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Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE) hopes to bolster sustainable agriculture in California by strengthening rural-suburban-urban linkages—directly challenging the state’s history of conflict between these sectors over land, water, and other resources. To create sustainable communities while promoting agriculture, SAGE emphasizes a flexible approach to regional planning, one in which mixed-use and collaborative strategies evolve in response to local conditions. SAGE terms this blend of sustainable farming and the new urbanism the “New Ruralism.”
Moving beyond farmers’ markets, SAGE helps communities create zones that incorporate parkland and working farms, expand small-scale agriculture at the edge of urban sprawl, and explore the connection between landscape, community identity, and natural resources. In Oakland, the latter program led to the AgriCultural Roots fair, a festival blending healthy living, an examination of farming’s role in the area’s history, and a celebration of cultural pluralism.
SAGE offers a valuable voice during a period in which rising energy costs and the collapse of the housing market have led to the decline in property values in suburban areas and cookie-cutter housing developments—and predictions that these trends will accelerate the growth of “walkable” urban communities. This window of uncertainty allows planners and community leaders to explore new possibilities for both economic development and the redefinition of urban infrastructure. The sustainable, mixed-use alternatives offered by SAGE answer the needs facing cities during this period of change by emphasizing local, integrated, approaches to land use.
. Historian Shae Davidson's research interests include public policy and the relationship between culture and civil society. His publications range from articles on industrial history to absurdist poetry.
