I recently visited one of Milwaukee’s best kept secrets, a sprawling campus near the Brewer’s Stadium known in a previous time as Wood, Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Soldiers Home is part of the Veterans Administration Complex which still provides services to area veterans, including myself. Much of the complex is a well tended cemetery, where tens of thousands of veterans are buried with tombstones in neat rows covering acres. Driving and walking through the wooded campus reveals magnificent Civil War era buildings silently crying for restoration. The plight of these buildings needs to be brought into the light, out of their secret decay, and remedied so that life can return to this forgotten treasure. The finest tribute we the living can pay to the brave men and women here in eternal rest is to restore the grounds and add new life.
The new life this veteran envisions is a learning campus, embraced by veterans, focusing on sustainable urban agriculture. Life needs to be brought back into the Center to maintain the inspiring beauty found here without diminishing it. Life in the form of people, edible plants, and fish could bring education to the community and funding for a project the veterans themselves can embrace. Restored unused buildings could become learning centers, reflecting our proud heritage through their architecture.
Whether we like it or not, we are at the threshold of a more sustainable way of living. To secure our food supply, we need to bring the production of food nearer to home. The Veterans Home could become a site of learning to produce food. Not by turning the Home into a farm, rather a site for education and demonstration of the principles of permaculture, of urban aquaculture, polyculture and aquaponics. We will then be able to see how tomatoes and lettuce can be grown with fish water in a healthy cycle mimicking nature with minimal waste. We will see worms feeding fish and turning organic compost into fertile soil. Adults and children alike are eager to learn the techniques of Will Allen’s Growing Power, eager to learn about the fish producing research coming out of the Great Lakes WATER Institute, eager to be shown how to reduce their carbon footprint in this era of dwindling resources.
The new Urban Aquaculture Center is looking for a pleasant campus-like setting. Other organizations involved with education in green building and living will certainly welcome a new venue. With careful planning, the tranquility now a part of the Soldiers Home could remain so, even as it becomes a destination attraction for the people of Milwaukee. One thing is certain. It will only be through bold thinking and action that this vision can become a life giving reality with those stately old buildings given a new lease on life.
By Jon Bales
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