This is A Sustainable Mind, Episode 18.

The notion of sustainability, it simply sustains what we're already doing.

We have way exceeded the carrying capacity of a lot of the systems on our planet.

Is this something that we just want to sustain?

Welcome to a Sustainable Mind podcast, where we delve into the minds behind today's most impactful

environmental campaigns, organizations, and startups, inspiring the environmental changemakers

of tomorrow.

I'm your host, Marjorie Alexander.

Greg Peterson is an urban farming and sustainability innovator who resides at the urban farm, an environmental showcase home in the heart of Phoenix, which he opens periodically for tours and classes.

He also runs Urban Farm You, designed to educate and inspire others to not only grow food for themselves, but for others as well.

Please welcome to the show, Greg Peterson.

Thank you.

Excited to be here.

So I must say that I'm incredibly excited to be interviewing you because people might not know it, but one of my dreams is to have an urban farm, not necessarily just to be a gardener, but to actually have an urban farm where I am producing for myself and my family and my friends, but also selling to the community a niche crop that is valuable to me and those around me. So I'm so excited to be interviewing you. So first of all, I want to

jump in here by asking you, what was your relationship with nature and the environment growing up?

Oh, wow. So I've lived in Phoenix, Arizona for 48 years. Before that, I came from Santa Monica,

California, both big cities. In fact, if you

stand on top of my roof in Phoenix, Arizona here at the urban farm, and look, there's houses

50 miles in every direction. And I have lived within five miles of the urban farm, my home where I live,

for the past 48 years. So a lot of my interactions and

a lot of my connection came in the desert, because Phoenix is in the middle of the Sonoran

desert, and it came in the city. So it was, you know, city nature, if we want to call it that.

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