Sims base their landing base in Asheville, North Carolina. A city rooted in the ancestral land of the Eastern Cherokee and the Yuchi, Asheville, as a local historian Roy Harris put it, a city that embodies “the worst of everything and the best of everything”. Surrounded by countryside in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville has attracted more than 10,000 people over the past decade, on the heels of an urban renewal movement that began in the 1960s and is like so much around the land. water, virtually eliminating only Black and Brown settlements. This movement has robbed the city of 500 acres of land and displaced once bustling communities into public housing. Communities of color have seen the closure of local businesses, grocery stores, and elementary schools in their posh neighborhoods.
Asheville is also one of the only cities to agree to this pledge repair solutions, a plan designed to enhance the financial, social, and community well-being of Black communities and atone for the nation’s long history of racial inequality. Harris, custodian of Asheville’s stories, history and legends, directs the younger generation on the best way to use this long overdue collection. “Land and education. Get elementary schools back, groceries back, replace urban reclamation land with vegetable and farmland,” Harris said. “Supporting young people to do the things that keep a community alive, to get some of that back.”
Enter Sims — ecologist, conservationist, farmer, healer, educator, storyteller, environmental translator. Modern industrialized agriculture has emphasized land as a “natural resource” rather than a living entity like the people who live on it. Subsidized monocultures such as soybeans and large cornfields endemic to rural areas of the United States, fortified with chemicals to ensure perfect produce or fat cattle, even newer varieties, mythical criteria characteristic of the organic sphere and the free range, all perpetuating the same illusion: that the needs of man and the needs of nature are separate, that they are not profoundly interdependent. As a result, both are exploitative and unsustainable.
In contrast, land management is based on cultivating equal relationships with the natural world. Aquaculture, polyculture, low-impact sustainable eco-design — all derive their languages, philosophies and technologies from land management as developed by indigenous cultures around the world. demand, ahead of agriculture in its most modern form. Farmers like Sims were among the pioneers of young Black, Brown, and Indigenous land managers who saw farming not only as a means of production, but as a way of generating income. Pathways to sustainable living.
“I was an environmentalist before I did anything else,” says Sims. “I’m an ecologist before I’m anything else, and that’s how I run my life, and I think agriculture is one of its branches.”
By tailoring its operations to generations of Indigenous knowledge, Sims prioritizes an ecosystem that thrives on interdependence, community, and renewable cycles of growth. grow, adapt and rest. For Sims, land management isn’t just about what they grow or how they grow it, it’s about making sure they create a safe space for their community to explore their relationship with the land. band.
