Ripping up Asphalt and Planting Gardens

Ripping up Asphalt and Planting Gardens was someting that landed in my inbox this morning. It's a great essay by Derrick Jensen and on a topic that I've been thinking about (and acting on) for a long long time now. I'm not going to reprint the whole thing due to space issues, but rather, comment on the parts that particularly resonate with me.

This culture is killing the planet. It must be stopped. 
We evidently do not have the courage to stop it ourselves.

One of the most utterly discouraging things that I have to
face on a day to day basis, is knowing that the vast majority of people around me
think that it's perfectly alright to exploit the world they live in, and are oblivious
to the fact that they will only hurting themselves (as well as me) in the end. Nobody
can make you "care" about nature, sustainability, or the beauty of life itself.  You
have to already have that state of mind.  The fact that so many people don't makes me
wonder how this civilization has come to no longer regard the natural world as
something valuable in its own right.

If you agree with all this, and if you don't want to dirty your
spirituality and conscience with the physical work of helping to bring
down civilization...you need to start preparing people for the crash, 
ripping up asphalt in vacant parking lots to convert them to neighborhood 
gardens, teaching people how to identify local edible plants, even in the city 
(especially in the city) so these people won't starve when the proverbial shit 
hits the fan and they can no longer head off to Albertson's for groceries. 

I was born with an innate curiosity towards the world of plants, and gardening.
Although this knowledge has been seemed to be somewhat extraneous at times in my
life, even in the midst of the most unlikely settings, I have called upon it.
I memorized the location of unlikely fruit trees in the city and returned to them at
the appointed time to gather their widely unappreciated fruits, falling uselessly to
the parking lots.  I would tresspass onto the private property of the rich to steal
fruit and vegetables that were obviously not being used by those who dwelled there.
I would harvest the medicinal and culinary herbs that had been planted by the
oblivious for strictly ornamental reasons.
Like a deer I would come out at night and eat grapes off a parking lot fence in
Chicago, pick persimmons behind apartment buildings in Memphis, interrupt drug dealers
in a municipal park to get at the muscadines growing behind a bridge, and walked the
alleys of Ashland taking advantage of a ceaseless buffet of cherries, pears, plums,
apples, grapes, blackberries and other fruits that hung pendulously over my
outstretched arms in the long hot days of summer.
Aside from my feral tendencies as an urban scavenger, I also participate in the
ritual of growing my own food, no matter where I live, even if it's just a few herbs
growing in whatever container I can find at the recycling center.
If old ladies in Japan can do it in tiny cramped apartments, so can I.  The Japanese
women had no compunction about ripping up grass and planting "less ornamentally
desirable" things like onions, so why should I be shy about planting gardens on rental
properties in full view of my more middle class oriented neighbors?
Besides, there's nothing more sociable than the curiosity of your urban neighbors
drifting over to inspect your un-grasslike bounty, even if their curiosity springs up
from the suspicion that your collard greens or squash viens are "weeds" worthy of
inspection by code enforcement.  The opportunity to educate is inherent in the
practice of a visible defiance of cultural norms and cultivating agrarian traditions
in an urban world.  Say nothing of course of the satisfaction of not having to buy
food elsewhere.

We need people working to teach others what wild plants to eat, what plants are 
natural antibiotics. We need people teaching others how to purify water, how to 
build shelters.

It never ceases to amaze me how little most people know about food, what it looks
like, where it comes from.  Basic things like tomatoes...much less the more
complex world of trees and herbs.  The average person is starved of the kind of
knowledge of how to provide for themselves.  The ancestors would weep in their graves
that their descendents don't have a clue about such a basic thing.   The trouble of
having money is that you don't know how to do anything for yourself, and live unaware
of the deep personal satisfaction that comes with developing competency in these
areas.

All of this can look like supporting traditional, local knowledge, it
can look like starting roof-top gardens, it can look like planting
local varieties of medicinal herbs, and it can look like teaching
people how to sing. The truth is that although I do not believe that
designing groovy eco-villages will help bring down civilization, when
the crash comes, I'm sure to be first in line knocking on their doors
asking for food.

One thing he hasn't mentioned that I think is important, is passing on some of
this knowledge to your children.  That is precisely what hasn't happened for the
past 50-100 years, and why were are where we are today.  They are the ones in the
best position to act upon these ideas, being unburdened with prior socialization
to believe that they are unable to do what is necessary to bring about change in the
world.  Children are the most adaptable members of society, and the ones that will
be able to carry on best, having not yet becoming personally invested in the system
as it exists.
So I think it should be our duty to teach these things to our children as well as
to each other.  I know it has made a huge difference in my own life to have been
taught by the elders to observe that patterns in nature, and respect them.

...the good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you 
look, there is great work to be done. Do what you love. Do what you can. Do what 
best serves your landbase. We need it all...

The work we face includes both destruction and creation....Those
lots need to come up. Gardens can bloom in their place. We can even do
our work side by side.

By Derrick Jensen
Oct. 21, 2005

When I was 22 years old, my dream was to plant vegetables and flowers on every burned
out vacant lot in my city, to turn every empty space into a place of joy.  I didn't
have the resources or time to act upon this, so I had to work with what I had close
to home.  But since then I have been harvesting seeds and giving them away to those
who will plan them where they are.  The more of us planting seeds, the more beauty
there will be in this world.  There is more than enough space in this world to
plant enough food to feed everyone. We are able to feed everyone now, we just
choose not to...
Just on my block alone, there is an unused side yard, a vacant lot (that we are
growing enough food in to feed a dozen people), and another vacant lot.  Enough food
to feed everyone in the neigbhorhood could be grown in these 3 spaces.
Thinkings about other cities I've been to, I'm sure this sort of thing happens in
many "bad neighborhoods" where land is underutilized, and vacant lots are the rule.
Once I saw an entire street of abandoned boarded up houses.  If I had the money, I
would have bought all the land, torn the houses down and turned it into a farm.
This is what needs to happen...instead of taking good farmland and turning it into
surburbs, cities need to be reclaimed by militant farmers.  Vacant lots could become
gardens.  Parking lots could become orchards.  Strip malls could become woodlots.
Abandoned houses could become barns.  Just think of the possibilities.

Derrick Jensen is an activist, author, small farmer, bee-keeper,
teacher, and philosopher whose speaking engagements in recent years
have packed university auditoriums, conferences and bookstores
nationwide. He has authored or co-authored a number of books that
examine western civilization, including The Culture of Make Believe, a
finalist for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, A Language Older
than Words, and Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution.
Visit his website: http://www.derrickjensen.org