Many people have asked me offline, bfp, why are you writing about gardening instead of….
There are so many reasons. Reasons that are eloquent and moving–and others that are just sort of practical, if that. I want to save the world in peaceful, practical, resourceful ways, AND….my head hurts if I read too much news any more, for example.
But I noticed something last night after I posted this post. The original title of the post was simply “gardening: the first strike.” I added the “radical” part afterwords.
It wasn’t until I saw that omission that I knew what I wanted to do–everything else in my blogging world has automatically been “radical,” even if it’s just a radical hott off? Why was I not looking at gardening in the same way?
Because I don’t want to just do ‘gardening’–I want to do gardening that takes over the world, ala vegan cupcakes. I want to do gardening that women in poverty can do. I want to do gardening that challenges what “public space” is. I want to do gardening that reminds people of what a privilege it is–and also reminds people that it is a purposefully lost skill. I want to do gardening that builds community, and gardening that capitalizes on the best each individual community members has to offer. Some have lots of time but no skills, others have money and no time, others have nothing but a willingness to work. And I want to learn how to work with that–instead of insisting everybody does the same thing.
Of course, these are grand ideas–ideas that may not ever be fully implemented, or may take years to implement. But in a long journey, what better place to take your first step than towards your own kitchen table?
- Share
March 6th, 2009 at 12:33 pm #
HELL YEAH.
Take over the beautiful manicured lawns with tasty vegetables! Dig in the dirt! That is the radical thing to do. And it feels good…
March 6th, 2009 at 12:36 pm #
Have I told you lately how radical, in all senses of the word, you are? I just love this:
“I want to do gardening that women in poverty can do. I want to do gardening that challenges what “public space” is. I want to do gardening that reminds people of what a privilege it is–and also reminds people that it is a purposefully lost skill.”
You’re marvelous. Thank you for gardening, and for everything else you do.
March 6th, 2009 at 1:40 pm #
BFP, you continue to prove that the Utne Reader was on-the-money when they placed you and Jess on the list of 50 visionaries who are changing the world. This right here, what you’re doing with this blogspace, is more powerful than perhaps even any of us quite understand yet. This is the direction my own activism has evolved over the decades. I haven’t given up on protests and placards and organizing meetings with annoying white leftists who never fail to dominate discussion. I still do some of that. But my passion pours so much more freely into the kinds of things you’ve been writing about. The outdoors. Walking. Gardening. These are areas of transformation and direct action which lie at the nexus of so much of what has gone wrong in our society.
I mean, it’s hard to even imagine today that cities once served communities; not always, of course, but it was possible, a century ago. People lived together and worked together and played together and organized together and pursued happiness together in public spaces which they controlled. Such spaces were consciously destroyed in the service of fossil-fuel-based industrial capitalism. Zoning laws were created explicitly to break up communities. Highways were built on top of fenced-in ghettoes and the internal combustion engine became the heart of economic expansion. The suburban nuclear family was held up as the social ideal by propagandists of the capitalist state, to isolate people in television dens filling their minds and bodies with stupid destructive crap. The elderly who no longer served capitalism were carted off and abandoned, disrupting the inter-generational transference of knowledge. Much wisdom was lost. Today the word “urban” is a bizarre code word having something to do with people of color and hip hop.
Hehe, wow I had no idea I was about to go off on some wild history lesson. But what you’re doing, it appears to me, is an attempt to reverse that entire historical arc. In small ways. It has to happen in small ways. At the literal grassroots. And squash roots. And lettuce roots. If we’re going to make it on this planet, if we’re going to turn this ship around and stop our pathological self-annihilation, this is how it’s going to happen. One garden at a time. I can’t imagine anything more radical.
Peace.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:35 pm #
Yes, yes, yes!
March 7th, 2009 at 8:14 am #
BFP I totally get what you mean when you say radical gardening, google image Victory Gardens from WWII, the movement was absolutely radical and inspiring and full of power. It was radical gardening at its finest. Canning is also a lost art. It really irks me when I see people complaining about the price of food when they have a spacious lawn or abandoned city lots that aren’t being used for anything! We waste so much space in this county on aesthetics like grass lawns (UGH!). People should be communing together in these ridiculous monstrosities we actually have the audacity to call “single family homes”. We should all be growing a little bit of something. Check out my v-log on gardening, you’ll like it. Hooray for Victory Gardens!
March 7th, 2009 at 9:49 am #
I must be completely oblivious — I hadn’t heard of the vegan cupcake cookbook until you posted that link! I found a sale copy of it at Borders today and I am so excited to try out these recipes
(Also, radical gardening? Rock on!)
March 7th, 2009 at 1:01 pm #
this is lovely. Reminds me that the Black Panthers’ much-less-famous activism was community gardening.
also seconding the urge to redefine”public space” – I love this! After so long in a law program, my ambivalence about how people define and redefine the word public and private makes me long to chomp nettles out of parks and streams and sprinkle seeds in median strips.
I’m now in the caribbean where food drops off the trees regardless of who owns them, and I’ve been learning about who comes out, at what time of day, to pick up the fruits. That has been intense. The university here is constructing a building which means they will cut down a stand of ackee trees I walk through every day, that I see people who are not university students come in a gather fruits from. Who will recompense them?
March 7th, 2009 at 1:03 pm #
Woops re: panthers I mean “is” not was.. I just left Oakland where the gardens are still..
March 7th, 2009 at 1:49 pm #
This is a great post. I’ve been interested in getting involved in a preexisting urban garden or starting my own when I’m able to. I’m not sure if you’ve seen this site, but it offers seeds for a small fee to start gardens and training.
Take Care.
March 7th, 2009 at 5:51 pm #
“somedays it’s uncertain if the future will even come
so i love her the one
who plants a flower in faith.”
March 9th, 2009 at 12:18 pm #
Thank you so much for this! I’m planting my first garden after being out of it since my kid was born 5 years ago. It’s so good to be back, and it’s so good to be around someone else who sees gardening as a deeply political act.