logo
    • Magazine
    • Membership
    • Donate
  • Racial Justice
  • Economic Justice
    • Collections
  • Climate Justice
  • Health Justice
  • Leadership
  • CONTENT TYPES
  • Subscribe
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Complimentary Webinars
    • Premium On-Demand Webinars
  • Membership
  • Submissions

A Nonprofit Birthday Party Carries a Perennial Message

Ruth McCambridge
September 26, 2016
Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
40th-birthday
40th Birthday at home / Dave Haygarth

September 24, 2016; Salina Journal

The Land Institute celebrated its 40th birthday at its 38th annual Prairie Festival in Salina, Kansas, with more than 1200 in attendance. The mission of the organization reads as follows:

When people, land, and community are as one, all three members prosper; when they relate not as members but as competing interests, all three are exploited. By consulting Nature as the source and measure of that membership, The Land Institute seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned, while promoting a community life at once prosperous and enduring.

In line with this, the outgoing president of the organization called attendees to remake farming in a sustainable rather than extractive model by focusing on the use of perennial plants such as some types of wheat and sorghum.

“I’m not talking about mere nostalgia,” Wes Jackson, Institute co-founder and outgoing president, said. “I’m talking about a practical necessity.”

Jackson emphasized that an extractive economy is not sustainable. “We’re so steeped in the Industrial Revolution, we don’t know where we are in it,” he said. “Somewhere 100 or 200 years in the future, whatever humans are around will say, ‘The Industrial Revolution was a bad idea.’”

Don Worster, a former Land Institute board member, provided a historical perspective. “We learned the Land Institute couldn’t succeed by secession.” Rather than seeing capitalism and industry as the enemy, he said the Institute found a peaceful path to coexistence. Wealth wasn’t “an unmitigated evil.”

Sign up for our free newsletters

Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

“If we were going to do real service,” Worster said, “we were going to need money.”

The Land Institute is designing an Ecosphere Studies Curriculum which would entail “a major rearranging of the philosophical furniture”—not only of agriculture, but of community and the economy.

That is certainly the case, but we were struck by the commonalities between what was being discussed in that crowded barn in the middle of Kansas and what Douglas Rushkoff said to us in a recent interview about the importance of the nonprofit role in turning the corner from an extractive to sustainable economy.

We live on a planet that—I mean, I hate to admit it, but we might have a fixed quantity of real estate on the planet. From space, it looks like a sphere; it doesn’t look like it’s growing to me. This looks like it’s about it, and it may be able to go on for a whole long time, way longer than people think, but it needs to start thinking about itself as a regenerative system, more like a coral reef or a forest than like a corporate marketplace that’s supposed to expand forever.

Whenever I say this, people accuse me of being Malthusian, that I’m saying things are limited and we’re all going to die, and I’m really not saying that. Things are limited, but you can still grow. It doesn’t mean you can’t have progress and change. You can have all sorts of innovations and shifts of stuff, but even if we may be able to grow, even grow forever, there’s a certain point at which you can only extract so much water from an aquifer before it can’t replenish itself fast enough and the aquifer is gone. Yes, in a billion years, assuming the planet is not gone, the aquifer will replenish itself, but maybe not fast enough for the human beings who want so much more water from it than it can really supply.

So, happy birthday, Land Institute, and perennial happy returns!—Ruth McCambridge

Share
Tweet
Share
Email
Print
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth McCambridge

Ruth is Editor Emerita of the Nonprofit Quarterly. Her background includes forty-five years of experience in nonprofits, primarily in organizations that mix grassroots community work with policy change. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Ruth spent a decade at the Boston Foundation, developing and implementing capacity building programs and advocating for grantmaking attention to constituent involvement.

More about: agricultureCommunity DevelopmentEnvironmentHuman ServicesNonprofit News

Become a member

Support independent journalism and knowledge creation for civil society. Become a member of Nonprofit Quarterly.

Members receive unlimited access to our archived and upcoming digital content. NPQ is the leading journal in the nonprofit sector written by social change experts. Gain access to our exclusive library of online courses led by thought leaders and educators providing contextualized information to help nonprofit practitioners make sense of changing conditions and improve infra-structure in their organizations.

Join Today
logo logo logo logo logo
See comments

NPQ_Winter_2022Subscribe Today
You might also like
How to Align Assets with Mission: Small Steps That Nonprofits Can Take
Anna Smukowski
Scaling Deep, Not Up: Lessons from Detroit
Suntae Kim
How do water shutoffs impact low-income communities?
Iris Crawford
Can CDFIs Rein in Capitalist Excess?
Steve Dubb
How Land Banks and Community Land Trusts Can Partner for Racial Justice
Beth Sorce and Kim Graziani
Organizing a Community Around Food Sovereignty
Ashley Gurvitz

Popular Webinars

Remaking the Economy

Black Food Sovereignty, Community Stories

Register Now

Combating Disinformation and Misinformation in 21st-Century Social Movements

Register Now

Remaking the Economy

Closing the Racial Wealth Gap

Register Now
You might also like
How to Align Assets with Mission: Small Steps That...
Anna Smukowski
Scaling Deep, Not Up: Lessons from Detroit
Suntae Kim
How do water shutoffs impact low-income communities?
Iris Crawford

Like what you see?

Subscribe to the NPQ newsletter to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

See our newsletters

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.

Independent & in your mailbox.

Subscribe today and get a full year of NPQ for just $59.

subscribe
  • About
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Copyright
  • Careers

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

 

Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.