The Windy City is about to roll out a new local food label designed to support the city’s burgeoning urban farming movement. “Chicago Grown” will soon appear on signs around the city and on stickers on fruit, veggies, herbs, and honey, and eventually on processed items in which they’re included, such as salsa, jams, and even kombucha.

Backers believe Chicago Grown will be the first label issued by a major city specifically to promote its urban ag culture. “We really want the label to both increase demand for foods grown through urban agriculture and celebrate that so many people are growing food within Chicago,” says Megan Klein with the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council (CFPAC), who is spearheading the effort with input from growers around the city. “We want people to be able to identify who is growing the food around them and to let them know where they can get it.”

Chicago Grown and efforts like it are a natural next step for the “buy local” campaigns started in the ’90s. The early movement helped usher in the era of farmers markets, launch community supported agriculture operations (CSAs), and convince the nation’s gonzo chain grocery stores to stock their shelves with “local” products — but the definition of “local” varies. Now, a flurry of branding and rebranding efforts around the country is giving the eating public an easy way to tell exactly where its food comes from and who grew it.

These local branding efforts are “reweaving a community tapestry undone by industrial America,” says Phil Korman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Community Involved in Sustainable Agriculture (CISA), which in 1999 founded the groundbreaking “Local Hero” marketing campaign, with the trademarked “Be A Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown” label. “We are giving back respect to farmers and changing the culture of where we are as people.”

Proof is in the (locally made) pudding. Korman says that internal studies show that over 82 percent of residents recognize the Local Hero logo — and those who recognize it are twice as likely to to shop at their local farm stand or farmers market or to choose local products at their grocery store. In the 2002-2007 USDA Census of Agriculture, farmers in the three-county Local Hero region reported that they doubled the amount of products — everything from wood to flowers to food — sold to local customers, increasing sales from about $4.5 million to almost $9 million. Acreage of land being farmed also increased, the number of farmers markets grew from 10 to 49 between 2002 and 2013, and just in the years 2006 to 2013, the number of CSAs grew from 12 to 55, now selling 10,000 farm shares annually that feed 40,000 people.

While local food still only makes up between 10 and 15 percent of the food consumed in the region, Korman says his organization has set out to double the amount of local food in local diets over the next 20 years.

Founded in 1998, Berkshire County’s Berkshire Grown marketing organization has helped attract a new wave of farmers, says Executive Director Barbara Zheutlin. The county has seen a drop in the number of acres being farmed, but there’s been an increase in the establishment of smaller farms. “By launching Berkshire Grown, the purpose was to keep farmers farming and to grow the local food economy,” Zheutlin explains. “We’ve now created a market and the demand is going up to where we have more demand than product.”

A similar effort sprouted in Nantucket in the early aughts as a way to keep farms on the island during a time when land value was skyrocketing. In 2000, seeing growers selling off their land, local residents created the nonprofit Sustainable Nantucket. They started a farmers and artisans market that in turn created a demand for local products. In 2007, they launched a local marketing effort called Nantucket Grown.

As a result, the number of farms has increased from three to seven, and several small “pocket farms” have grown as well, says Michelle Whelan, Sustainable Nantucket’s executive director. Through a partnership with local landowners, Whelan anticipates the numbers will increase further. Restaurants are spurring on the trend, she says, by sourcing more food grown on Nantucket.

In 2007, in an effort to support local ag and assist the many small tobacco farmers transitioning to fruit and vegetable operations, the Ashville, N.C.-based nonprofit Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP) unveiled Appalachian Grown, promoting farm products produced within a 100-mile radius of the city. Sales soared as restaurants and grocers began carrying more locally labeled produce. Today, there’s even a distillery that makes moonshine from Appalachian-grown heirloom corn.

Maggie Kramer, ASAP’s communication manager, says the group supplies certified farmers with everything from labels to twist ties and produce boxes, all with the Appalachian Grown logo. The movement, she adds, has also spread to “tailgate” farms — farmers selling their fruit and vegetables roadside. “Now if you ask someone on the street what locally grown means they will answer ‘Appalachian Grown’ — they are that specific,” she says. “They want to be assured that it comes from our region and that’s different than what ‘local’ meant 10 years ago.”

And the list of local food labels continues to grow. Last weekend, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback unveiled the new From the Land of Kansas trademark, promoting ag services from “farm to fork.” The state will launch a website next month allowing residents to locate everything from restaurants to farms within a 30-mile radius of their homes. Brownback says the initiative empowers the consumer to define what local means to them.

In Chicago, backers of the Chicago Grown project hope that the new label will not only help build a market for locally grown foods, but also, in turn, create the need for more farms and farmers. As the label gains momentum, CFPAC will add a website in which the public can read about urban farms, their products, and the farmers themselves, as well as businesses that use locally grown ingredients.

Nathan Wyse, owner of a small, Chicago-based kombucha manufacturer called Arize that uses locally grown herbs such as mint, says the label will help make an “ethical connection” between grower and consumer.

“Think community gardens, victory gardens,” says Erika Allen, head of CFPAC and national projects director for the Milwaukee-based group Growing Power. “The goal is to support urban ag, and attract more farmers, giving the farmers another tool they can have in their arsenal for their business.”

Over time, CFPAC believes, the label will become as familiar to Chicagoans as, say, the logos of its two sparring baseball teams. With any luck, Chicago Grown will have more success rounding to that “home plate” than the Cubs have of late.

Anyone who’s visited Chicago can see it was once a hub for rail industry: Abandoned tracks criss-cross The City of Big Shoulders like scars on a brawny boxer. Converting this brutal urban landscape into swaths of green might seem like a stretch, but Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pledged to create 800 new parks, recreation sites, and green spaces throughout the city over the next five years. The centerpiece of that effort includes two of the nation’s most ambitious urban parks: the Bloomingdale Trail and the Burnham Wildlife Corridor.

Come early summer, work begins on the Bloomingdale Trail, a 2.7-mile, elevated “sky park” that will replace an abandoned industrial rail line in northwest Chicago. Like a super-sized version of Paris’ Promenade-Plantee or New York’s High Line (which stretches a mere 1.4 miles), the $92 million Bloomingdale Trail will link to five ground-level parks, serve as a main transportation route for bicyclists and pedestrians, and function as an extended backyard for locals.

Then, in August, the Chicago Park District will put out a historic call for volunteers to help plant a staggering 125,000 trees and shrubs in one day for the new Burnham Wildlife Corridor, offering sanctuary for some of the 5 million birds that follow the lakeshore into the city during migration seasons — and often meet their ends when they collide with glass skyscrapers. The smudge of land, now choked with invasive species, is located on the city’s South Side, hemmed in by rail on one side and bustling Lake Shore Drive on the other.

One park is for the legged populace, another for the winged. But both reflect a recent awakening, in Chicago and elsewhere, of a desire to make more room for nature in cities. In some ways, planners say, greening these ghosts of industry past will make restitution for that rugged history.

As the benefits of urban parks and nature preserves – healthier people, less crime, and improved quality of life — increase in desirability, so goes design. Through programs like Rails to Trails, elevated parks are flourishing across the country: Repurposed rail projects include Atlanta’s BeltLine, New York’s QueensWay, and Philadelphia, Pa.’s Reading Viaduct project. New riverside parks in the works include St. Louis’ Confluence Greenway and the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis.

The Bloomingdale Trail consists of 38 bridges along the former route for the Canadian Pacific Railway. At its highest point, the trail rises 18 feet off the ground. Ramps leading off the trail and into the adjacent neighborhoods will strengthen Chicago’s rep as a major biking hub, and could even spur economic development in the culturally diverse neighborhoods where they connect, says Beth White, director of the Chicago Region of The Trust for Public Land (which is managing the project).

Initiated by Friends of The Bloomingdale Trail, who once promoted the idea of the trail by posting Burma-Shave-style quizzes along Humboldt Boulevard (“What’s 18 feet off the ground and gives great views of the city?”), and 10 years in planning, the trail will offer public art, native plants, an outdoor observatory, and small theatre and concert venues. The park’s proximity to Lake Michigan and its fluctuating temperatures also make it an ideal ecology installation: From end to end it will be planted with indigenous trees that will alternately bloom and leaf out in sequence. Scientists who monitor these blooming and leafing periods over several years could gain precious clues into climate change’s effect on local botany. Paid for by state and federal funds and private donations, the trail is expected to be completed by the fall of 2014. If it receives a good public response, the trail will eventually be extended east to the Chicago River.

Meanwhile, the 2.2-mile-long, 40-acre Burnham Wildlife Corridor continues an ongoing plan by the park district to restore both prairie and woodland habitat along the lakeshore. Thousands of native oaks and fruit-bearing shrubs will offer food and respite to woodcocks, warblers, hawks, owls, and other bird life. While Chicago has dropped to the third-largest human population in the country, its location on the shore of Lake Michigan makes it a major hub for migrating birds, and the Burnham Wildlife Corridor will help keep it that way.

“On a good morning, the number of birds landing along the corridor could be in the thousands,” says Judy Pollock, director of bird conservation of Audubon Society’s Chicago Region. “When the birds come off the lake at dawn, they’re looking for a place to land. When they look down and see these wonderful green spaces in Chicago, I imagine they are saying to themselves, [in reference to the classic John Belushi Saturday Night Live skit about Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern] ah, ‘cheeseburger, cheeseburger.’”

Stretching from 31st to 47th streets, the corridor borders neighborhoods that have endured years of economic hardship. As the trees and habitat flourish, a walking path will be added, helping to connect residents with nature, increase desirability, and possibly even revitalize the neighborhoods.

“Urban planning began right here in Chicago in the early 1900s,” says Doug Farr, an architect and author of Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature who also chairs the Congress for New Urbanism. “It was a time of land grabs and making the big buck. And somehow, we forgot about the people and spaces and nature.

“But we’re rethinking it now,” Farr says, “retrofitting long-gone industry and unused space with things that flourish and grow.”

On the equinox, March 20, a mostly forgotten sliver of a city neighborhood, where Goldeneyes and Coots fly low and fast along the river, the stalks of last season’s brush still steeped in snow, hummed with the celebration of the season’s unfolding.

They gathered along the water’s banks, cutting back old growth, repairing paths and railings fashioned from tree branches. And when the day’s labor was done, the local chorus, calling themselves the Bullfrogs, sang songs bidding farewell to winter with a rousing cheer to spring.

This is life among the Riverbank Neighbors, ages 0 to 90, so named because of their close proximity to the once-shunned North Branch of the Chicago River and the life they’ve built around it. In one breath, they are both a throwback and the future, recalling a time when community thrived, often centered around the local landscape. Their recapture of life writ small and meaningful makes the art of porch sitting seem regal, a wooden step, a throne.

After his mother slipped down the muddy bank during a walk in 1994, Pete Leki took to clearing the thicket of weeds and gnarly trees hiding the ribbon of water long shunned because of its stink and ugliness. It was as if a curtain lifted — Well what have we here! — and for the first time, this mix of working class and upwardly mobile neighbors saw light bounce off the river.

Leki, an elementary school science teacher whose house is a mere stone’s throw from the river, built steps from discarded concrete and flagstone, fashioning railings from old tree branches. He posted bills about brush clearing around the neighborhood. A few turned into many. Together they shored up the bank, terracing the new soil to prevent erosion. Naming themselves Riverbank Neighbors, they began celebrating a day’s work with potlucks along the bank. Afterward, the Bullfrogs would sing a cappella — a bit of The Talking Heads or Sly and the Family Stone.

Old brush was replaced with native plants and trees: hazelnut and American plum, blue fruited dogwood, button bush. Rows of gooseberry bushes now yield fruit for pies and jams. Beavers have returned to the water, along with turtles and fish. Fox and Black-crowned Night Herons, Red-breasted Grosbeaks, and Great Horned Owls. Each house, it seems, has a canoe or kayak.

Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Lost City, a study on the decline of communities in the U.S., says Riverbank Neighbors reflects a shift. Nature — parks and forests, farms and gardens — historically have been at the core of community. Today’s environmental concerns, such as climate change and mass extinction, increase the desire for people to live in more tightly knit communities. The swelling use of social media, he adds, is actually drawing people closer to where they want to meet in person.

In Chicago, the Riverbank Neighbors have set up a system of borrow and barter as a means to stay out of the big box stores. And they’ve created a fun, illustrated guide to keep them off the marketer’s map, titled How to Disappear.

Fridays mark the Walk Around, when many Riverbank Neighbors open their homes at the dinner hour and are visited by other neighbors who make their way from house to house, eating a bit of the meal, often grown in their own gardens, at every stop. There’s a requirement, however, that before moving on to the next home, guests and hosts must throw on some music and dance. Leki says the most recent tunes included some hip-hop, a Cajun waltz, and bits of classic rock.

On the first weekend day following an equinox, neighbors will gather and form a circle either outside or in someone’s house, and a member from each family tells what has transpired in their lives over the closing season — deaths, joy, achievements, birth. They will also go over their precise river management goals for the seasons ahead, detailing work to be done throughout the year.

At Waters Elementary School, where Leki teaches, the river’s history is taught in second and sixth grades and it includes study along its banks. Recently, the students met cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Rivers Festival, in which they celebrate great musical works centered around rivers. The kids sang a song they wrote about the river:

Long time ago, I think,
Indian kids could swim and drink
Now when kids come down to play,
A sign there says to stay away …

Rivers, the CSO stresses, are “forever intertwined with our past, present and future.”

The story of a day when Leki stood on the school roof, his students fanned out below, is now part of neighborhood history. With maps at his feet detailing the original location where the Chicago River once flowed, he directed students on the asphalt below. One by one, they lay colored circles on the blacktop, creating a colorful path where the ribbon of water used to be.

Word of the Riverbank Neighbors has spread. It’s common, Leki says, for people from outside of the hood to show up at a river event and say, “We’re not from the neighborhood, but we’d like to join in.” And they’re welcomed. People are hungry for community, Leki explains. “We no longer value the idea of ‘staying.’ Transiency has become the norm,” he says. “So we’re happy when they come to visit.”

A new, seven-acre urban “accelerator farm” taking root on Chicago’s south side will soon grow one of the Windy City’s most-needed crops: farmers.

Called South Chicago Farm, it will be the seeding ground for Farmers for Chicago, a recruiting program announced today by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Growing Power, the Milwaukee-based urban farming organization founded by MacArthur Award-winning urban ag luminary Will Allen. The three-year, tuition-based farm becomes part of the city’s new “incubator network” through which the city is making land available for farmer training. Emanuel, who unveils the network plan today, says getting farmers on the land is the next big step toward building a strong, local agriculture system.

The farm site, located across the street from a former steel plant, includes walking trails and an adjacent plot that will hold community gardens for 100 local families overseen by Growing Power.

Erika Allen, Chicago and national projects director for Growing Power (and Will Allen’s daughter), says that while the city is making huge advances in developing urban agriculture, there simply aren’t enough farmers to grow the food that Chicago needs. Detroit, Cleveland, New York, and other cities that are working to build local food systems are also feeling the farmer drought.

Growing Power has been a leader in the urban ag movement nationally and operates eight farms throughout Chicago. Erika Allen says six to 12 farmers will be chosen for the program, with farming beginning on small parcels as early as May. When in full operation, Farmers for Chicago will school 100 farmers annually.

To start, Farmers for Chicago will only take applicants with prior farmer training who submit a business plan. The program will help these emerging growers launch their own businesses by providing not just the land, but also technical assistance, shared tools, seeds, and access to local markets. Allen says the program provides participants with three years of support, earned income, and rights to lease and farm the land long-term.

Tuition will go toward operating and lease costs. Allen estimates tuition will be $200 a month during the first year, then dropping as farmers advance in the program. Scholarship funds will eventually be available for economically challenged students. Produce grown at the site will help bring fresh food to local neighborhoods as well as small, local retailers moving into the healthy food arena.

Training and incubator farms will further advance Chicago’s goals for urban agriculture by not only creating a local food supply, but teaching marketable job skills including hoop house construction, food processing, compost production, and both retail and wholesale sales. Via the incubator network, farmers will be able to graduate to city-owned land, helping to make use of hundreds of vacant lots created by disinvestment and economic blight.

The city owns 15,000 vacant lots. However, it takes the work of one farmer to care for a quarter-acre of land. And it costs the city $250,000 to get a half-acre of city land prepared to farm. The cost includes new soil, compost, fencing, and adding a water supply.

The training and incubator network will be made up of more than 15 acres of land throughout the city, including the new South Chicago farm and established urban farms run by Angelic Organics, Growing Home, Heartland Human Care Services, the Washington Park Consortium, and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Several more will be added next year. Heartland is currently developing the 2.6-acre Chicago FarmWorks in Garfield Park, a work-training farm creating jobs in urban agriculture. The Chicago Botanic Garden, through its Windy City Harvest system, is preparing the new 1.7-acre Legends Farm, also an incubator, in the city’s Grand Boulevard/Grand Crossing neighborhood.

The network further deepens the city’s commitment to urban agriculture and providing healthy food for residents. In 2011, a new urban agriculture ordinance went on the books, and late last year, Emaneul announced the formation of an urban farm district on the city’s south side. Last month he set an agenda to get Chicagoans eat healthier.

Peter Strazzabosco, deputy commissioner for the Chicago Department of Housing and Economic Development, says no other city in the country is working so hard to provide city-owned lots for farming use. Last November, the city announced the formation of a large, South Side urban ag district, making it one of the most comprehensive plans in the country.

The mayor’s support for farming in Chicago is creating not only awareness among residents about healthy eating and possible new job growth areas, it is also garnering national attention. What sets Chicago apart, says Dave Snyder, program manager at Chicago FarmWorks, is the will behind its urban ag movement.

“It has cultural support from the mayor all the way down to tiny little block clubs,” Snyder says. “But what people don’t realize is that Chicago has a long, long history of both gardens and farms within the city. We had the Slum Busters (south side neighbors who planted gardens as a way to beautify their communities) of the ’80s and ’90s who were doing this thing before anyone even thought of it. And it underpins the culture we have today.”

Of Chicago’s evolution into urban farming, Snyder says the transformation is casting the city in a different light.

“To be certain, Chicago is going to be a very large urban ag hub. I can’t think of another place where city government is turning over land for farming,” Snyder says. “The commitment is real and it’s a thriving and diverse scene. Chicago has this reputation of being segregated. Yet, last week I went to a community garden summit and when I walked in there was the most diverse group of people you could ever imagine.”

Here on this small stage in a shanty of a bar called the Hideout in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, where Jack White once shook the night in flame-red pants, the Band of Farmers is about to strut its stuff. And we’re not talking produce.

Clad in everything from overalls to mustard yellow rain suits, a procession of characters mounts the stage, plucking guitars, strumming mandolins, and twirling pitchforks. There’s even a reading by a “beet poet.” They work the crowd into hoots of “yeehaw!” Some in the audience wave jars of apple butter in one hand, craft brews in the other. From the stage a voice bellows, “God, this is an episode out of Portlandia!”

Welcome to the first annual Farmer’s Talent Show, a hodgepodge of acts by nine Chicago-area organic producers. They created the show as a way to market community-supported agriculture operations, or CSAs. CSA farmers sell seasonal “shares” of their products, often before planting season. The early infusion of revenue gives them funds to buy items such as tools, seeds, and other equipment for the coming season. Customers, in return, receive weekly or bimonthly boxes of freshly harvested produce that are delivered to drop-off places or right to their doorsteps.

The lure of a CSA has always been the bond it forms between farmer and customer. Founded in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland in the 1960s as cooperatives funding farmers growing healthy food, CSAs were brought to the U.S. in the late ’80s, and soon gained popularity. Some CSAs have moved beyond produce, offering fruit, meat, poultry, eggs, flowers, and even honey and fresh-baked bread — sometimes all in one box.

But sales for many CSAs have declined in recent years, due in part to a bumpy economy, but also because more farmers markets and grocery stores that offer a growing selection of natural foods have made for an increasingly competitive marketplace. The rise of the not-necessarily-local “produce in a box” model has also helped muddle choices for consumers.

In response, farmers have had to get creative — and no place more so than in Chicago. Julia McDonald says she came up with the idea of the talent and fashion show as a way to further connect with potential customers while forming a marketing coalition with other area farmers. Julia and her husband, Todd, farm the 20-acre Peasants’ Plot near Kankakee, Ill. Tonight, wielding pitchfork and rake, they perform an “interpretive” dance to the Pogues song “I’m a man you don’t meet everyday.”

Also in the lineup, Alison Parker of Radical Root Farm sings in a Patti Smith vibrato that we should “join a CSA, we won’t be mad, make the best meals you ever had …” And in a stunning piece of performance art, a deeply eye-shadowed Jody Osmund of Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm sits at a humming Singer sewing machine and makes a bag out of a T-shirt while Tim Minchin’s video “Canvas Bag” plays on a huge screen. Finished, he whips the bag from under the needle, prancing the stage, the audience dancing and wildly chanting, “Take Your Canvas! Bags! to the Supermarket!”

Osmond, who offered the state’s first meat CSA, says community-supported ag operations offer better rates and longer seasons than farmers markets that open and close on set dates. Farmers enhance the one-on-one experience by offering farm tours, seasonal dinners, and newsletters and blogs containing preparation methods and recipes, he says. As for the talent show, Osmond says it helped create buzz around the city, but it also gives the farmers “a chance to show our creativity and find a way to beat the winter doldrums.”

To be sure, the event forever changes the image of the “local farmer.” These people are creative and vibrant, bearded and tattooed, self-deprecating and grubby in a delightfully urban way. In a surreal moment, Heidi Joynt, owner of Field & Florist organic flower farm, dons a stretchy jumpsuit and flower-patterned roller skates, green garden gloves, and shades, grabs a bouquet and hands out flowers as she roller dances among the audience to Queen’s “Another one bites the dust.”

The show fills the Hideout to capacity and participating farmers sell a few shares on the spot. George Eberhart and Jennifer Henderson of the city’s North Side say they saw a poster announcing the show and CSA fair. Curious, they made their way to the Hideout, where Henderson says meeting the farmers face-to-face in such an unusual setting was enough to seal a deal.

Laura Lenaoni came to renew her meat share share with Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm. “It’s awesome to know your farmer and have access to good food,” she says. It’s more than getting a box of meat each month. They’ve taught me how to cook it and put together a meal.”

As dusk settles over the Hideout, the fashion show begins. A farmer takes to the stage, modeling cargo pants that transform into shorts with the tug of a zipper. Nick Choate-Batchelder of Midnight Sun Farm models his “town scarf.” (His field scarf, he says, smells like hog poop.) “I got it at Farm & Fleet” rings through the bar like Dolce and Gabbana at Paris Fashion week and the audience, awash in beards and berets and tattoos, sways to songs about DIY and nails in the coffin.

And in a grand gesture that elicits a mass “ewwww” from the crowd, rookie farmer Tim Magner, of Truck Farm, a mobile operation run out of the back of a F250, pulls off his shoe, fills it with beer, and takes a swig. A toast to the Band of Farmers.

With mounting school loans and the uncertainty of finding a job after graduation, 26-year-old Jenny Monfore decided to leave college early and look for alternative education. At the Driftless Folk School in Wisconsin, the Bozeman, Mont., native and massage therapist studied organic food preparation, blacksmithing, and mushroom identification — skills she hopes will augment her income and allow her to live a more independent lifestyle.

“We no longer have practical skills, we don’t know how to feed ourselves, and we’ve basically become lost,” Monfore says. “So we’re slowly building new, thoughtful communities.”

Folk school: The phrase calls to mind cloggers, birch bark hats, and strains of “If I Had a Hammer.” But these craft schools of yore are experiencing a resurgence of late, drawing young do-it-yourself homesteaders and restless baby boomers to the woods to learn about everything from organic farming to electric cars.

The folk-school movement originated in Denmark in the 1800s as an alternative educational system steeped in religion, culture, and community. In the U.S., the schools’ focus on “togetherness” morphed into the ’60s and ’70s hippie and Foxfire awakenings. They were relegated to the fringes by the subsequent corporatization of nearly everything, however, and aside from long-established schools such as the craft- and music-centered John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, they disappeared.

But now, a growing interest in sustainability and the rise of craft and DIY culture, as well as unease with the current course of the economy and climate, are drawing people back into the folksy classroom.

“There’s a level of uncertainty about what the future holds for us as a society,” says Kyle Lind, a 27-year-old college graduate who recently started a 10-month internship at North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minn. “Oil and food prices are on the rise. The cost of electricity and heat are skyrocketing. More and more people are realizing they have to know how to do for themselves.”

Last June, after doing similar work in Missoula, Mont., Lind started a business, the boldly named Morningwood Hardwoods, salvaging wood from “blow down” urban trees in Minnesota, and says he wanted to learn saw milling skills and expand into furniture making, timber framing, and boat building — the backbone of North House’s curriculum. It’s a way, he says, to break free of corporate America, to forge his own path.

North House holds 350 workshops yearly, drawing students from across the country and the globe. Executive Director Greg Wright says he fields calls weekly from people who want “the recipe” for starting a folk school in their communities. “Folk schools are resurfacing and it’s a reflection that people are conscious that change is coming,” Wright says. “The world is going to change. The paradigm we have now can’t continue to exist.”

The schools themselves have shifted focus in order to be relevant to a new generation, with a heavy focus on organic farming, sustainable communities, and green technology. In Fairbanks, Alaska, the new Folk School Fairbanks will team up with mechanical engineers at a local university that was asked to design an electric car for a manufacturer.

People enrolling in folk schools range in age from 18 to 70. Enrollment is growing among high school graduates taking a gap year before starting college. College grads are opting to spend gap years at folk school, too, in some cases using the opportunity to rethink their careers. Some students in their late 20s and mid-30s come to learn a trade or craft for a second income. Add to the mix boomers who’ve been laid off, have difficulty finding work, and are hoping to start a small business, and others who have chosen to leave careers in pursuit of a long-ignored passion, and you have a recipe for dramatic growth.

The Driftless school, which sits in a hotbed of organic farming amid the rolling hills of Viroqua, Wis., was founded in 2006 by residents who wanted to open an art school. The school (named for the local topography, which was unscathed by the glacial drift that plowed much of Wisconsin flat) now enrolls 300 students annually. Classes, which are mostly held in teacher’s homes, have expanded to include everything from farming to beekeeping to rustic bread craft. With enrollment growing each year, Driftless will eventually move to a permanent building, says Robert Schulz, one of the school’s founders.

Schulz, 37, and his wife own a 40-acre organic produce farm and built their own home. He supplements his income in the off-season by blacksmithing, making railings, door hardware, and fencing — a trade honed at the Campbell school. Nonetheless, Schulz says most of these schools aren’t advocating that students depart society for a rustic life in the woods nor to totally give up day jobs.

Rather, Schulz, Lind, and Fairbanks’ John Manthei see the movement as more of an awakening, an awareness that we’ve drifted a bit too far from nature. Not as doe-eyed as their earlier ’60s counterparts, they know the world won’t become one happy commune. Still, they point to a budding homesteading movement in both urban and rural areas as evidence that these ideas are gaining traction.

“No one is saying this is going to take over,” Schulz says. “For those, however, who are feeling as though something isn’t quite right, that they’re not self-sufficient enough, not creative — they are the ones who will find us.”

Not many people would see value in a retired Chicago Transit Authority bus with 500,000 miles on the odometer, a slow engine, and seats bursting at the seams. But in late 2011, a group of Chicagoans looking for a way to transport groceries into their deprived neighborhood had a vision. They bought the bus for $1, and with grant money, made repairs, tore out the seats, and gave it a fresh paint job and a fitting new name: Fresh Moves.

Today, Fresh Moves, a nonprofit serving the city’s south and west sides, has two buses in its fleet, with a third coming in June. When growing season arrives, the crates onboard overflow with locally grown fruits and vegetables. And the lines of residents awaiting its arrival grow longer and longer.

If Mayor Rahm Emanuel has his way, services such as Fresh Moves will soon take root and flourish citywide under a completely revamped food system designed to change the way Chicagoans eat. Emanuel’s recently adopted, $5.8 million Recipe for Healthy Places is a comprehensive agenda seeking to curtail obesity by changing Chicago’s food culture. His goal: to make fresh food affordable and available within a mile of every resident’s home. And why not? This is, after all, home of The Bean.

But Emanuel has his work cut out for him: Of the city’s 2.8 million inhabitants, 400,000 live in food deserts — neighborhoods clogged with fast food chains but devoid of grocery stores. And Chicagoans’ favorite dishes aren’t exactly right out of The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. This is the city of deep-dish pizza and unfortunate prophetic menu offerings like spicy chicken “thunder thighs.” Since 1980, obesity in Chicago has doubled among adults and tripled among children.

Other cities have similar programs: New York has FoodWorks, Minneapolis has Home Grown Minneapolis, and Los Angeles has Good Food For All. But what sets Chicago’s plan apart is its comprehensive approach, says Bradley Roback, the city’s sustainable development coordinator, who helped draft the agenda. Two years in the making, the multi-department, citizen-driven plan incorporated input gathered at 24 meetings throughout the city from more than 400 residents — from community and backyard gardeners to urban farmers, nutritionists, and nonprofiteers.

The plan has of six major goals: build healthier neighborhoods, grow more food, expand healthy food enterprises, strengthen the food “safety net” (stock soup kitchens and food pantries with healthy choices and allow residents to food stamps at more places that sell good food), serve healthy food and beverages, and improve the overall eating habits of Windy City residents. So precise is it that it even addresses getting more hospitals and clinics to promote breastfeeding, getting healthy food into children at birth.

Much of the plan is already underway through the mayor’s overall Healthy Places agenda. Vacant city lots are being converted to neighborhood gardens and an urban farming district is growing on the city’s blighted south and west sides, part of an overarching Green Healthy Neighborhoods initiative. Dozens of asphalt school lots have been dug up and converted to gardens. The city has invested $68,000 to put fresh fruit and vegetable carts on neighborhood streets, with each vendor running his own small business.

Coming soon: More local farmers markets, and several national grocery chains have committed to opening stores in underserved neighborhoods. Smaller corner stores are being encouraged to carry fresh produce. There are new guidelines for social service agencies serving shelters and food pantries, soup kitchens, and churches. Food offerings at city festivals and concerts will be reviewed. Even sporting events are targeted. (Oh, die, thy beloved, holy, Chicago-style hot dog! Served with celery salt, mustard, never katsup, always on a poppy-seed bun …)

And this is just the first breaths of the mayor’s vision. Planners say their road map is “organic” (badum-bum) and will grow and change with education and access to healthier choices.

But changing how Chicagoans eat will take time. Take, for example, the people who work for the city itself. Much to city workers’ dismay, an estimated 300 vending machines in municipal buildings will be cleared of chips and danishes and stocked instead with apples, oranges, and low-fat snacks. In City Hall, some of the machines have already disappeared, replaced by a sign that reads, “New, Improved Vending Options Coming.”

Just as well, says one worker. “You end up spending $1.50 a day on Flamin’ Hot Cheetos because you’re hungry and you have to get away from your desk. Not only is it bad for you, it’s expensive. Over the course of a year, that could be a flat screen TV.”

Or a new bicycle! Right guys? Right?

While an apple may not initially taste as scrumptious as thunder chicken thighs, with some education and given a choice, people will choose the apple — or so the mayor believes. And if they have no choice other than a healthy option, they will take it. Even better if it was grown right down the block.

With time, maybe Chicago will live up to its given Latin motto: Urbs in Horto. Translation: City in a garden.

Dave Willard guides the way into a room within Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where the scene inside is at once ghastly and gorgeous. Soft down floats in the air as chatty biologists tear fistfuls of feathers from corpses of birds large and small. This day’s work: sparrows, warblers, thrushes, sapsuckers, and creepers, all among the 3,000 birds collected from last fall’s migration.

It is Wednesday, “prep day” at the museum’s Bird Preparation Lab, the small quarters where Willard, a 66-year-old biologist specializing in ornithology, leads the nation’s most extensive study of migratory birds, most killed by brutal concussion when hitting windows at flight speeds of up to 65 miles per hour.

Because of its location on migratory routes, Chicago’s skyline kills more birds than any other in the country. Navigating by the stars and hungry after flights from as far away as Peru, the birds arrive on Lake Michigan’s shoreline in search of food. There, the twinkling city and its canyons become a death trap.

Now, stripped down to the burgundy-brown musculature veined with tissue, the birds are lined up on cafeteria trays, their china-like frames reminiscent of a hat-and-cane vaudeville dance act. There’s a perfume of sweet meat, mothballs, and rot. As the biologists pluck and eviscerate, they sip coffee and talk about football and politics. Then someone carries in a paper tray of what looks to be — yes, chicken nuggets.

Willard’s salvaging work spans 33 years, during which he has collected and prepped thousands of birds whose bodies or skeletons will, over time, give us cues about environmental change. Fewer individuals of a species could point to population declines. Earlier in-migrations and later departures may be an indication of global warming. The increasing number of smaller birds found, noted by their skeletal size, may be a sign that they are adapting to rising temperatures.

While the number of casualties has been in decline since skyscrapers and high-rises began turning off lights during migratory seasons in 2004, the lab takes in about 5,000 birds yearly. And of the 64,000 this lab has handled, half died hitting the face of one building: McCormick Place, a low-rise, black steel and glass Death Star perched on the shoreline of Lake Michigan.

Long before “lights out” programs, which began in Chicago, Willard was told that the building was taking migratory flocks in untold numbers. That’s when he began his daily migration trek, setting out before dawn in rain, sleet, or snow to the lakeside base of McCormick Place. Visit after visit turned up more birds, many rare: Northern saw-whet owls, American woodcocks, ovenbirds, black rails, painted buntings, white-throated sparrows, Tennessee warblers. He recalls hearing thwacks against the glass while gathering the dead and injured.

McCormick Place has greatly reduced the number of nights its lights are on, but some remain on, and its lakeside location and glass façade make it a bird magnet. And so Willard contents himself to collect the corpses and use them to study migration “instead of having them swept into a dumpster.”

Willard and the museum team collect hundreds of birds, their vitals hand-logged in books now numbering in the hundreds. The birds are then identified, numbered, then ziplock-bagged and frozen. Still more are delivered by members of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors who comb the city’s streets for migration casualties, storing them in kitchen freezers, hidden among pints of ice cream and frozen pizzas.

On prep day, a batch is thawed in the lab and the work begins. Snippets of breast tissue are taken for DNA; feathers and toenail clippings are logged. Their isotopes reveal what the bird ate during its molt and growth, helping pinpoint where it wintered or summered. Remains are then carried to a room marked Dermestid Beetle Colony (“It doesn’t smell great in here,” Willard sings out as he leads me inside) where hundreds of thousands of the small, black, hard-shelled carrion critters dine, cleaning bird carcasses to the bone in less than a day.

Once the beetles are done, the skeletons are placed in a dilute solution of ammonium hydroxide for a total cleaning. Beautifully alabaster, the bones are painstakingly and individually numbered and stored in small, brown, jewel boxes.

It’s a labor of love for the Willard lab. Consider that some members confess to having made “gamey but flavorful” soup stock from birds killed in the field as to not waste them.

Willard’s studies have turned up both bad news and good: Once abundant field sparrows are now rarely found, helping to show the decline in grassland species. On the upside, lights-out programs are decreasing the numbers of deaths. The number of birds killed at McCormick Place dropped from a high from 2,400 in the early 1990s to 400 for last year’s spring and fall migrations.

More importantly, Chicago has taken note of its threat to birds and is working to provide them safe passage. Architect Jeanne Gang has designed plans to turn more than 40 acres of Northerly Island, just off of the shore, into lush habitat, hoping to pull migrating birds away from the buildings. Several miles of parkland along South Lake Shore Drive are also slated to become bird habitat.

Of the thousands of birds that Willard’s team inspects, a few attain places of special reverence.‬ ‪Willard opens a drawer where a pinky-sized brown creeper lies as if asleep. Found by a collision monitor on April 17, 2009, along the city’s North Michigan Avenue, the creeper weighs less than a drinking straw.‬ ‪The birds are so small that they’re rarely seen in flight.‬

When this particular bird was found, one leg was banded, denoting that it had once survived a window strike, recovered, and was set free. Records showed that exactly one year before its death, the bird had hit another building, also on North Michigan Avenue, no more than two blocks away from the window that would mark its final flight.

The April 17 creeper wasn’t sent to the beetle room. It was carefully skinned, cleaned, stuffed with cotton, and sewed back together — and placed in a drawer, deeply respected for the story it told.

It’s not every day that a former prison work camp is given new life as a place to grow food. But that’s exactly what’s happening in Peoria, Ill., where Hanna City, the shuttered facility that was also once a home for delinquent boys and a 1950s Air Force radar base, is being reborn as a food hub and farm incubator site.

The 40-acre patch of land is growing on local sustainability supporters, who believe it could be easily transformed into a farm training center and production location, helping to boost the local economy and supply food to the region’s vast food deserts.

Closed in 2002 for budgetary reasons, the state signed the prison camp — complete with a greenhouse and pristine farmland — over to Peoria County in 2008. But the gift came with conditions and strict instructions; Hanna City can’t be developed or sold. And, if rejuvenated, it must be done for public use only. Also, since it remains an active radar center run by the FAA to track aircraft, nothing metal can be built close by.

John Hamann, the county’s rural economic development director, says the county has considered giving Hanna City back to the state.

“Some of the buildings are falling apart. And inside, it looked as though everyone decided to just up and leave. Papers were still on desks, dishes were on the tables, and pairs of bowling shoes [the camp had a bowling alley for recreation] were left sitting out and untied, like someone just slipped them off,” Hamann says.

It was, as some county officials have admitted, a pretty crappy gift.

That is until Mary Ardapple got her hands on the place. Long interested in food, Ardapple, a Peoria County board member who owns a local bakery, was inspired to re-envision Hanna City after she took a trip to Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, where organic food farms dot the landscape.

“I thought, ‘why not in Illinois?’,” Ardapple recalls. So she brought her ideas to the board. Meanwhile, Anne Patterson, owner of the nearby 86-acre Living Earth Farm, confirmed the potential in the healthy soil beyond the facility’s barbed wire fence.

Illinois residents spend $48 billion a year on food, 90 percent of which comes from elsewhere. While the state has an estimated 27 million acres of farmland, soybeans and corn make up the main crops. Once a hub for vegetable, fruit, meat, and dairy production, few such farmers remain. A new crop of farmers, and a food hub to help with distribution, could help shift the local economy — even if they only produce 10 percent more of the area residents’ food.

Moreover, the area is home to many state institutions (universities and government agencies) that will be asked under the Illinois Food, Farms and Jobs Act to source at least 20 percent of their food locally by 2020, creating a great demand for food hubs.

Hanna City, in Patterson’s vision, would be one of a growing network of planned food and farming hubs in Central Illinois (the neighboring town of Galesburg’s Sustainable Business Center and the Edible Economy Project also hope to help transform the local food scene in the state).

In January, the county board — with further local input — will decide how Hanna City will be transformed. As Ardapple sees it, a farm could only benefit Peoria, a small but vital city that has experienced a cultural boom in recent years. Farm-to-table restaurants, river recreation, art festivals, and planned loft housing in the city’s warehouse district have made Peoria a weekend getaway for both Chicago and St. Louis residents.

Climate change, county officials say, also has farmers statewide rethinking the way they grow food. Some have adopted the practice of planting cover crops, while others are considering specialty crops and adding hoop houses for year-round production.

In one scenario, Hamann imagines some of Hanna City’s acres being leased to county residents who may want to switch careers and take up farming. “They could farm at Hanna City for two seasons to see if it’s what they like,” he says. Patterson extends the vision, suggesting the old work camp may also eventually be open nationally to anyone who wants to learn how to farm.

After all, access to farm acreage is one of the biggest challenges for today’s young and beginning farmers. And Patterson hopes Hanna City appeals to “young people from across the nation who are looking for a different type of career and looking for land.”

Beets, goats, bees, cheese. The possibilities are many on what Hamann says might be “the most unusual use of former prison land in the country.”

Look over your shoulder, Portland, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C. Chicago is about to roll out plans to lay down 645 miles of bike lanes by 2020. If you’re not careful, the Windy City is going to pedal off with the title of Most Bikeable City in the U.S.

Today, the city’s bike-loving mayor, Rahm Emanuel, will unveil the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020, an aggressive bicycling blueprint that was a year in the making. With 30 miles of protected bike lanes already completed and another 70 promised before the end of Emanuel’s first term in 2015, the city’s new cycling infrastructure will weave through every neighborhood, assuring a path within a half-mile of every Chicagoan’s home.

The unveiling takes place on Chicago’s once taxi-, auto-, and bus-infested Dearborn Street. The city spawned a wave of envy among national bike bloggers this month when it removed a motor vehicle lane from the downtown artery, replacing it with a two-way protected cycling lane complete with bike traffic signals.

Michael Amsden, a project manager for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) Bike Program says swiping a lane from drivers took “lots of political know-how,” adding that “no other city has cut through dense traffic” in that manner. While other cities have been putting in bike infrastructure for years, what sets Chicago apart, Amsden says, is the sheer super-speed at which the city has laid down protected bike lanes, going from “zero to second-most in the country in just 18 months.” City officials hint that converting car lanes into bike lanes is the way of Chicago’s future.

The mastermind of all this action is Chicago transportation czar Gabe Klein, known for cruising town on his Dutch-style two-wheeler sporting vintage linen suits. In many areas of the city, Klein says, lane installation is tied with planned infrastructure improvements, which will make the work less expensive. And while initial funding for the project is local, next year the city will work with federal funds awarded through the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program.

But the plan’s strongest asset, say supporters, is its backing from the public: It’s a grid designed by the people for the people. To create it, CDOT teamed up with the Active Transportation Alliance, a local nonprofit advocacy group that set up community meetings in nine areas of the city. Alliance volunteers met monthly for a year with residents in neighborhood bars, restaurants, and homes to discuss where they wanted to see the bike lanes installed. Major obstacles included the city’s numerous rail lines, waterways, and high-crime areas. Large maps detailing the routes were delivered to CDOT engineers.

“To my knowledge,” says Lee Crandell, the Alliance’s director of campaigns, “no other city has involved the public as much as Chicago has.”

Klein hopes to see the number of cars on the roads — and their speed — decrease. (According to the 2010 census, only 1.3 percent of Chicagoans bike to work, but studies show more would if they felt safe.) Future engineering includes more pedestrian crosswalks, bus-only lanes, and digital speed signs for motorists along busy thoroughfares. Over time, Amsden envisions the Windy City becoming less frenetic as the “Mary Poppins Effect” kicks in – that is, as racing bikes and Spandex give way to more casual cruisers and street clothes.

“When motorists see someone dressed in their work clothes riding a bike with a bell and a basket, while sitting upright, they seem to slow down because the cyclist’s look calls for respect,” Amsden says. “Drivers in Amsterdam, for example, know how to drive next to a person on a bicycle.”

There’s been little opposition to Emanuel’s quest to transform Chicago’s driving habits. One of the few outspoken critics is John Kass, a plump (“readers tell me that bicycling to work would seriously improve the sculpt of my buttocks”), car-driving Chicago Tribune columnist who has often painted cyclists and their protected lanes as either hipsters or snobs. When Emanuel gushed about progressive transportation and the need for sustainability in times of environmental shifts, Kass wailed that bike riders are the “One Percenters of the Commuter Class.”

“We thought we’d be able to get through the summer without reading a nakedly antagonistic-to-bicyclists story,” moaned a writer on the Chicagoist blog. “Leave it to Tribune curmudgeon John Kass to piss in our Corn Flakes yet again.”

Pete Scales, spokesman for CDOT, estimates the city spent $4 million on the 30 miles built in 2012. City Hall considers it a small investment with a large return. Bike lanes, Emanuel and Klein believe, will attract new and young entrepreneurs and high-tech companies to Chicago.

Crandell adds that studies have proven that bike lanes help fuel the local economy. “It is said that the faster a credit card goes by your door, the less likely it is that card will be used in your store,” he explains. “When someone is on a bike, they can just pull over, hop off, and park. And biking creates more bike-related businesses.”

Last year Bike Magazine listed Chicago as the 10th most friendly city for riding. This year it rose to No. 5. CDOT hopes that the Dearborn improvements will put the city in the lead. But can Emanuel really make good on such ambitious promises, given Americans’ love affair with the automobile? Word is that in Emanuel-speak, he’s f#!*ing determined.

“I’m a big believer in getting things done versus talking about them,” says Klein. “So is the mayor. We have a moral responsibility to make change as soon as possible.”