The Ecological Culture Initiative is proud to offer fresh, organic, locally grown vegetables to the local food pantries of Hampton Bays. We are growing heirloom variety produce in the Good Ground Heritage Garden located at the St. Joseph Villa in Hampton Bays, and providing healthy, fresh food to community members in need.
The Ecological Culture Initiative is proud to offer fresh, organic, locally grown vegetables to the local food pantries of Hampton Bays. We are growing heirloom variety produce in the Good Ground Heritage Garden located at the St. Joseph Villa in Hampton Bays, and providing healthy, fresh food to community members in need.
For the past three years my wife Anne, daughter Mia, son Michael, and I conducted a cultural experiment in a wonderful old house that is layered with history. The house was originally built as part of a farmstead by a man with the last name Foster, and what has for a time served as our home literally fostered our experiment of creating and nourishing the Ecological Culture Initiative.
Like all else around us, our lives as founders of the Ecological Culture Initiative have evolved and our relationship to the beautiful structure that served as our home and office has changed also in ways that make it necessary for us to move away and hand off the leadership of ECI to others…
Having always believed that change begins at home, I developed for myself a set of guidelines for living into the landscape. I then worked to bring my concerns to the community and its leaders, pursuing this work full time for the past two years. I can’t really tell if my work and the work of an incredible group of staff and volunteers who labor beside me has had any meaningful effect, but I do know my life here is unsustainable emotionally and financially, and I must move on.
As a youth I had the good fortune of spending countless hours exploring a large abandoned estate behind my childhood home. I would investigate each crevice in every tree, look under every rock, search every inch of every stream, saying hello to each amphibian, crustacean, insect, mammal, or reptile I found and follow birds on the wing with my eyes.
The serendipitous opportunity to work with a beloved professor, Marc Fasanella, in the early stages of his non-profit, brought me out to the beautiful town of Hampton Bays on Long Island, NY. Marc founded the Ecological Culture Initiative (ECI) to create a sense of place and culture of community engagement with the local ecosystem through advocacy, education, and local action.
We stand at a crossroads in this and every human community as we enter the twenty-first century, perhaps a tipping point. We have two options: follow the trajectory of public investment in municipal infrastructure to grow economic development along traditional economic lines, a process that has led us to...
This summer as I sat on the edge of the conservation easement surrounding the 1858 Foster Farmhouse on Wakeman Road in Hampton Bays, I asked preservationist Richard Casabianca what lesson he has learned from living in the farmhouse. “It is humbling to know that it will carry on longer than you,” was his response....
