Victory Gardens—a Manifesto Victory Gardens—a Manifesto
Near the beginning of the 21st century we humans find ourselves is an urgent struggle against tremendous destructive forces of our own making. We will, in the coming years, need to fight for our health, for our community, for our habitat, for our very survival. We have poisoned ourselves and our land and must now begin the process of cleaning and renewing our polluted planet. This struggle will take great effort from our government, our industry, our schools, and our communities at every level. Brave and creative leadership will be necessary, as this struggle must be confronted on a scale larger than the individual: we need to join together and demand this sort of leadership and action. But we must also undergo profound individual reorientations and must take action consistently and daily. We must revise and refine our values, goals, expectations, entilements, tastes, even our recreation. We must reorient the way we house ourselves, clothe ourselves, transport ourselves and, most fundamentally, the way we feed ourselves. We propose to aid this struggle on an individual level by each planting a garden, large or small. Planting a garden can help restore our health with the sorts of fresh and wholesome foods humans evolved to need. Planting a garden can help cure our alienation from our bodies and from the physical work they were made to perform. Planting a garden can help restore our environment, because our food is currently embedded with fossil fuels from the food's production, transportation, and storage. By growing our own food, locally, in our yards and on our roofs, we can eliminate much of our food's carbon footprint. Planting a garden can help maintain the bio-diversity that has been destroyed by the monocultures of corn and soy, with which our snacks and fast-foods are packed. It can help us rediscover the fine and subtle tastes that have been drowned by sugars, oils, and processed grains. Planting a garden can turn idle or wasted space into productive and cleansing bio-cultures. Let every spare space become a green space! The grass lawn that is soaked with pesticides or the roof that soaks up heat can become spaces of environmental renewal. Let every flat roof become a garden or farm, a prairie or thicket. Planting a garden can help us achieve peace, because so many of our wars are fought over the fuel needed to produce and process our food. Our demands upon the world start, daily, with the way we eat. Our wars are fought so that we can maintain the domination and affluence that allows us to ship exotic foods from all over the planet—anything we want, any time we want it, fresh, frozen, or preserved. Our caloric abundance and disproportion is safeguarded by our policies, our violence, our disregard. Planting a garden can help us restore our communities. "Culture" and "cultivate" share the same roots, and our human roots lie in the communal production of food and shelter. A garden can become a meeting place of work and joy and health and celebration. This struggle of our generation is, most of all, not only a struggle to save a way of life (though many parts deserve to be saved); it is equally a struggle to change the way we live our lives. We have come to see ourselves primarily as consumers and this orientation has put our health and survival at risk. Planting a garden is a step, symbolic and actual, in changing this orientation—in seeing ourselves and acting instead as producers, as preservationists, conservationists and stewards, as cultivators, as growers. Without this orientation, our prospects are bleak. With this orientation, our prospects are rich indeed. Let us call these gardens "Victory Gardens" and let our generation also be one that creates new freedoms and prosperity. Let it too be a "great" generation rather than a passive spectators of our ruin. Erik Lindberg Pictures and Erik's proposal for garage roof top garden at http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/Main/HomePage -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20080506/0e607b0b/attachment.html _______________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
