Published in Ode Magazine, April 2009
Read at odemagazine.com

French rapper Abd al Malik has no trouble explaining why young men in the French ghettos usually celebrate New Year’s Eve by torching cars. “When you live in a country that acts like you don’t exist, you want to be recognized,” he says. “It’s like someone who contemplates suicide because he wants to say, ‘Hello, I am here!’”

Growing up in the Neuhof housing project outside of Strasbourg in northeastern France, Abd al Malik had his own way of getting recognition. He lived a double life as a straight “A” student and a thief and drug dealer. But as he watched many of his contemporaries unravel from addiction or lose their lives to violence, he channeled his own anger into music and is now one of France’s most successful rappers. His music is an authentic call for tolerance across cultural divides, distilled from his experience as a minority youth in French society and his journey from extremist Islam to mysticism.

Abd al Malik’s music and France’s rap culture were both born in the context of widespread racism and xenophobia. “It was like you had the good French and the bad French,” Abd al Malik says of his experience growing up as the son of Congolese immigrants. “When I was at school, politicians would say, ‘We are all French.’ But I never saw a black man on television. I never saw a black politician.” French rappers denounced the lack of opportunity for children of immigrants and the climate of poverty and crime in which they lived.
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Youth employment is low in France—less than 25 percent of 15- to 24-year-olds have work—and for children of immigrants, it’s even harder to find a job. Discrimination against those with foreign- or Muslim-sounding names is common, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Young immigrants in the ghettos complain of widespread police harassment, too. Inevitably, as rap grew in popularity in the 1990s, it was criticized as glamorizing violence and heightening racial tension.

In 1989, when he was 14, Abd al Malik embraced rap as a way to channel his frustration, to tell his story and to critique society. He joined with his brother and a group of friends to create New African Poets, or NAP. He was inspired by American rap of the 1980s, especially such politically conscious rappers as Chuck D of Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash and Big Daddy Kane, whom Abd al Malik calls “my Bob Dylan.” Abd al Malik was also enamored of the Black Power movement, and he idolized Malcolm X as a black Muslim champion against injustice. For Abd al Malik as for many immigrant youth in France, Islam offered an alternate, defiant identity.

Abd al Malik converted to Islam when he was 15. Though he’d been moved by Malcolm X’s vision of Islam as a unifying tradition, he was quickly caught up in an extremist form of the religion that he says offered “a black-and-white vision.” His new teachers preached obedience to a fixed set of rules of behavior, including restrictions on dating or even on shaking hands with women. For a few years, Abd al Malik accompanied a group of street preachers who traveled the country cajoling young men to go to the mosque, grow their beards long and give up liquor and drugs. The Muslim teachings popular in the French ghetto weren’t explicitly violent, says Abd al Malik, but they encouraged young immigrants to scorn everything Western, secular and modern, thus deepening their sense of alienation.

As a teenager, Abd al Malik couldn’t reconcile the contradictions of his new identity. His faith was as zealous and genuine as his passion for rap, an art his religion condemned. He remained caught up in a painful paradox for years, made worse because the means he had to finance his musical efforts—drug dealing and petty crime—were also irreligious. One day, at his lowest point, he went to a local crime leader and asked for a loan. Later, alone in his apartment clutching a garbage bag full of money, he sat and wept.

This inner turmoil drove Abd al Malik to seek a deeper understanding of his faith. He found answers in Sufism, the contemplative, mystical branch of Islam. He met a North African spiritual teacher who taught him that the heart of his religion was love and awareness of the spiritual nature of every human being. “Islam is a religion of love,” Abd al Malik says. “It is being in peace with yourself and with others. The Islam of the ghetto is a ghetto of Islam. It is not the true Islam.”

This shift also broadened his views on rap and the role of art. He began to write songs for his new solo albums that advocated understanding among races. One song, “12 Septembre 2001,” is a plea for the separation of politics and religion; another, “God Bless France,” describes his personal evolution from resentment to patriotism. “In music as in life, I decided … to simply translate the language of the heart,” he writes in his autobiography, Sufi Rapper. Click here for an excerpt. He also left behind his hard-core rap roots and began to collaborate with a range of musicians to develop a new sound that mixes jazz, chanson and the aesthetic of slam poetry.

Other French rappers continue to produce angry music; some have been accused of inciting violence after an incident in 2005 when the death of a Muslim youth pursued by police sparked weeks of rioting. Instead of criticizing the French system, Abd al Malik encourages the country to live up to its democratic ideals. “When you live in France, you can think how you want to think,” he says. “I’m proud of being French.” At every gig, he speaks out about the need for understanding between religious and ethnic groups. “The concepts of liberty, equality, fraternity—that’s the concept of our country. I am working to make this not only a concept but real life.”

His message is timely. Last year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed an Algerian immigrant, Yazid Sabeg, as commissioner for diversity and equality to increase minority representation in the media, government and elite schools. In January, Sabeg warned that France’s social divisions were growing worse. But Abd al Malik’s audience seems poised for change. The rapper’s most recent album, Dante, tops the French charts; his concerts routinely sell out; and in 2008 he was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest cultural accolades. “When I’m at a concert and I see black people, white people, people from the ghetto, people from the bourgeoisie, for me it’s a beautiful thing,” says Abd al Malik. “People need this kind of music right now.”

Published in Ode Magazine, Jan/Feb 2009 issue
Read at odemagazine.com

There’s a framed photo hanging in Michelle Chan’s living room that makes her feel uneasy when she stops to look at it. It shows an old Chinese couple standing in an alley. The man’s eyes are downcast. The woman looks up, into the distance, soft light illuminating her face. Behind them are round, woven baskets leaning against a wall. From the moment Chan bought the picture, she says, it got to her: “I knew the picture was of a scene in a place that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Chan fought for nine years to save that place, but her efforts ultimately failed. Despite the vehement objections of environmental and human-rights organizations, the Chinese government built the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, completing it in 2008 after more than a decade of construction. The dam displaced an estimated 1.4 million people, flooded 370 miles of farmland, destroyed towns, villages and countless archaeological sites and threatened the river’s fish stock and endangered dolphin species. And of course, it displaced the old man and woman in the picture, whose home and ancestors’ graves are now under 500 feet of water.

Though Chan couldn’t stop the dam, the struggle gave her motivation and direction in her career. In 1995, Chan, just 23 at the time, took on the Three Gorges battle as a campaigner with the environmental organization Friends of the Earth. Instead of protesting against the Chinese government directly, she and fellow campaigners took a new approach: They exposed the Wall Street banks involved in funding the project, a tactic that gradually reshaped public expectations of banking.

It was the first major project in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had gone to private-sector banks and asked them to take responsibility for the ethical and environmental impact of the projects they funded. And it was the first time that some commercial banks acknowledged that certain projects were too harmful to merit their involvement.

The term “sustainable” has become commonplace, but it usually refers to consumer products, agricultural practices or energy. Chan’s work has done much to create and push forward the concept of sustainable finance: the idea that banks should evaluate investments based on social, ethical and ecological as well as financial criteria. Organizations such as Friends of the Earth see banks as key to getting corporations to practice corporate responsibility. Thanks in part to pressure from NGOs, more than 60 commercial banks have voluntarily adopted a set of ethical principles for assessing the environmental and social impact of investments in the developing world. Many banks have also begun to implement environmental and social responsibility policies affecting their operations.

With worries over climate change intensifying and a financial system in crisis because of widespread use of risky investing practices, many environmental organizations think the time is right for sustainable finance to become even more far-reaching. “The public—especially the American public, because we’ve paid a lot for the bailout—is ready to see a return to soundness, sustainability and decency in our financial system,” Chan says. “People are hungry to participate in a way that allows their savings and investments to create positive change.”

One afternoon in her office in San Francisco’s financial district, Chan is laughing hard, catching her breath to talk, then losing it again. She has a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon in her hand and is about to toast her office mate Adina Matisoff. But the success she’s celebrating is a quiet one. She and Matisoff have just completed a paper analyzing China’s new financial regulations; surprisingly, they include environmental laws, which Chan suggests provide an example to the U.S.

It’s hardly a high-profile stunt, but pushing forward new ideas is Chan’s particular brand of activism. “A lot of what advocacy groups struggle with are power issues,” Chan says. “Part of the job is to shape the debate, to get your ideas out there.”

And Chan is quite skilled at it. “She’s an incredible pioneer,” says Matt Arnold, director of Sustainable Finance Limited, a consulting firm that works with banks on their environmental practices. “She’s been doing this for longer than most people knew it was a ‘thing.’ She’s provided a huge amount of intellectual content for developing these policies at banks.”

Chan knew sustainable finance was the next frontier in the mid-1990s, when she got her start. Back then, the idea of asking Wall Street banks to broaden their definition of corporate responsibility was new. “At the time, big companies thought being environmentally sensitive meant recycling their office paper,” Chan says. “We had to push to redefine what social responsibility meant for these big companies. The way we did it was by talking to them about the environmental impacts of their portfolios.”

One part of banks’ portfolios was particularly vulnerable in discussions of ethical behavior. It was a narrow but important segment of banks’ global business called project finance, the most common lending practice for funding infrastructure and resource extraction in the developing world. It quickly became the lever NGOs used to raise consciousness within the banking sphere. In the early 1990s, the World Bank had changed its policies to encourage more of these investments by commercial banks. NGOs already knew how to lobby the World Bank, which has a mandate to work for the public good; the challenge Chan took on was to develop techniques that would work with private sector banks that think in terms of profit.

The way to do that, she discovered, was to frame ethical conversations in terms of financial risk. Project finance provided the perfect entry point. These loans are typically guaranteed on the basis of the revenues of the project, which leaves the bank no claim to a client’s other assets should the project fail. This means the bank’s bottom line is much more vulnerable to the risks of the project; it’s therefore in the bankers’ interest to assess the negative environmental and human impact that might cost money to fix. “These issues at the project level are very visible, real and occasionally quite tragic, so they scream out for a robust risk-management framework,” says Sustainable Finance Limited’s Arnold.

The work on project finance paid off in 2003 when a group of major U.S. and European banks voluntarily adopted the Equator Principles, a set of ethical standards and operating procedures for managing these kinds of investments. Participating banks agree not to lend money to borrowers who don’t comply with standards of environmental and social responsibility, as defined by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, including concern for pollution, biodiversity, fair working conditions, involuntary resettlement and the rights of indigenous peoples.

Chan often uses the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” to talk about her work. “Are things different today than they were yesterday because this bank or group of banks has decided to follow environmental standards?” she wonders. “It’s something I ask myself all the time.” If the roster of financial conglomerates at which Chan has helped shape environmental policies is any guide—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others—it does make a difference.

Shawn Miller, director of environmental and social risk management at Citigroup, says Citi has changed the way it operates as a result of adopting the Equator Principles. For example, a company wanted to borrow money for an oil and gas development in the Middle East that posed harm to a coral reef. Citi hired outside experts to assess the situation and finally required the project developer to alter the plan and protect the reef. Citi now invests more heavily in alternative energy, and recently committed to uphold a set of standards for coal power investments. Called the Carbon Principles, these commit the company to working with coal-fired power clients to encourage lower CO2 emissions and investment in alternative energy options.

“It’s opened up the company’s thinking on broader opportunities, not just from a risk-management perspective,” Miller says. “It helped us start thinking, ‘Okay, we manage our risk appropriately, but we can also make money out of doing good.’”

The crucial question for Chan is: Will banks stick by the principles they espouse, especially during a dire economic downturn when profits may take precedence over principles? In 2004, Chan founded BankTrack to support organizations that were keeping watch on banks both in the U.S. and abroad. BankTrack is a confederation of international environmental and human-rights groups that monitor and lobby the global financial sector. In part, they work to fill in what Chan sees as the biggest missing piece of the Equator Principles: accountability. They track information about “dodgy deals” and make sure the public is aware of banks’ activities.
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A few years ago, Chan started paying attention to the influence of another major power player in development: banks of emerging economies. In particular, she looked at China, which was expanding its investments in other countries to feed its growing economy. “What we’ve found is the most lucrative and easy natural-resource extractions have already been taken by Western nations, but you now have emerging market economies competing with us for the same kind of concessions,” Chan says. “Since the world is reaching its ecological limits, the struggle to get the last resources out is going to be pretty nasty.”

For example, China is involved in Indonesia, where forests are being cut down at a rate of almost 5 million acres (2 million hectares) annually, mainly from illegal cutting, according to the World Bank. Chinese banks fund several logging operations there, and environmental groups allege that some companies engage in illegal forestry practices, including logging in endangered tiger and elephant territory. Chan has been to China several times, teaching environmental groups to use some of the same advocacy techniques she put into practice with Wall Street banks. Groups there are protesting a range of companies they say pollute or disregard human rights in China. She’s impressed on them the direct connection between polluting companies and the financial institutions that underwrite them. “If you can follow the money and get conditions put on the money, you can potentially improve the actions of corporations,” she says.

It turns out that environmental organizations have a surprising ally: the Chinese government. Starting in 2007, Beijing has passed a series of laws to restrict major banks from lending to and investing in companies with poor environmental records in their operations within China. For instance, China created a “green credit policy” that blacklists companies with negative environmental records. Another law requires companies seeking initial public offerings to get approval from the Chinese Environmental Ministry. “It’s funny and heretical to rip a page from China’s quasi-socialist playbook,” Chan says. But she adds that China—which recently bailed out its financial sector as well—is in a situation similar to that in the West, and the U.S. could learn from its model. “It’s something that we should consider as we rewrite our financial regulations or consider our economic stimulus package,” she says. “We should consider how this moment can be shaped to create a more sustainable future.”

Chan’s office is decorated with mementos of her travels: strings of glimmering purple fish scales from an indigenous group in the Amazon; a miniature barrel of sweet, light crude oil from the Urucu-Porto Velho pipeline in Brazil; a bright set of trading cards made for the annual Socially Responsible Investing Awards, which include one made in her honor—a young superhero in red tights brandishing a sword, captioned “Michelle Chan: Global Avenger.”

But Chan is hardly the typical fire-breathing radical. She labors quietly and courteously in boardrooms and at conferences, and sees change come in the smallest of increments, as shifts in the definition of corporate responsibility. She fervently hopes this is affecting practice. But measuring success on the ground is still hard. Even after 13 years, she doesn’t know for sure how much improvement has come from her work. Until banks provide greater accountability and transparency, she can’t tell whether their directors are following through on their good intentions. Unless the markets are regulated with the environment in mind, the money trail too often leads to more pollution, more population displacement and more species under threat.

“We do live in an instant gratification world,” says Chan. “But anyone involved in social change realizes these things don’t happen overnight. When you take the longer view, whatever you can achieve in your time on Earth is a contribution. It’s a job to be shared with others, as well as others that come after you.”

Designer Natalie Chanin remembers the exact moment her fashion paradigm shifted. “I was standing on a street corner in the [New York City] Garment District holding this old T-shirt that I had ripped apart and sewn back together myself,” she says. A 20-year veteran of fashion and costume design, she’d spent the day meeting with manufacturers, asking them to do a hand-sewn line of her reconstituted T-shirts. People kept giving her “a cockeyed look, like I was from outer space,” she recalls. Standing at the corner of 37th and 8th after one meeting, Chanin realized she was finished with New York and with the industry status quo of fast and cheap production. “I looked at the stitching I was using and it looked like quilting stitches. That’s when I realized I should go back home.”

Chanin’s hometown is Florence, Alabama, once known as the T-shirt capital of the world for all the cotton milling, weaving and T-shirt production that went on there. When she returned in 2000 after her epiphany at 37th and 8th, the town was still adjusting to the sudden loss of 5,000 textile jobs as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Seeing the vacuum left behind in her community, Chanin questioned a business model that treats people like commodities, as disposable as the cheap garments it produces. Soon she started her own company, called Alabama Chanin, which operates on a more sustainable model, employing local sewers, creating hand-finished garments built to last, and striving to run a zero-waste operation by “upcycling” (i.e., re-using) production leftovers.

Chanin isn’t alone in her ambition to radically rethink fashion. Since the early 2000s, a growing number of designers and apparel companies have embraced ethical alternatives to the industry’s resource-intensive and wasteful practices. And it’s not just diehard Al Gore fans making hemp yoga clothes. Fashion shows in major cities have started to include sustainable designs from major labels, and hundreds of new eco-fashion companies have come onto the scene. The last time eco was this chic, back in the early 1990s, the focus was on materials, like unbleached organic cotton. Today’s ethical trends reflect a deeper commitment to make the entire production process more sustainable.

In the early 1990s, the first eco-fashion line from a major label was Esprit’s Ecollection, designed by Lynda Grose, who today teaches sustainable design at the California College of the Arts. At the time, Grose says, it was hard to get management even to understand the value of organic cotton; today, many big-league retail brands not only offer organic cotton lines but have taken giant steps to address labor issues, pollution, recycling and sourcing of raw materials. “This is a long-term trend that will continue to grow,” says Grose, citing the collaboration of clothing companies Gap and H&M with the Cleaner Cotton Initiative; the improved labor standards of Levi Strauss & Co. and Nike; and the investment of upmarket U.K. department store Marks & Spencer in fair trade.

In 2005, Nike started assessing all design decisions through the lens of sustainability in a program called Considered Design. The goal: to reduce waste and increase the use of environmentally safe materials by 2020. The firm gives designers instant reporting on the environmental cost of their decisions so they can find cleaner ways of doing things right from the drawing board. “Nike is trying to move as quickly as we can to reduce our environmental impact, and the best way to do that is to include the designers in the process,” says Lorrie Vogel, general manager of Considered Design. “They’re our visionaries.”

Despite progress like this, industry leaders are well aware that there’s still more to do. “When you start accounting for the full cost of production,” says Jill Dumain, outdoor apparel company Patagonia’s director of environmental analysis, “the question becomes, How do you really come up with something that is sustainable, that can stand on its own and is not robbing from the future?”

Luckily, major established brands and young, globally minded designers alike are coming up with answers to exactly that question. Here’s a look at six trends that are bursting the seams of fashion’s old business model and creating a more sustainable future.

1) Know your supplier

Any idea you might have that ethical fashion is for dour do-gooders disappear when you see the French-Brazilian company Veja’s line of 1970s-inspired sneakers. “The main reason ethical fashion wasn’t selling was it didn’t have a sexy image,” explains Elizabeth Laskar of the Ethical Fashion Forum, a network of designers and fashion industry leaders in London. Veja shoes are sexy and chic enough to be an impulse buy, but they’re also the product of a meticulously cultivated supply chain from farmer to seamstress to salesperson to consumer. “We wanted to start from scratch,” says Sébastien Kopp, who co-founded the company with François-Ghislain Morillon in 2005.

When Kopp started looking for growers in Brazil who could consistently produce the materials he needed—organic cotton, wild-harvested rubber and vegetable-tanned leather—he found many farmers cultivating less than an acre of cotton and rubber harvesters who had no business know-how. Working with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), he helped organize and train the farmers in the Ceará region, developing the market for cotton. “It’s a global fight to work with very small producers,” he says. “They’re far away from communication links and roads. You have to know them, know their challenges and know the paradoxes in the field. But it has a long-term benefit for everybody.” Kopp is convinced that relationship-based supply chains are scalable; his company is growing fast, without advertising, and demand is strong on five continents. “If two crazy French guys did it, it’s possible,” he quips.

2) Just say no to waste

When he founded Rickshaw Bagworks, Mark Dwight was frustrated with the wasteful cycle of seasonal forecasting and overproduction common in the accessories industry. “I started looking just at the engineering part of this problem,” he says. “How do I get rid of waste in manufacturing?” His answer: a modular design concept featuring a classic bag interior and trend-driven fabrics on the exterior flaps. Since the interior remains the same, and can be updated with seasonal fabric styles, Dwight doesn’t stockpile unsold finished goods that need to be dumped at season’s end. He has also created the Zero Bag, made from a single piece of nylon, with not a scrap wasted. “Mother Nature has a certain healing capacity and we’ve exceeded that capacity, so now we’re starting to live in our own waste,” Dwight says. “As a species, we’re smart enough to solve just about any problem. Now is the time.”

3) Close the loop

When you wear out a Patagonia garment, you don’t have to feel guilty about disposing of it. Just take it to a Patagonia location and it’ll be recycled into something new. “When you look at this raw material, which is in essence the same raw material as the end product, reusing it makes sense,” says Patagonia’s Dumain. The company’s directors are working to make all products recyclable by 2010. The firm has already seen energy and carbon emissions reductions as a result. “The more we learn about how much energy it takes to grow, extract or mine raw material, the more we’re convinced that closed-loop cycles make sense,” says Dumain. Adds the California College of the Arts’ Grose: “The old model was linear; you make it, sell it and dispose of it. The new model is cyclical.”

4) Start upcycling

With millions of tons of perfectly usable clothes thrown away every year, designers have started tapping into this waste stream for raw material and inspiration. Britain’s Junky Styling and Canada’s Preloved brands have both made fresh “upcycled” designs constructed from clothes that would otherwise end up in the landfill. U.K.-based designer Mia Nisbet has gone a step further. In her fashion studies at the Glasgow School of Art, Nisbet discovered one of the disturbing side effects of fashion’s fast-consumption model is that old clothes get dumped on markets in Africa. “When these clothes are exported to African countries, it can be devastating to the fashion economy,” she says.

To turn this situation around, she started a business based in Malawi. She purchases castoff clothes from street markets and hires local tailors to construct her creative designs, which mix Western styles and locally produced traditional Malawian textiles. Her clothes, sold in boutiques in London and Los Angeles, bring lost fashion wages back to Malawi’s economy. Nisbet hopes her initiative will inspire consumers to look at their own closets differently. “The way the disposable fast fashion market is going these days, it’s important to take stock of what we’ve already got. People don’t realize what they’ve already got in their wardrobe may have the potential to be something different.”

5) Go global

It used to be that designers in Paris, New York and Milan would send out their concepts to be produced by cheap labor in the rest of the world. But fashion shows and shops increasingly showcase designers from developing economies like South Africa, Brazil and India. Tamsin Lejeune, director of London’s Ethical Fashion Forum, says this will support the evolution of an increasingly equitable marketplace. “For emerging economies, fashion is an inspirational way they can access more trade,” she says. “It’s a more sustainable model, which isn’t exclusively about businesses in the West sourcing [in the developing world.]”

Many of these designers are also attuned to environmental and social issues. Samant Chauhan, from Bihar, India, has created a widely acclaimed line of couture silk garments made entirely from silk harvested without killing the silkworm. Chauhan aims to preserve the age-old spinning and weaving techniques in his native village, Bhagalpur. “This was my hometown but I was not aware of this silk,” he says. “When I was in fashion school, I came to know this is something very unique.” Now he works with a local NGO to organize craftspeople to negotiate with buyers from the apparel and home décor industries.

6) Take it slow

Natalie Chanin may run Alabama Chanin from an abandoned T-shirt mill in her hometown of Florence, Alabama, but her business model is radically different from those mass production days. Chanin takes a “slow” approach to fashion. Slow design focuses on quality and on “an awareness of the materials and the people making them,” says Kate Fletcher, a U.K.-based fashion consultant, credited with applying the concept to fashion.

Chanin draws inspiration from the days of Alabama’s quilting bees, when women would gather to hand-stitch quilts, and from her grandparents, who lived simply and grew their own food. “It seemed to me my grandparents actually had it right,” Chanin says. “They lived with respect for everything around them.” Chanin’s garments are created with that same respect for quality and craftsmanship. They are handpainted and embroidered by local craftswomen. “How much better would it be,” she muses “if we only bought things that we love so much we never want them to leave our life?” Chanin also sells patterns and raw materials for those who want to try making their own.

Chanin’s company may be small but it’s leading a new trend, in which style is defined not only by the cut of the cloth, but by the integrity of the business model.

Bob Cannard coaxes perfection out of his farm by allowing a little bad behavior

The day I visited Bob Cannard’s farm in the Sonoma Valley, I nearly drove right by. The road had climbed steadily up from the cul-de-sacs, the wineries and the golf course of Glen Ellen, toward the blue-green ridge of the Sonoma foothills. I had passed the neighbor’s neatly trimmed vineyards and entered a domain of green meadows blooming with wildflowers and lush forests of redwood, bay, oak and madrone. One field, scattered with olive trees and tall patches of oats and rose clover, might have been part of a farm, or might have been a long-abandoned orchard. I wasn’t quite sure. I finally realized I’d arrived at a working farm when I passed a rickety barn stacked with shovels, rakes and hoes, and stopped in front of a little blue and white farm house.

I got out and took a deep breath of sweet air. This was it, the Shangri-la of locavores, the farm that started it all. Every week, vans from Chez Panisse come up this drive to pick up the food Cannard grows on these 30 unkempt acres. Since 1984, when Alice Waters’ father discovered Bob Cannard, the famous Berkeley restaurant has relied on him to provide the freshest produce for its famously local and seasonal bill of fare. He supplies about half their fruits and vegetables, and is one of a handful of farmers billed on the menu. More than just a celebrity restaurateur, Waters has become an apostle for local, sustainable agriculture. And Waters isn’t alone. Nationwide, eating locally has taken off as the latest cause of the environmentally minded, with writers like Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan making the case for growing your own food or supporting local farmers. Through it all, as the favorite of gourmet chefs, Cannard’s farm has remained the gold standard of just how delicious local, sustainable food can be.

Cannard on his farm.

Russell Moore, a former chef and produce buyer at Chez Panisse, recalls when he and Waters first began working with Cannard. “What struck me about Bob was this guy was absolutely connected to the earth that he was taking care of,” Moore said. “He just seemed to do everything right.” Moore said Cannard’s crop wizardry is unparalleled. “Bob’s produce is the best. No one can grow arugula like him, or lettuce, carrots, fennel, cardoons. I could live off the food on Bob’s farm all year round and be completely content.” Wandering near Cannard’s house, I found what looked like a neglected garden. An arugula crop had gone to flower near rows of young lettuce heads glowing green in the sun, interspersed with weeds. A lopsided fig tree was covered with still unripe figs, and a jumble of mint grew in between strawberry plants. The fava beans with their long, swollen pods had invaded the vineyard and young mandarin starts were flowering in pots near the front porch, perfuming the air with the scent of citrus blossoms. How could this place, which felt more like an unruly nature preserve than a farm, be the source of so much culinary inspiration? Soon Cannard, 55, appeared, wearing a blue plaid shirt and scuffed work boots. Grey hair framed a ruddy, expressive face and bright blue eyes. It soon became apparent that his attitude about farming was as unconventional as his fields. “I don’t like to work. I’m not interested in making money,” he said. “I want to make love to nature.”

Nature, it seems, loves him back. Cannard’s 30 acres produce over 200 different crops, enough fruit and vegetables for about 350 meals per day, he estimates. The harvest includes a mixed orchard of persimmon, pomegranate, cherry and quince trees; fruits of the earth, such as favas, squash, radishes, carrots, turnips, strawberries and raspberries; and assorted greens, including frisée, radiccio, arugula and mustard. Cannard’s idiosyncratic approach to sustainable farming is not a matter of following certain rules, or simply avoiding forbidden pesticides and fertilizers. It’s an entire worldview. Cannard, along with a group of other likeminded farmers, eschews the term “organic” because he feels many organic farmers have the same adversarial attitude toward nature that conventional farmers do. They just use “natural” instead of chemical remedies to eliminate pests. “Why do you want to kill bugs?” Cannard asked. “You’ve got to look at why you have that adversity in the first place.” He tells a story of an eggplant crop that was attacked by insects one year. He took it as a sign that the soil was deficient and applied raw crushed rock, which adds mineral content. Ten days later he saw a total turnaround: The bugs disappeared as soon as the plants were strong enough to fight them off. “There’s no such thing as a pest within the structure of nature,” he said.

Cannard embraces the chaos and the conflict of natural processes, allowing plants to grow side by side with weeds, allowing bugs and birds and various pests to do their part in creating a healthy ecosystem. He claims his plants are stronger and sweeter for having competed with weeds and survived natural enemies, rather than living in fields scrubbed clean of pests. “Who would not prefer a life of choice?” Cannard said. If you’re doing things right as a farmer, according to Cannard, your farm starts taking care of itself. As he gets older, Cannard imagines a day when he would “just harvest what grows on its own.” But if Cannard takes a libertarian view of his plants, he takes a nurturing attitude toward his soil, which he tends as carefully as if he were raising dirt, not vegetables. The day I was there, Cannard took a group of guests for a tour of his farm. We peered into what looked like a barrel of dirt. It was, in fact, a particular flavor of compost he was curing. He reached in and pulled out a decomposing stalk. A rich, chocolatey humus was developing in the inner marrow of this dead bone of a plant. In the potato field he picked up a couple of rocks from the many that were littering the rows. He scraped one with a pocket knife and it shed a few shaley flakes. While another farmer would dig out all these stones, Cannard leaves them there, as the ultimate slow-release fertilizer. He also adds mineral content by spreading powdered rock and oyster shells on his fields.

Cannard does not worry about yield in the conventional sense. “Instead of making the farm bigger, you make it more nutritionally intensive,” he said. In the cardoon patch, he squatted down next to a robust silvery green plant, its arrow-shaped leaves spreading in all directions. He dug his fingers into the matted mess of dried-up weeds at the base of the plant, showing us how thick the cover was. While most farmers, even organic ones, kill weeds to leave more nutrition available to crops, Cannard lets them grow, die and rot in the field. He does the same thing with a good portion of his crops. “When a crop dies of its own volition, it dies in contentment, so you incorporate contentment into the soil as well as organic matter,” Cannard told us.

The tour ended at the stomach of Cannard’s farm, a weedy pasture where he keeps his compost tea-brewing rig. Compost tea is an organic fertilizer used by certain organic and biodynamic farmers to increase the levels of healthy bacteria in the soil. The brewer looked like a giant’s pickle barrel, connected by tubes to several watering troughs and sinks. It smelled like rot.

With his silvery hair flying in the breeze, Cannard took a bucket of fish emulsion and a few handfuls of compost and stirred them into a frothy primordial soup. Tinkering with some rickety wiring, he turned the power on, shooting a rush of bubbles into this mix. Cannard uses everything that’s dead and rotten for the potion, including road kill, kitchen scraps, oak leaves, dead bugs, crab shells and eggshells. This produces a crop of bacteria and microorganisms, “the digestive forces of soil,” which he will spray on his fields to break down minerals and make them available for plants.

Digestion, whether in the soil, or in a human, seems to be the heart of it all, or, better put, the gut of it. “I realized for me, the avenue toward influencing the consciousness of humanity is not through the word but through the digestion,” Cannard said. Deep down, it seems, Cannard believes vegetables can change the world. When he talks, he sounds by turns like a farmer, a Zen master and a radical, and he has his own unique vocabulary for declaring his views. “If we were to grow our food, instead of in adversity with nature, but in nurturement with nature, we would grow full food and our great-grandchildren could shed the smallness of our nature,” he said. “If we grow our food in adversity, we’re going to grow a whole bush of warmongers.”

Over lunch at his farmhouse, his guests had the opportunity to literally digest Cannard’s philosophy and practice. Three long picnic tables were spread with flowered tablecloths in the dappled shade of a rattan canopy. The late afternoon sunlight illuminated a row of young peach trees and the lettuce patch shone in emerald, garnet and pale green hues.

Cannard’s wife, Charlene, a former Chez Panisse cook, had pre pared a feast from the farm’s bounty. To whet the palette, she served homemade olives and pickles, tempura of green garlic cloves and Meyer lemon, and fava bean puree with crusty bread. For main dishes there was asparagus with roasted fennel confit and soft cooked eggs; tender meatballs stewed in last summer’s golden tomatoes; fresh sardines wrapped in grape leaves and roasted red peppers; and herbed frittata with a buttery crust. We finished off with smooth slices of fuerte avocados with shaved radishes, and a salad of young mixed lettuces. We toasted Cannard and Charlene with biodynamic wines from nearby Coturri vineyards and for dessert took turns hand-cranking a batch of feathery-light vanilla ice cream.

After we ate, I found a solitary moment and walked over to the herb garden. There were bushes of flowering rosemary and sage, redolent in the sunshine. I noticed bumble bees suckling, head first in the sage flowers, and a ruby-throated hummingbird hovering nearby. I felt an unfamiliar craving rise within me. I longed somehow to connect with all this life force around me.

I had always thought of growing plants as forced labor, frustrating, sweaty work, a losing battle against weeds, bugs and poor soil. A struggle with nature. Now I was suddenly itching to start a garden. I bent over and grabbed a handful of the moist soil. I never knew dirt could smell sweet, but it did, clean and mineral-like, with undertones of carrot and straw.

It occurred to me that I must be feeling one of mankind’s most basic instincts: the urge to cultivate, to grasp from the earth a free feast of living food, replete with all the sweetness and vitality that nature has packaged in plants. I wanted to find a corner of my backyard in Oakland and lay down a thick layer of rich soil. I wanted seeds. I wanted baby radishes, and sweet peas, and micro greens of my very own. I was ready to go. Cannard had made it look so easy.

Yet, several months after I had left the farm, I still hadn’t found the time to live out my primal urge. I had bought a bag of dark compost-rich soil. And I had the seed packets, French radishes, arugula and spinach. But they lay unopened on my counter top, gathering dust. I bought a pot of strawberry plants, only to see them die after I spent a particularly hot weekend away. The only thing I had managed to plant, in a burst of horticultural effort, were some yellow pansies.

Week by week, as I walked past the little patch of dirt next to my front steps, often carrying bags of store-bought groceries —shipped no doubt from the Central Valley, or Oregon, or Mexico —I mourned my unfulfilled agrarian dreams.

Then one day, something miraculous happened. A small pair of matching fuzzy leaves poked their heads up from the dirt. And then they branched and branched again, and in a week I had what appeared to be a thriving volunteer tomato. Narrow yellow five-pointed blossoms popped out. The tangy scent of tomato stems reached my nose, and every day the plant grew bigger, its green stalks reaching out over the cracked sidewalk.

I might never be able to coax plants to their full vitality like Bob Cannard. But Nature had taken it upon herself to remind me just how easy growing food can be.