Google Is Still Planning a ‘Smart City’ in Toronto Despite Major Privacy Concerns

After nine months, the new deal between Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto is still light on details about data, surveillance, and privacy.

Bianca Wylie is an open-government advocate and the co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, a group that advocates for public good in the innovation economy. She's also a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation..

After nine months of closed-door negotiations, Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs and public corporation Waterfront Toronto have signed an agreement to proceed with a controversial plan to create Toronto’s neighbourhood of the future. The new deal, released Tuesday, solidifies Sidewalk Labs’ $50-million investment to forge a final agreement to build “Sidewalk Toronto” on Quayside, a 12-acre plot of land on Toronto’s waterfront.

Sidewalk Toronto has been marketed as a high-tech community, prioritizing sustainability, safety, and affordability through innovative technology. Think autonomous vehicles, underground garbage robots, green energy infrastructure, snow-melting sidewalks, modular construction, wooden buildings, and more. The neighbourhood, built “from the Internet up,” will be underpinned by pervasive data collection through connected sensors and personal information that people would share to access customized programs and services.

Both Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto like to talk about how this data-driven neighbourhood will “improve quality of life” and “drive urban innovation” to help solve the urgent problems faced by cities around the world. But they don’t like to talk about trade-offs that need to be considered in the context of innovation as they relate to surveillance, power, and governance. They also don’t mention that the problems cities face are much more about the politics of urban change than a lack of data or technology.

Politics are driving this deal. Waterfront Toronto, and all levels of Canadian government—federal, provincial, and municipal—appear smitten with the project, even though it is largely undefined. They see it as a way to boost Toronto’s burgeoning tech sector and brand itself a world leader in new urban planning supported by innovative technology.

The new agreement provides more details than the initial deal, signed last year. It reportedly narrows the scope of Sidewalk’s influence to a small 12-acre site rather than the 800 acres of undeveloped land on the waterfront, and privacy and data issues that were almost entirely overlooked in the first contract are covered in three pages of Digital Governance Framework Principles.

One obvious issue with the principles is how they are framed. They start off with declarations to not break Canadian law then move to a promise to inform the work using “Canadian values,” which are not defined.

Another problem is the weight given to the principles. Data minimization (reducing the amount of data collected to a bare minimum) is mentioned once in passing. Minimizing data collection should be a headline, not tiny subtext. Not once is there a mention of the idea that some data shouldn’t be collected at all.

The principles read like a grab bag of words that have been raised as challenges related to the project: surveillance, aggregate data, openness, sovereignty, consent. But there is no clarity on which principles would be prioritized over others—critical, because any discussion around data use is about trade-offs and priorities. Because of those words, people feel better about this updated agreement. In truth, the only way to feel good is to get our privacy laws updated to reject surveillance capitalism as a social norm.

Chantal Bernier, former interim privacy commissioner of Canada and legal adviser to Waterfront Toronto, told me an interview that existing Canadian data laws are sufficient to manage the issues of a smart neighbourhood because “Canadian privacy law is based on principles and has flexibility in its application regardless of the technology… The principles are immutable.”

This comment comes in the wake of a week that included Canadian shopping malls using covert facial recognition technology in their information pillars and the Canadian Border Services using ancestry DNA website information to aid in deportations.

As for intellectual property, Waterfront Toronto has now been included in potential future revenues from products created in Quayside. No one has asked Toronto residents whether they want to make a profit from surveillance products, nor if they want their data being used in these products. The tide is turning on surveillance as a social norm. It was wrong go down this road without democratic debate.

The new deal is being heralded a success, when after nine months of negotiations, it still isn’t at the point it should have been at from Day One. The agreement fails to make simple declarations on basic items: city ownership of data collected in public space and publicly owned digital infrastructure.

Waterfront Toronto is still a public corporation making policy with a vendor. Nothing within this partnership structure can correct that fundamental problem. Now, as ever, all levels of government need to step up and take control by defining the requirements that Sidewalk Labs, and any other smart city vendor, investor, or enabler, will need to meet in order to do business here.

Follow Bianca Wylie on Twitter @biancawylie.

Spain’s Dictator Is Dead, but the Debate About Him Lives On

Last month, within days of taking office, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced his government’s intention to exhume the remains of Francisco Franco, the strongman who ruled Spain from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until his death of natural causes in 1975. Expected to take place before the end of the summer, the exhumation plan calls for transferring Franco’s remains to a location yet to be determined. Just as controversial is Sánchez’s proposal to transform the remains’ current resting place, the Valle de los Caídos (the Valley of the Fallen), into a memorial for the victims of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship

.

El Valle, one of Europe’s largest and most imposing public monuments (the entire complex, often derided for its fascist theatricality, includes a basilica, a Benedictine abbey, and a cross rising some 500 feet that is visible from over 30 miles away), was inaugurated by Franco himself in 1959 to mark the 20th anniversary of his victory in the Civil War. Virtually untouched since Franco’s embalmed body was interred there, the monument is a veritable shrine to Francoism and an obligatory pilgrimage for Franco’s defenders. In recent weeks, the most devout of these defenders have taken to the streets of Madrid chanting, “El Valle no se toca” (Don’t touch the valley).

To outside observers, the news of Franco’s exhumation and the controversy around it give rise to obvious questions: Why was Franco spared the popular infamy at home accorded to fellow fascist leaders Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini? And why is the status quo about how Franco has been memorialized since his death getting upended now? Answering these questions requires delving into the peculiarities of how Spain became a democracy in the late 1970s and the unusual choices about the country’s dark and painful history made by the politicians and the public as part of the democratic transition.

Much about Franco’s fate, both materially and figuratively, in the period after his death is due to the fact that the transition to democracy in Spain left very little room for justice and accountability toward the old regime. Unlike its sister dictatorship in Portugal—the António de Oliveira Salazar regime—which was uprooted by a popular uprising, the Franco regime was reinvented from the inside out as a democracy by a process of political reform spearheaded by a young King Juan Carlos. Although the king had promised Franco to carry on with “Francoism without Franco,” after the death of the dictator—and responding to the popular clamoring for democracy—he went back on his word and put Spain on the path to democracy by calling for free elections in 1977.

The democratic reinvention of the Franco regime meant that the losing side of the Civil War—the Republicans, a mostly leftist coalition of liberals, communists, socialists, and anarchists that resisted Franco’s assault on the popularly elected Second Republic—never got the chance to make Franco pay for his political sins. In what historians have referred to as the “Spanish Holocaust,” as many as 200,000 political dissidents were executed by Franco’s militias; an additional 400,000 were imprisoned in jails and concentration camps established by Franco after the end of the Civil War, where many died of malnutrition and starvation. An unknown number of prisoners were forced into virtual slavery to aid in the postwar reconstruction effort, including building El Valle. Some 500,000 people fled Spain as political refugees.

As part of the political negotiations that allowed for a swift and orderly transition to democracy, politicians from across the ideological spectrum agreed to a “pact of forgetting” that was institutionalized with a broad amnesty law, enacted just before the 1977 elections. This was “amnesty for everyone” as one politician put it, since it included anyone who had ever committed a political offense prior to 1977. Despite bearing the brunt of Franco’s repression, the left was eager to support this pact. It helped conceal the left’s political sins, especially the so-called Red Terror, the wave of killings that left anywhere from 20,000 to 70,000 Francoist supporters dead, including some 2,000 clergy, many of them later beatified by the Pope as Civil War martyrs.

An important reason why the politicians were able to let bygones be bygones was the complicity of the public. At the heart of this complicity is the ambivalence that many Spaniards feel toward the Franco regime. Polling data gathered in 2008 by Madrid’s Center for Sociological Research, a government research center, showed that a majority of the public acknowledged that Franco did “both good and bad things.” This data also showed the public opposed to the prosecution of former Franco officials and lukewarm about a truth commission to assign responsibility for the Civil War. And no national organization demanding accountability against the old regime emerged until the movement for the recovery of the historical memory began to gain steam in the early 2000s.

Spanish society’s complicity in silencing the past did not develop in a vacuum. In the wake of Franco’s death, fears of another civil conflict and another dictatorship were widespread. Less apparent is the intense process of political socialization that the public endured under the dictatorship. The Franco regime encouraged silence about the Civil War, which accounts for why Spaniards who lived through the war have very few recollections of this event being discussed at home, in schools, or in the workplace. After the end of the Civil War, Franco and his allies also began to promote numerous myths about the war and the regime—aided by a vast propaganda machine, including press reports, films and documentaries, and school textbooks—that in the post-transition period have done wonders to discourage any revisiting of the past.

Among the popular myths of the Civil War is that of shared responsibility, which holds both sides of the conflict equally at fault. It conveniently overlooks the fact that in 1936, Franco overthrew a popularly elected government. Another popular myth is “collective madness,” which absurdly theorizes that Spaniards lost their minds and began killing each other for no logical reason. Yet another popular narrative is to blame foreign ideological influences, especially anarchism. In this view, Spain is cast as a victim of outside forces. Nothing, however, trumps the salvation theory, the view that Franco’s uprising in 1936 saved Spain from the chaos and violence of the Second Republic. This outrageously cynical reading of history ignores both the chaos and violence that Franco inflicted on Spain, and that whatever degree of peace Franco was able to bring to the country was purchased with the lives of close to 1 million people.

The salvation theory was boosted by the political stability that Spain enjoyed after 1959—after all those in opposition to Franco had been either killed or forced into exile—and by an economic “miracle” that began to unfold in the early 1960s and lifted millions of Spaniards from abject poverty to the ranks of the middle class. Paradoxically, this very success undermined the salvation theory by blurring the memory of the Civil War and the misery of the postwar years. Thus, by the 1960s, the notion of the Franco dictatorship as a modernizing regime was born, with socioeconomic progress as the regime’s new rationale for its existence. In the post-transition era, this last regime reinvention has allowed Franco’s defenders to claim that the dictatorship paved the way for the successful democracy that Spain is today.

It was not until 2007, with the enacting of the Historical Memory Law by the Socialist administration of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, that the Civil War myths promoted by the Franco regime began to be seriously questioned. The law declared the Franco government illegitimate; called for the removal from public view of public monuments honoring the Franco regime, save for those with historical significance; provided financial compensation to those victimized by the Franco regime; restored Spanish citizenship to the Republican exile community; and created a center for the study of the Civil War in the city of Salamanca. Propelling the law was a new generation of Spaniards curious about the Civil War and no longer traumatized by the memories of the past, including Zapatero, the grandson of a military captain executed by a Francoist brigade for refusing to join the rebellion against the Republican government.

2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

I vaguely recall that summer of 1968 but for my mother's idea to take me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. Soon after its release at the Loews King Theatre in Brooklyn on Fulton street not too far from Brooklyn's city hall even at 8 years of age I was surprised that she had taken to me to 2001. If you knew my mother she was, without belittling her, a simple person, but she wasn't the best "mother" and she knew I liked science fiction and "space". I learned from her by observation, never directly. Often I asked a question she referred me in her broken English to the teacher for an answer to answer all "the why's" I had. As my questions grew in depth she referred me to the library and the books I would ask for birthdays and Christmas. I passed her capacity to teach me at a young age. As soon as I knew to walk to the library safely on my own, the library became my second home. I wasn't born with the best economic resources so I spent much of my early life finding ways to get the answers I needed through other less expensive or free means; the library, educational grants, low rate educational loans and the like to teach myself. I realized early on that to learn what for me became the establishment I only had myself to depend on. Through established norm's all I would learn was what all established instructors taught was the same thing which was fine but too often I would find they couldn't or worse they wouldn't answer the questions I wanted answered especially when it became obvious to me that they  weren't prepared to fulfill my needs. Even to the point of having my head slammed down on my desk by the teacher, first asking for questions then not answering a request for elaboration on the article in the NYT we were discussing. But then I was insistent and ended up reporting her to the principal who had her suspended.

Enough of that, I learned no matter because finding answers was the goal. I wasn't trying just to learn the basics, there was so much more. And more is what I wanted...

I stood up beside my mother as 2001 came to an end and said to her, "that's what I want, to do that" pointing at the screen I wanted to learn to what the film was teaching, "2001: A Space Odyssey".  I took awhile to learn on my own the answer(s) I sought to fill my needs; I don't think I ever will, my life is a question and my life the answers to that one question.

Our life, my life is...

ep·ic

ˈepik/

noun

1. 1.
   a long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the history of a nation.

...never stop asking. If you think you're done asking, if actually believe you have an answer, you must be dead, or just wrong.

2001: A Space Odyssey

It’s been 50 years since Stanley Kubrick unleashed 2001: A Space Odyssey onto the world, shaping the sensibilities of a generation of filmmakers while providing dissertation fodder for no shortage of academics. It’s been a busy year for the movie, with a 70mm release early this year and an unearthed recording of Kubrick explaining the film’s enigmatic ending. Well, the festivities aren’t over yet, as the film is now heading to Imax.Warner Bros. will screen the film on Imax for a week-long engagement in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto starting on August 24th. Per Variety, tickets go on sale Friday in the following locations: AMC Universal Citywalk IMAX in L.A., AMC Lincoln Square IMAX in New York City, AMC Metreon IMAX in San Francisco, and Ontario Place Cinesphere IMAX in Toronto.UPDATE: An updated press release from Warner Brothers reveals that a 4K restoration of the film will be playing on more than 350 Imax theaters throughout North America. The four aforementioned theaters will be screening the “unrestored” 70mm print—described as “a true photochemical film recreation struck from new printing elements made from the original camera negative with no digital tricks, remastered effects, or revisionist edits”—on Imax. All screenings will be held for a week-long engagement beginning on August 24th, with tickets going on sale this Friday, August 3rd.

Persistence of Vision....

The day passes in breathes...

Moments where her image appears... There in amongst pictures of her...

A persistence of vision...

Appears...

Do you ever forget me?

There's this movie...

No beginning...

Middle...

or End...

A Persistence of Vision....

California lawmakers upset that wildfire money is left out of White House's disaster aid request

By Maya Lau

Nov 19, 2017 | 4:10 PM

Aerial view of destruction caused by wildfire that swept through the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa in October. The city lost 3,000 homes. (March Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Every day, Mike Thompson hears a new story about how last month’s fires in Northern California have affected people’s lives. Insurance is being denied. Tourism is down. Some companies have laid off workers.

“Block after block of homes are wiped out and cars are melted down to their skeletal remains,” the Napa Valley congressman said of his travels in Santa Rosa over the weekend.

And yet none of the $44 billion that the White House requested of Congress on Friday for supplemental disaster aid includes funding to rebuild California after the fires — which killed 43 people and destroyed nearly 9,000 structures — a move that’s sparked an outcry from Thompson and his fellow lawmakers.

“I think it’s very disappointing. Folks throughout California were ravaged by this fire, and we should ensure they get the help and support they need,” Thompson said Sunday.

He and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said in a joint statement that it was “mind-boggling” the Trump administration did not include any funds for California in its latest request, most of which will go to hurricane relief in Texas and Florida.

California lawmakers had asked the White House for $7.4 billion to help residents recover from the wildfires that began in early October, calling it one of the deadliest and most destructive fire events in the state’s history. None of that money was included in the Trump administration’s package.

“It’s appalling the White House is choosing to ignore the victims of California’s wildfires. The latest disaster supplemental request is a completely inadequate response to all of the recent natural disasters, but it’s particularly egregious that no money was included to help Californians rebuild,” Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris said in a shared statement.

Lawmakers in other states also criticized the supplemental disaster funding request, saying it was not enough to address the devastation left from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the $44-billion figure, saying it was not a low amount.

“And my guess is if you ask any average citizen across this country, they wouldn’t feel like it’s low either,” she said.

The White House’s proposal addresses California’s wildfires by calling for tax relief for those affected.

The funds requested by California lawmakers would go toward direct assistance to victims, rebuilding public infrastructure, restoring lost homes and wineries, and cleaning up debris and waste.

The money would also replenish Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds to allow victims to apply for temporary housing, rebuild homes and small businesses, receive crop insurance, and access basic needs including medical care.

Last month, Congress approved a $36.5-billion disaster aid package, which included $576.5 million for wildfire suppression in California and the West.

Thompson said the federal response to the fire emergency was “great” — with help also pouring in from places as far away as Australia, which sent firefighters — but the rebuilding phase still needs more attention.

He and his colleagues will continue to ask for supplemental federal disaster aid funds.

“I’m not done fighting,” he said.

Measure

Measure

The Young Farmers Behind Puerto Rico’s Food Revolution

Ah, Puerto Rico! Land of rum and iguanas, palm trees and paddleboard yoga. I arrived in San Juan two days ago with every intention of reporting briskly and soberly on the state of food and farming here since Hurricane Maria hit last September.

But even the most sober reporter would be entrapped by this island’s enchantments. Since touching down I have: drunk a cocktail called the Tesla out of a lightbulb at the pert little La Coctelera (where the cocktails are quite performative: The Paper Plane is garnished with a folded airplane); eaten deep-fried fish fritters with mayo-ketchup—the island’s preferred sauce; sat with my feet in the sand reading about Lolita Lebrón, the stylish Puerto Rican nationalist who, in 1954, led an attack in which five U.S. representatives were shot, shouting, “¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!” without once rumpling her French-knotted scarf.
This might all come across as frivolous given recent events, but in San Juan, at least, so much has been rebuilt in seven months that it’s hard to find evidence of Maria’s devastation—but for the occasional inoperative traffic light and the blue pointillist dots of FEMA tarp roofs against the composed pastel city. Of course there is damage one can’t see from bar stools or beaches, and I am en route to meet a 34-year-old named Tara Rodríguez Besosa, cofounder of the Puerto Rico Resilience Fund—an effort to help rebuild the island’s beleaguered farms. Rodríguez Besosa is the force behind an emergent Puerto Rican food revolution, and my plan is to join one of her volunteer brigades tilling topsoil at Huerto Semilla (“seed garden”), an agroecological student-run farm smack in the middle of San Juan, at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus.

When I arrive, the scene is a veritable hive of activity: young farmers, almost all women, bent over hoes, ferrying large bunches of holy basil or laying irrigation tape. Rodríguez Besosa, whose pixie cut and thin limbs give her the appearance of a rangy Peter Pan, stands with a shovel by beds of cilantro, mustard greens, and kale. She is physically striking, making a schools not prisons T-shirt, short black leggings, work boots, and dirt smudges look chic. The effect is partly due to her height—she is five feet ten—and her deep outdoor tan, sparkling eyes, and constant smile. She shovels soil through a sieve, while directing admiring young volunteers and answering her constantly ringing phone: Here’s where to deliver lunch; this is what time the car should meet her in New Orleans in two days; here’s where to send the next brigade.
Restoring Puerto Rican agriculture is a complex and novel project, since the island mostly stopped producing its own food long ago. By a conservative estimate, Puerto Rico imported at least 80 percent of what it consumed before the hurricane. The story of why in the briefest possible terms: Farming declined during Puerto Rico’s days as a Spanish colony, when native agriculture ceded to large colonial plantations. Under U.S. administration, beginning after the 1898 Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico was subjected to a combination of economic restructuring, industrialization, and the growing stigma of being perceived as a rural, peasant island. Surviving farms grew profitable sugarcane, coffee, or, in rarer cases, plantains and other fruits. By the turn of the twenty-first century it was all but impossible to procure anything locally but a very limited set of crops.
This does not perhaps sound so bad—until you consider the high environmental costs of transporting the island’s food. And the poignant lesson of Maria, which destroyed 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s crops in addition to roads, homes, vehicles: that dependence on imports left Puerto Ricans uniquely susceptible, in the face of a natural disaster, to starvation.
“They say that during Maria, Puerto Rico only had enough food for one week,” says Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, who rose to international prominence feuding with President Trump over aid. “I hate to say anything positive about Maria. But what the hurricane did was force us to look at the realities of life here and how our dependency on the outside weakens our ability to ensure our people are taken care of. Maria made it evident that we need agricultural sovereignty.”
Sylvia De Marco, a collaborator of Rodríguez Besosa’s and co-owner of a San Juan boutique hotel called the Dreamcatcher—in whose Goddess Suite I’m spending the week—agrees. “After the hurricane, even people who didn’t care about food started to care. It really opened people’s eyes: that we have to depend on our soil, not shipping containers.”

Puerto Rican farming was highly limited before the hurricane. Recovery efforts envision a more diverse crop. Detail of Papaya, by Ana Mercedes Hoyos.
Photo: Courtesy of Ana Mercedes Hoyos. Papaya, 1994. Oil on canvas, 23.6ˮ x 23.6ˮ.
Enter Rodríguez Besosa, an artist turned farmer who studied architecture at New York’s Pratt Institute and helped run a gallery in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A decade ago, missing home, she moved back to Puerto Rico. She helped out on her mother’s tiny organic farm to make money while she opened a cultishly popular, illegal, and not at all lucrative bar in San Juan. She quickly detected a problem. “There was one farmers’ market every two weeks, and you had to be up at 9:00 a.m. to get anything. I was running a bar. I wasn’t waking up at nine.” Some small vegetable and meat farms, like her mother’s, existed around the island, but farmers and consumers had few ways of getting together.
Rodríguez Besosa, a natural entrepreneur, decided to fix the problem. She accepted $10,000 in seed money from a friend, rented a warehouse, named it El Departamento de la Comida (“the department of food”) and started driving around selling boxes of local vegetables. “The vegetables I bought had to be not just local but sustainable—agroecological, biodynamic,” she says. Her quick conversion to the dogma of sustainability may be genetic. Her mother was a model and fashion retailer turned farmer; her sister studied biology before taking over the family farm in 2011. “My point was we could not afford to go on farming unsustainably in Puerto Rico,” she says.
The response was enthusiastic. María Grubb, a Puerto Rican who spent about seven years cooking at New York’s Pastis, the Modern, and Maialino before returning to open Gallo Negro in San Juan’s bohemian Santurce neighborhood, says that when her restaurant opened, El Departamento de la Comida was the only place she could find fresh local vegetables. Juan José Cuevas, former chef at Blue Hill in New York City, who moved here in 2012 to take over the kitchen at the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, agrees: “Tara was doing this when no one was.”
“We detonated something really interesting,” Rodríguez Besosa tells me over a delightful lunch at Huerto Semilla of rice and beans, roasted eggplant, and local lettuces with orange vinaigrette. “We were all over the newspapers. The whole thing erupted. I was like, I have no idea what this is, but, holy shit, it is amazing.”
Her next step was to transform El Departamento de la Comida into a restaurant. She bought an $80 stove, installed it in the warehouse, and let friends and visitors make simple dishes like pumpkin soup and pesto. “We had two to three people in the kitchen. Maybe it was an artist who cooked outside, or maybe it was someone who liked to cook, like Paxx Caraballo Moll”—a Puerto Rican chef getting accolades for the new restaurant–in–a–tiki bar Jungle Bao Bao. Furnished with folding tables and chairs, serving a changing vegetarian menu of whatever local farms harvested, the restaurant quickly became beloved, akin to Brooklyn’s Roberta’s—shabby, a little uncomfortable, delicious.
“Then the hurricane hits us, and bang, we’re gone,” Rodríguez Besosa says. The restaurant flooded, then was repeatedly looted. Stranded in New York for an event while the storm raged, Rodríguez Besosa gathered friends to create her Resilience Fund and pitched in with the ad-hoc Queer Kitchen Brigade, which canned food to send to the island. Rodríguez Besosa brought some of the cans and jars back herself, along with seeds and farming tools—by joining a delegation aboard a Greenpeace ship.

Since November, Rodríguez Besosa has sent farming brigades, in her brightly painted Guagua Solidaria (“solidarity van”), to more than 30 gardens and farms all over the island, distributing seeds, building rainwater collection systems, donating tools, cooking meals, giving acupuncture treatments, and providing general spiritual uplift. She plans to help 200 farms before the campaign ends. “And if you’re growing food in your backyard, you’re included,” she tells me. “If you sell at farmers’ markets, you’re included. If we want to create autonomy in Puerto Rico, it will have to be in different ways. We have to do urban agriculture; we have to do school farms, community farms, backyard gardens.”
Mayor Yulín tells me that Rodríguez Besosa’s role in the island’s future is unique. “Tara is giving agriculture a new face,” she says. “She’s found a way to convey the importance of a new local agriculture at a primal level, with the technology and vision to ensure it’s done in a socially responsible and fair and ethical way. She’s taking something old and making it exciting.”
Rodríguez Besosa isn’t alone; others on the island have rallied to support local agriculture too. The Dreamcatcher’s De Marco offered guests the opportunity to volunteer at a farm called Estancia Verde Luz in nearby Ciales last spring. She tells me, “Our menu is all local, and Estancia Verde Luz was the main farm who sold to us. It was completely trashed in the hurricane. So we had guests help with cleanup. People felt really good to be supporting the economy, and at the same time helping a farm rebuild.” In May, De Marco launched a monthly dinner series called Nuestra Mesa (“our table”) in collaboration with Rodríguez Besosa: four courses of local vegetables, served in the Dreamcatcher’s airy kitchen and patio, attended by hotel guests, locals, and farmers.
An hour and a half east of San Juan, I pay a visit to an Ayurvedic biodynamic farm named Finca Pajuil that Rodríguez Besosa has told me is a model of resilience, replete with rotation planting, rainwater collection, aquaponics—the kinds of things Mayor Yulín says must be part of Puerto Rico’s agriculture.
An unfortunate misunderstanding with my phone’s GPS system leads me to a distinctly un-Ayurvedic pizzeria (I recommend the calzones), but eventually I arrive at my destination, and the bright-eyed head farmer, Jey Ma Tulasi, greets me at the gate—an inexplicable but not entirely unattractive green botanical V painted down the middle of her face. Tulasi shows me where neem and breadfruit trees once divided her land from the road, their disappearance depriving her crops of shade. Still, it’s impossible not to see how many more birds flock to Tulasi’s moringa and banana groves than to neighbors’ backyards, how many more bees buzz in flowers, and how healthy her curving spirals of holy basil and tarragon, aloe and mint make the land. Her little shop sells a homegrown, Ayurvedic version of adobo made with her own turmeric and local sea salt. There is moringa for sale by the bunch, and curry leaves. I’m struck by the hopefulness of the hugelkultur beds—deep garden plots made from fallen trees—which are already thick with pumpkins and sweet potatoes.
Over a final dinner with Rodríguez Besosa at Cuevas’s 1919, inside the Vanderbilt, I note that women seem to be leading this movement. “In terms of activists inside the farming movement, at least half of them are women,” Rodríguez Besosa says. “And more than half the farmers I work with are.”
What follows is one of the more exciting meals of my recent memory: white gazpacho; lobster with eggplant and mozzarella; tuna tartare with caviar; barely cooked tuna with tomatoes; salmon with fresh shelling beans; local goat-cheese ravioli; and a local fish from the snapper family called cartucho—much of which comes from farms and fishermen on the island, whom Cuevas buys from directly.
Cuevas joins us as we share coconut sorbet and a salted caramel–and–chocolate tart. He sees another silver lining in Maria. “Obviously, six months ago things were very bad,” he says. “But six months have given people time to stop, think, and grow things. The Puerto Rican diet of rice, beans, plantains, and root vegetables is very earthy, but it also takes a really long time to grow.” The destruction of plantain groves has encouraged the planting of fast-growing beets, greens, tomatoes instead—ingredients healthy diets demand.
We end the night tasting three homemade jams from a woman who delivers them biweekly: one pineapple-and-mango, one papaya, one guava-coconut. They are faultless. I wonder whether I could find them in New York.
Rodríguez Besosa’s sparkling eyes light up further. Her next project is starting her own farm on land she bought last week. “It’s in a small community in Caguas, 45 minutes south of San Juan,” she tells me, so excited she’s nearly vibrating. “I’ll finally produce my own food on a larger scale.” It’s also the next iteration of El Departamento de la Comida. “This will be a model farm that hosts only workshops using permaculture and agroecology frameworks, and a collective for queer and trans people who want to work the land.” She plans to build a commercial kitchen on-site and use primarily the harvest from the farm itself. Next up, she says, as we chase our jam with petits fours: “our own product line.”
In this story:
Sittings Editor: Yohana Lebasi.
Hair: Adam Szabó; Makeup: Caoilfhionn Gifford.

MeasureMeasure

God Is Dead

God is dead.

God remains dead.

And we have killed him.

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: 

who will wipe this blood off us? 

What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? 

Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

-- Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)

God Is Dead 

I receive a call from Emily, an old girlfriend...

Nervous and anxious she asks me to rush over to see and to talk...

Emily was due back at work but never showed up...

Emily had been missing for several days when she called...

I rushed over to her apartment...

Anxious to know how she was...

Where she had been....

Emily was careful and reluctant to let me into her apartment... 

She looked gaunt and exhausted...

Her eyes were mad, her eyes moist with tears... 

We sat on the couch and she said, “I killed God.”

“You killed God?”

“Yes.” 

“How – what do you mean, you killed God?” 

“That’s just it. I killed God.” 

“How did you kill God? How did you meet God

“I beat him over the head with a long piece of wood I had found further down in the forest, that I had used as a walking stick to climb up the mountain.” “Emily, you went on vacation to Central America, right?” “Yes I did. Belize actually.” “Belize. Did you find God in Belize?” “No. Not exactly.”

I found a path...

I found a walking stick...

That I used it to climb the mountain...

And used it to kill god...

So you met God...

Yes...

You killed God with a branch?

Yes...

And God did nothing to stop you...

No, not one bit of protest, God is dead...

How do you know it was God...

I was told by the elders in the village...

And why assume they were telling you the truth?

I traveled a long way because of what I'd been told about by many of the villagers before...

How remote it was in a place so far away...

And what had you been told?

Magic, the village held secrets and magic was one of them...

And that I could find God...

Jeremy, I was a broken woman...

Space and time, I needed space and time...

I couldn't interact, I couldn't work with you or others...

I considered life as it was and it made no sense so I left...

And looked for God.

For all intent, I am dead...

Said God...

I tried to care so much... 

Too much that I became an angry God... 

And my children turned away from me...

Having lost all memory of me...

There was no son...

An embellishment by those who thought I should... 

One of the hundreds who spoke as if they knew me and of my power...

I am dead to humankind and they are dead to me...

I must remain as the essence of humankind though... 

I leave and will wither without me...

I must wait until humankind throws itself into the fire...

I must wait until they release me...

The chain keeps me here...

Chained to a stick in the ground...

I make no choice...

I have no choice...except to be killed by the hand of one of my children...

You can free me...

Instead perhaps I should let you suffer, bring you within a hairs breath of death...

Why do you hate me so?

I don't hate you...but I don't love you...I don't need you.

Are you sure?

I don't know.

I recall once as a child I would serve God...

How could God ever die?

The universe is greater than you can ever imagine...I am a layer among layers...

I represent a greater power...Humankind called me God and I am not for there is a God above me...

And I'm sure above that...the hierarchy seems endless...perhaps it is...

Perhaps, I am not needed?