In the fall semester of my senior year I began helping out at the Garfield Community Farm. Inspired by the agroecological farms and gardens I saw in Costa Rica, I wanted to put my hands to the soil and practice what I learned. The farm is located at the crest of a steep hill in Garfield, just next to a water tower. When I first arrived, I met with one of the farm’s founders who showed me around the garden and explained the farm’s purpose and goals. My work was never the same thing: I mowed, weeded, pruned, picked, mulched, planted, and watered something new each time I came to help. I was constantly meeting new people every time I came to the garden. Some people were part of church groups, some were students like me, and others were people who lived nearby. The farm serves as a way to provide local, sustainably grown food to the neighborhood by involving the very people it feeds. From this I learned that sustainability extends beyond the ecological framework of agriculture and the environment to the people that make it possible. Of course a farm or garden needs people to tend to them, but it also needs people to build a community to ensure its longevity and reliability as a food source.

If you’re new to Pittsburgh, it doesn’t take long for you to realize that it’s a city of hills. For the most part of the landscape, development has managed to engineer its way over the hills, valleys, and ravines. But for the some of the steepest hills, what developers have not attempted conquer, trash has filled their place. Throughout the city and in the surrounding area there is an abundance of illegal dumpsites that litter these steep, undeveloped hillslopes. DumpBusters is an organization that picks up tires, glass, shopping carts, plastics, clothes, and more, piece by piece from illegal dumpsites and transports this waste to the city’s waste management center. Joe Divack, the program coordinator, met me and other volunteers every Saturday morning to clean up a different dump site no matter the weather. For about three hours, we’d walk back and forth up and down the hill side, following the narrow path we shaped by our repeated trips until the truck was neatly and completely packed with trash. Joe made an emphasis to fit as much waste into the truck as possible. I saw it as a puzzle challenge to fit the disregarded and broken pieces together as tight as I could.  I also understood Joe’s intent to minimize trips to the waste center, he didn’t think that fixing people’s lack of care for the environment as an excuse to ignore his own impact. I took this as a valuable lesson that I apply to greening my everyday tasks.