What can we learn from a Community Garden on the Arctic Treeline?

Back from the Canadian Arctic and more or less over the bout of COVID I caught the moment I got home. I was in Inuvik, on the Arctic tree line, and about 50 miles from Tuktoyaktuk, which is on the coast.

But why go up there?

A need to walk in the boreal forests in the many channels of the MacKenzie Delta?

Inuvik in the MacKenzie Delta

A fondness for tundra and pingoes?

Pingo Canadian Landmark on the shores of the Arctic Ocean

A bit of bathing in the Arctic Ocean?

Looking south from the tip of Tuktoyaktuk. The breakwaters are being expanded to deal with increasingly severe storms.

All of the above are certainly alluring, as was the opportunity to try some drone photography, but I was at the Inuvik Community Greenhouse’s Harvest Celebration.

Inuvik is a pretty interesting place. It was founded as a Northwest Territories government hub in the 50’s and now serves as a hub for the Territorial Government as well as the Gwich’in and Inuvialuit Settlement Regions and is home to about 3,000 people. The area highlights several interlocking issues around climate change; sustainable economic practices; indigenous sovereignty; petropolitics; renewable and distributed energy; and supply chains that I want to discuss further in the future, as well as the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation’s strategies. Today, however, I’ll focus on the thing that brought me up there in the first place: greenhouses.

The Inuvik Community Greenhouse. The solar panels provide energy in the summer and enough electricity can be stored to maintain basic functions in the winter. The trailer at right is an experimental hydropionic unit.

See, for a town in the Arctic that isn’t in Scandinavia/Russia, Inuvik is pretty well-connected. Unlike Iceland, Bodø, Tromsø, Murmansk, or Arkangelesk, which have year round sea access thanks to the warm North Atlantic Current (which also makes Svalbard accessible), or cities like Norilisk, Apatity, and Vorkuta, which were gulags (or otherwise forcibly settled as part of Stalin Era policies) built on mineral deposits and train lines, Inuvik is notable for being connected to the rest of Canada via an unpaved highway with ferries for river crossings in summer, and an ice road in winter. Supplies can also be brought down the MacKenzie on barges from Alaska, but during the period when the river is freezing or thawing, the town is only accessible by air. Due to climate change, this length of this period is becoming longer and the timing more unpredictable. While bridges and, indeed, entire railways are possible (as the Soviets showed), melting permafrost makes constructing large, permanent structures like bridges much more difficult.

The barges are also increasingly unviable; drought conditions have made the river too shallow for shipping.*

Tuktoyaktuk, finally connected to Inuvik by a gravel highway, could be enlarged as a port, but increased deglaciation is actually causing an increase in icebergs, meaning that the sailing conditions may become more unpredictable in the coming decades. In any event, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk are the exceptions; many towns in the area are only accessible via ice roads, i.e., only in the winter.

Gravel highways, like this one, are built in the winter so as to avoid disturbing the permafrost. Should the permafrost beneath the roadbed melt, the road will quickly become filled with potholes.

Why am I telling you all this? Some perverse fondness for logistics? (Actually, yes. Logistics are cool.)

But also because this situation, while not exactly rare in the Arctic or without parallels in the rest of the world, creates a number of interesting problems, and it is community-driven solutions to some of these issues that drew me northwards.

Commodity prices are high, food prices are absurd, as is the cost of housing. And I’m saying this as someone living in San Francisco! This is because of the cost of getting goods and food up north. Furthermore, instability in transport means that costs will rise even as supply becomes increasingly irregular. And remember, this is in a place about as well-connected as you get in the North American Arctic.** So how do people deal with high prices and limited availability?

The solution to the problem of food security is the same as it is for  people who deal with food deserts elsewhere - community gardens. As in Greenland, there is a short, intense growing season, and as I have discussed elsewhere, the economics of the situation mean that the start-up costs for a local, for-profit farm just aren’t worth it, despite the overall social utility. However, the situation isn’t quite so bleak. It isn’t an all-or-nothing problem; relatively small proportions of the population can be engaged in an activity to generate overall systemic change.

Community and urban gardening have a long history in the US and England, and notably have been very useful in addressing food insecurity in food deserts; areas of a city where there is not reasonable access to markets, thus forcing consumers to shop at what amount to convenience stores selling highly processed foods. While people do not have the time or space to grow everything they eat, community gardens provide people with a viable way to supplement their diets. Of course, people could do this on their own in a window planter or something, but not everyone has the space or lighting. More crucially, the community nature of the activity itself is of value.

Inside the Greenhouse, home to the furtherst north apple tree.

We tend to think of things as public or private, profit or non-profit, but this entirely misses a crucial dynamic of human activity: the community or peer-to-peer interaction.*** By creating a community, we do several things:

1. Perhaps most obviously, we create a community. People want to go. We’re leveraging social bonds to make food security into a hobby where people can meet friends. This is also part of how grassroots organizing operates. In more operational terms, it increases the retention rate and provides word-of-mouth draw for participation and use of services.

2. The community also creates a natural setting for cooperation and collaboration. Most obviously, it gives people access to expertise in the form of more experienced gardeners. 

3. Community gardens also organize classes and workshops, allowing people to try new techniques, be it ways of growing things or ways of cooking and preserving them.

4. They also facilitate other forms of exchange (allowing for specialization). People can trade produce or keep an eye on plants when someone is out of town or sick. 

5. They also create connections in the community for other ways to serve community needs- be it grassroots organizing to deal with pressing social issues or ways of expanding the utility of the garden. 

6. This same pooling also makes it easier to raise money for other projects that would be beyond the ability of any single member of the community.

The benefits of such an organization extend beyond the walls of the garden itself. One of the coolest aspects is its participation in the Arctic Market, a community-driven market held every couple of weekends throughout the year. People in the community bring things they have grown or made. In a town like Inuvik, that means indigenous arts and crafts, homemade Filipino snacks, and fresh vegetables and herbs. Plants grown in the garden make their way into the meals of people who don’t garden at all. Similarly, the annual plant sale fundraiser, where they incubate plants in the Greenhouse and sell them across the Territories. The result is that people in town and beyond who don’t participate in the Community Garden but are still interested in growing something themselves now have access to plants ranging from tomatoes to ornamental flowers. The garden also opened a cafe, which doubles as a public kitchen, allowing people, particularly in cramped apartments, to come and bake.

There are some limitations in the Inuvik case- participation in the community garden is primarily non-indigenous. Preliminarily, it seems that indigenous people seem to prefer spending summer weekends hunting and fishing, while transplants tend not to have boats and cabins and are subject to different game laws. It also seems that the management of the garden through Northwest Territories grants, in conjunction with the fact that the Greenhouse is the former hockey rink of a residential school, causes Elders not to trust the institution while also associating it with a history of pain and alienation.*** The Inuvialuit Community Corporation has also set up small greenhouses of its own as part of a pilot program in food sovereignty. At the moment, they are using their smaller greenhouses to provide vegetables for meal kits as part of a food assistance program, but these do not yet serve the general community.

This issue aside, the Inuvk Community Greenhouse is a great example of how community-driven action can address social problems, providing benefits that extend beyond the direct membership of the organization.  Learning from the successes and limitations of existing organizations such as this allows us to envisage and implement new solutions to the many dire problems our species faces.

*It looks quite wet, but the climate up there is quite dry; it’s just that the permafrost prevents the surface water from draining.

**Yellowknife and Whitehorse are both subarctic. Yellowknife, on the permafrost, still suffers from major road issues, and while the first permanent connection with the rest of the Canadian road network was completed in 2012 (via a bridge), ice roads are still hugely important. Whitehorse is in the mountains and is better connected.

*** I am in the process of exploring this more in-depth so as to better understand how to increase participation in such projects across a society.

****See previous posts for further discussion of community action, as well as parts of chapter 3 of my dissertation, though there it is primarily focused on issues of social cohesion and administration.