A road trip through California’s worst drought in 1,200 years, and the folks working to restore broken ecosystems and rewild lost landscapes.
by Joel Caldwell
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CAMP BIRDHOUSE | Los Angeles County, California
Recasting the Hollywood Hills.
“Hollywood is important,” Jonny Allen tells me over coffee and toast with his partner Bella LeNestour. “Because this is where stories are told. This is where our dystopian futures are created, through media, and we could have an impact on that by telling a new story of interdependence and possibility. That’s as much our work as learning to cultivate the soil.”
Bella and Jonny, both artists, founded Camp BirdHouse together—a community garden and ERC a mile from the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles—to answer a paramount question: How do we live a life that the planet now demands? Their garden is a food forest, bursting with edible perennial plants, fruit and nut trees planted to support biodiversity and improve the health of the soil. Two residential buildings on the property send grey water to the garden from sinks, showers and appliances. To prevent evaporation, they mulch and cover the soil; an extensive tree canopy helps manage the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground.
Unable to afford a large tract of land in the pricey Hollywood Hills, the BirdHouse team creates relationships with neighbors who buy into the project and participate in regenerating their land, creating a mosaic of biodiversity within the urban landscape. One plot is dedicated to a medicinal herb garden while another is focused on food production. A third parcel, owned by the city, became a demonstration site to show how a severely desertified piece of land can be transformed into a wildlife corridor.
Listen to Jonny talk about the importance of imagination
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Transcript
Jonny: Hollywood is important to us because this is where stories are told. This is where our futures are designed, in a sense, through media, and that we could have an impact on that because most people live in a world of resignation, and we believe that it just takes imagination. And once we have developed the skill of imagining a more beautiful future, we can live into that future. And that’s, I’d say, as much our work as learning to cultivate the soil, which we do.
“The moment you begin paying attention and developing a relationship with plants,” Bella tells me, “You can’t say, let’s put a parking lot here instead.” Handing me an apricot from a nearby tree, Jonny pauses his harvest to look through the canopy at the Los Angeles sprawl below. “Most people live in a world of unrecognized resignation,” he says. “We believe it just takes imagination—we need to develop the skill of imagining—and then we can live into that more beautiful future.”
After saying farewell to Jonny and Bella, it’s time for me to head home to South Carolina. Descending into the LA traffic en route to the airport, the faces, places and voices I’ve encountered during this tour of California flash through my mind, warring with the endless concrete and garbage-strewn streets to capture my imagination and establish the dominant narrative. The folks I’ve met refuse to give up on working toward a better future. They stand in defiance of the prevailing paradigm, modeling a better way of living. And I choose to join them. As John D. Liu says, “This is the great work of our time.”
