Laura Morton
I moved to Sarasota in 2003 when I took a transfer with US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resource Conservation Service to become the Coordinator for the Florida West Coast RC&D Council. This title and job is confusing to everyone but me, but it means that I am similar to an executive director. I am just beginning to make contributions to the sustainability movement in Sarasota County, following in the lineage of Mike Sosadeeter, one of my RC&D Board members. When I showed up in Florida and met Mike and he dropped a few key words like "vermicompost" and "sustainable agriculture", I knew I had met a new big brother.
I am a Maine girl born in Milton, Florida. I grew up on what my dad called "Morton's Managerie" in a small, formerly-agricultural town in Southern Maine. We had chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, ducks, horses, gardens, mini-orchards, a big strawberry patch, and my mom ran a small greenhouse business. I was very close with my cousins, who were potato farmers that traveled every year from Maine to Florida to do two seasons, so my connection to Florida continued and flourished. After the University of Miami and The American University, I obtained my Master's degree in Natural Resources from the University of New Hampshire, with an undergraduate degree in Soil Science and minors in Plant Biology/Ecology and Political Science. Before college I worked for a variety of small businesses including agricultural, landscaping, and restaurants. During college, I worked in the U.S. Senate with the Senate Majority Leader's Press Office and with educational/research activities at the University of New Hampshire. My career has included mapping soils, marketing and communications, a detail to Nicaragua during Hurricane Mitch Restoration, and teaching soil science at the undergraduate and graduate level.
In 2003, Mike Sosadeeter and I put together what we called the Sustainable Community Agriculture Initiative under the RC&D and developed a plan affectionately called "the Mexican Restaurant Plan", named for the location of our mind meld. Working through Jodi John's Sustainable Sarasota Community Partnership, I chaired the Sustainable Food Systems subgroup. RC&D soon got sucked into the "farmstand controversy" in 2004 even as newcomers to the agriculture community , and it was in these various meetings that I met a lot of the agricultural community in Sarasota County (including Peter Burkard). I learned one critical thing from Bill Pischer during that time: if we weren't serious about finding land for farmers in Sarasota County, we weren't serious about a sustainable food system. Point well taken.
It was sometime during that same year that Jodi John and Nina Powers put together a little Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Road Trip with their new boss Carolyn Gregov, who had recently become County Extension Director. For those of us new to the area, we needed to visit businesses around that are doing what we are always talking about. On that four-county road trip (Sarasota, Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Manatee), Carolyn Gregov met Robert Kluson.
I had met Robert at the visioning retreat of the Science and Environment Council (SEC) of Sarasota at GWiz. He and I immediately had the connection of food/agriculture types and he invited me out to Buster Longino's Ranch where he was managing the conservation easement. That was the most grounding field trip I had in getting to know Sarasota - I could feel a sense of place starting to build!
Dr. K, as Nina Powers calls him, and I were both in the Sustainable Food Systems Subcommittee under Jodi John's group and had a lot of plans up our sleeves for the food and agriculture system in Sarasota County. That's how he smoothed in on the Road Trip! But, I like to take credit for introducing him to Carolyn who later hired him as Sarasota County's Ag Agent, but the trace on that one goes back through Jodi John and Nina Powers, Meg Lowman with SEC, and who knows who else!
When the Economic Development Corporation was forming its Life and Environmental Sciences (LES) Cluster, a bunch of folks from the young SEC had found dual citizenship, including me. It was here that I launched the Natural Capitalism Initiative under the LES Cluster. I worked to make this event inclusive, complex and textured, and a creative effort of many people that have been working in this movement in Sarasota County. This seminar hopefully had a strong positive impact and show us how to rally around the full implementation of sustainability in Sarasota County.
As a newcomer to Sarasota and the sustainability scene, Mike Sosadeeter directed me to two hubs: Sustainable Sarasota with who he called "Sarasota's Sustainability Czar, Jodi John and SEC, where Mike said that if RC&D wanted to be "at the table" in environmental issues in Sarasota that was the place to be. The third critical hub I found was formed later - EDC's Cluster group process, which was much more focused on the economic development angle of environmental issues which matches with RC&D.
When it comes right down to it, I am what my husband Rolando calls a "Roots Woman" - connected to my food, my heritage, my land, and my soil. I was recently talking with Ervin Shannon, the 1890 Agricultural Assistant in Manatee County and he told me that we are "the common folk" - not the political leaders or the high-powered executives. I realized that day that no matter what speech I am giving, or what suit I am wearing, I always want to be one of the common folk. That's why I left Washington, DC, and that's why I left the "state office" of my agency. And, I think that's why I love my job in RC&D - RC&D was created back in the 1960's to address rural poverty and was basically about empowering people by helping them create their own natural resource-based economies. To me, that feels a lot like both serving and being one of the common folk, a goal that I plan to keep no matter where I go or what I do.
