the soil care it entails – production would double; and applying permaculture, it would quadruple. These two cultivation techniques, real philosophies of soil care, could potentially lead to the rise of millions of new small farms and jobs globally, regenerating compromised ecosystems, bringing higher earnings to farmers, and producing healthy food. This manifesto of the future, though it might sound utopian and romantic, is indeed highly feasible and pragmatic.
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