Dear Mr. President

Stephen J. Toope
President and Vice-Chancellor
Office of the President
The University of British Columbia
6328 Memorial Road
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2

Dear President Toope;

"Imagine cities as places where there is concern for air, water, and land, where working people can afford to live and raise their families. Imagine rural life protected and preserved, not turned into one commercial strip after another."
--Carl Anthony

A tiny tree frog covered in pollen emerges from a zucchini blossom. A hummingbird drinks nectar from nasturtium blossoms as I gather edible petals to sell at the UBC farm market. A woman in traditional Mayan dress measures two pounds of clay-coloured beans in a hand-made scale. Four nine year old boys taste rhubarb for the first time in the muffins they have made from scratch. These are a few of my favourite memories of UBC farm.

"The natural world is a resource for aesthetic appreciation, education, and recreation. Cities that are barren of trees suffer from the heat-island effect as pavement and roofs absorb and radiate heat. When soils are displaced with paving, water can't percolate into the aquifers, and this too affects the microclimate."

I have been volunteering at UBC farm for three years now. I've worked in the market garden, extracting honey, and teaching elementary school students where their food comes from in the Landed Learning Program. As a mother, artist, and a girl from the prairies the farm has been a place of education, enchantment, and inspiration for myself and our entire family.

"Building community gardens, or opening up and restoring creeks and watersheds, provides opportunities to bring people of different jurisdictions, neighborhoods, and social classes together."

I spent my childhood in a home surrounded by wheat fields and natural prairie. I have seen the degradation of the grasslands, and the ill effects of increased pesticide use on the land. When I go to UBC Farm I see hope for the future of our food security. I meet students who understand the need to farm ecologically and sustainably. I see people who care passionately about the health of our communities and the land that sustains us physically and spiritually. These are the people who will use their knowledge to put food on our tables and pass their wisdom onto future generations.

"Today our food is grown, harvested, processed, packaged, distributed, shipped, and marketed by a small number of giant corporations. Folks in cities have no idea where their food comes from. The small family farm is no longer economically viable. Rural communities bear the brunt of noxious corporate farming practices. The money that urban populations spend for food increasingly pays for industrial farming monocultures, dependent on toxic pesticides, and transportation costs for shipping our food from countries all over the world to urban supermarkets."

The land is out teacher, and the lesson is life. As our population moves into cities and out of rural areas and urban sprawl eats up our agricultural reserves, we are in danger of destroying life itself. If "eco-density" means destroying the green spaces in urban environments, it is not a viable concept. The University of British Columbia can preserve UBC Farm as it is to set an international standard for integrating farms into cities and preserving our quality of life. On the other hand, you could choose to aid in the destruction of the social and ecological fabric of this city. What kind of legacy will you leave behind? How do you want to be remembered?

"Imagine vital exchanges across generations and beautiful places where people gather.Urban life is at its most vibrant when people from various parts of the world bring together their music, food, cultural systems, and religious expressions. All of these make for cities that manifest the strength and brilliance of the human garden."

All quotes are from Just, Green, and Beautiful Cities by Carl Anthony, director of the Ford Foundation's Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative.
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1266)