Lifecycles

One of the concepts that business and business education has borrowed from the sciences is that of the "life cycle." Software life cycle, information life cycle, knowledge life cycle, and corporate life cycle, to name a few, are part of the popular lexicon. However, it is high time businesses paid attention to the earth that houses its operations, its uses, and the life cycle of the soil. At Tellabs, the CEO and others created a prairie garden when the corporate headquarters was being built. While there were still large parking garages, this was a start.

In an interesting piece in the NYT, "In Latino Gardens, Vegetables, Good Health and Savings Flourish" Ms. Patricia Leigh Brown describes a growing momentum in gardening among the relatively poor Latino community in San Jose. "At dawn, Maria Lupercio Alarcon wakens to the heady scent of onions and cilantro from her family’s first garden, outside her bedroom window.The two-month-old vegetable garden, from which Mrs. Alarcon picks extravagant bursts of broccoli for breakfast with scrambled eggs, is both comforting and unfamiliar. It is one of 30 backyard vegetable gardens recently planted by a nonprofit group here called La Mesa Verde, or The Green Table, which makes house calls to help residents of the city’s low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhoods grow their own organic produce.“People don’t eat vegetables unless they are close by, to be honest with you,” Mrs. Alarcon, a mother of three who grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, said of the human tendency to eat whatever is at hand, especially if it is cheap. “If you have vegetables,” she said, pointing to luxuriant tangles of peas and other delights, “then you can come get them. To see them growing is a blessing.”The fledgling effort to bring backyard vegetable beds to San Jose neighborhoods like the Washington-Guadalupe and Gardner districts — historic portals for immigrants — is part of a national movement, from West Oakland to Little Rock, Ark., to make healthy food readily accessible to marginalized urban neighborhoods.“Nobody was going into the homes,” said Raul Lozano, 55, the son of farm workers, whose passion for gardening inspired him to form La Mesa Verde after 15 years as executive director of a Latino theater company. “You can get beer in the neighborhood. But not vegetables.”In San Jose, with roughly 300 sunny days a year, the new gardeners were recruited from food pantry rolls and word of mouth.Once known as “Goosetown,” after Italian immigrants who raised geese there, the Gardner neighborhood is less than two miles from downtown but is fragmented by highways. In the 1980s, it acquired the nickname Barrio Horseshoe, a reference to a contested sliver of territory between street gangs.In recent years, with help from a city neighborhood revitalization initiative, it has become a place of “prideful homes,” as Mr. Lozano put it, where the familiar ting-a-lings of vendors selling ice cream, tamales and pork rinds with lemon and chili punctuate the afternoons. These are the working poor — maids, landscapers, restaurant workers, teacher’s aides — “people trying to make ends meet with two or three jobs and who don’t have time to commit to a community garden,” said Poncho Guevara, the executive director of Sacred Heart Community Service, which started Mr. Lozano’s program with over 100 volunteers...."