Urban homesteaders forge ahead, despite lack of ®
Ruby Blume
Ask anyone who's ever raised a barn or bee'd a quilt: farming is about community, wherever it can be found. For the isolated homesteaders who spread out across the American West, community often meant traveling long distances during the spring planting or the fall butcher and harvest. Groups of men would traverse the prairie between often-sparse settlements (the Land Ordinance of 1785 implemented a standard survey wherein the minimum parcel was one square mile or 640 acres; by 1800 the number was halved to 320 -– still unweildy, but a good bargain for the $1.25, payable in four installments) to reach out to their neighbors and lend a helping hand.
For the most part, today's homesteaders must counter a different type of isolation – asphalt not grass and sky – which is why, for years, the Internet has been the second home to a steadily growing network of urban farmers who till their carrots and tap away on their keyboards about the experience.
Sharing knowledge is a crucial element of the homesteading experience, to keep trial-and-error from becoming trial-and-travail. So it's understandable that pastoralists the blogosphere over erupted in rage and hurt this February when the Dervaes Institute – a long-time and, for some, much loved Internet presence and self-proclaimed authority on the subject of urban farming – sent not-quite-cease-and-desist letters to sixteen other institutions and small businesses. The letters forbade their recipients, all of whom were becoming established voices in the homesteading community, from using the term “urban homesteading” without designating it as the Dervaes’ intellectual property.
The Dervaes – Jules and his three grown children – have farmed their family-operated organic plot in Pasadena for more than twenty years, and have documented their journey online (formerly at www.PathtoFreedom.com, now at www.UrbanHomestead.org) since 2001. The institute’s first attempt to trademark “urban homesteading,” was denied in 2008, but thanks to an epic two-year struggle with the US Patent and Trademark Office – easily tracked on the PTO’s website – their masthead now boasts a big, round “®.”
But that may soon change. As of today, when San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation posted notice of a petition filed to fight the Dervaes’ bogus claim, all signs point to two years wasted.
In an email this morning, Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the EFF, wrote that the filing is the crucial first step necessary to (as one group of Facebook users demands) “Take Back Urban Home-Steading(s).” Why the awkward spelling? Because right now, those Facebookers can’t say “Urban Homesteading” either.
In addition to targeting fellow urban homesteading organizations like the Denver Urban Homesteading agricultural center and the Institute of Urban Homesteading founded by Oakland local Ruby Blume, the Dervaes sent DMCA complaints – which, incidentally, apply to copyrights, not trademarks – to Google and Facebook demanding they block pages that use the term. A number of pages have been disabled, but new ones urging community members to “Dump the Dervaes” quickly filled the void.
One of the Facebook pages taken down was Blume's. She was using the social networking site to publicize a new book, co-authored with Rachel Kaplan, called Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living. In a phone interview this morning, Blume said that she neither learned from, nor knew of, the Dervaes Institute until shortly before receiving two separate letters from the Dervaes – an informal notice directed toward her Oakland homesteading school and a formal cease and desist sent to the publisher of her upcoming book.
The crash-course version of trademark law hinges on whether the terms in question are “generic” and “merely descriptive,” or whether they have become – as the Dervaes claimed to the PTO – distinctive of the company’s goods and services. With the dubious claim of “substantially exclusive use” of the terms, the Dervaes managed to squeeze into the supplemental trademark registry for educational purposes – a status that does not confer many rights, according to an EFF spokesperson . . . and certainly not the right to prohibit Blume and others from using the term in a general sense.
“I learned about urban homesteading from a vital urban homesteading community in the Bay Area,” she said. “The Dervaes Institute wasn’t on my radar at all.”
Though attempts to protect what they see as their own intellectual property may have backfired personally, the Dervaes debacle actually brought the urban homesteading community much closer together, in Blume’s opinion. She sees it as a rallying point in a movement that is centered on pride and sharing – the reason why so many people from disparate places came together so quickly on the issue.
“When April Krieger started the Take Back Urban Home-Steading(s) page,” Blume said, “over 1,000 joined in the first day.”
What Blume describes as a micro-revolution merely reinforces the values of self-reliance and community support that urban homesteading teaches.
“They’ve really put urban homesteading on the national map,” Blume said. And along with it – judging by the popularity of the newly re-christened Facebook page – Blume and Kaplan’s upcoming book.
Urban Homesteading Cover
Though the Electronic Frontier Foundation has formally filed its petition on behalf of a different set of authors, Kelly Coyne and Eric Knutzen, as well as the publisher of that duo's 2008 work The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the City, Blume and Kaplan are likewise at the center of the controversy. Even making it out of the publishing house, their forthcoming book made it onto Wikipedia’s brand-new urban homesteading page.
But for Blume, Kaplan, and all the others who rallied around the Dervaes trademark dispute, publicity was the last thing on their minds.
“Being urban homesteaders is very much about our humanity,” Blume explained. “It’s our birthright to grow and preserve food. We’ve been doing it for millennia. The possibility that it might be taken away is just so against the feeling of the movement. Sharing resources and ideas, that’s what it’s all about.”
Kaplan agrees. In addition to co-authoring the book, the Petaluma resident has worked with community reliance organization Daily Acts to shape the Homegrown Guild, a group committed to dispersing knowledge and hands-on assistance among its hundreds of members.
“We share information like we share bounty,” Kaplan said. “Our job is to keep inspire one another to keep raising the bar.”
The co-authors, who met over 20 years ago as members of San Francisco’s Mission art scene, wove a broad yet intricate guide, with Blume providing the artwork and photographs as well as some of the more nitty-gritty how-to’s, and Kaplan producing the bulk of the writing, or what Blume describes as the “why-to.”
Nearly every aspect of their collaboration was fortuitous. Blume had been approached by several publishers to produce a book – something she realized she “didn’t really want to do” at the expense of her teaching. At the same time, Kaplan, knowing nothing about the potential book deal, looked up Blume with her own ideas about writing a book.
The pieces fell into place, and a partnership was born. At its heart, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living is about cooperation – perhaps the Dervaes should pick up a copy.
Pick up a copy yourself at the following Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living book launches:
Ecology Center
April 14, 7 p.m.
2530 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley
Modern Times Bookstore
April 27, 7 p.m.
888 Valencia, SF