We start this thread by evaluating certain aspects of Robert S. Emmett's Cultivating Environmental Justice: A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing. Noting in Chapter 5, Postindustrial America and the Rise of Community Gardens, there are caveats.
'Languages as Environmental Justice: Private Property and the Public Interest in New York Community Gardens
In cities dominated by neoliberal reforms (defunding of public services, privatization of tax revenues as business incentives) through the 1990s, there was a growing sense that food gardens might be more than a weird agrarian anachronism, or "anachorisms", elements out of place (Cresswell, p. 166). Despite, or even because of, the force of the dominant story about land as private property, community gardens have proliferated in cities. This fact led the landscape architect Kenneth Helphand to designate them as a recent form of "defiant gardens." In his 2006 book of the same name, Helphand provocatively links urban gardens to other gardens mad in extreme conditions: in the trenches of the First World War and in Polish ghettos, internment camps, and POW camps during the Second World War. The term defiance may be an allusion to the essay "On the Defiance of Gardeners" by Henry Mitchell, whose earthman persona was encountered in chapter 3 in connection with the garden-centered ethics of of Michael Pollan. Mitchell attributed defiance to gardeners who face annual droughts, freezes, and pests yet return each year to plant. Helphand's gardeners faced the most adverse conditions imaginable of modern war and dispossession, and he takes them to exemplify a universal impulse, and urge to cultivate for food and beauty. Whereas Mitchell's "Defiance of Gardeners" considers nature the gardener's sole adversary, Helphand's gardeners also defied the social injustices that shaped their impoverished condition.'
One of these caveats is that no gardener who is renting space in a community garden can grow trees in the rented space. The politics of this regulation swiftly moves to the very idea of renting space, for a tree as a seedling or sapling can be grown in a container for quite some time, rendering this regulation highly questionable. The argument that a tree saps too many nutrients from the soil cannot hold, because the soil for its sustenance is apart from the rented garden's soil. Because many community gardens' soil was manufactured by forest trees, it is ironic that any regulation would argue against a tree as a shade-maker, when the corn in an adjacent garden will be growing just as tall. For trees under about 6 feet then, defiance must go beyond the stultifying implications of community garden regulations, as well as beyond the idea of garden-as-food. Examples will include those plants and trees that will assist in deciphering the genetics and epigenetics of human disease, the evolutionary associations of other living things with those plants and trees (many of which are natives), and the conservation of such evolutions.
'Languages as Environmental Justice: Private Property and the Public Interest in New York Community Gardens
In cities dominated by neoliberal reforms (defunding of public services, privatization of tax revenues as business incentives) through the 1990s, there was a growing sense that food gardens might be more than a weird agrarian anachronism, or "anachorisms", elements out of place (Cresswell, p. 166). Despite, or even because of, the force of the dominant story about land as private property, community gardens have proliferated in cities. This fact led the landscape architect Kenneth Helphand to designate them as a recent form of "defiant gardens." In his 2006 book of the same name, Helphand provocatively links urban gardens to other gardens mad in extreme conditions: in the trenches of the First World War and in Polish ghettos, internment camps, and POW camps during the Second World War. The term defiance may be an allusion to the essay "On the Defiance of Gardeners" by Henry Mitchell, whose earthman persona was encountered in chapter 3 in connection with the garden-centered ethics of of Michael Pollan. Mitchell attributed defiance to gardeners who face annual droughts, freezes, and pests yet return each year to plant. Helphand's gardeners faced the most adverse conditions imaginable of modern war and dispossession, and he takes them to exemplify a universal impulse, and urge to cultivate for food and beauty. Whereas Mitchell's "Defiance of Gardeners" considers nature the gardener's sole adversary, Helphand's gardeners also defied the social injustices that shaped their impoverished condition.'
One of these caveats is that no gardener who is renting space in a community garden can grow trees in the rented space. The politics of this regulation swiftly moves to the very idea of renting space, for a tree as a seedling or sapling can be grown in a container for quite some time, rendering this regulation highly questionable. The argument that a tree saps too many nutrients from the soil cannot hold, because the soil for its sustenance is apart from the rented garden's soil. Because many community gardens' soil was manufactured by forest trees, it is ironic that any regulation would argue against a tree as a shade-maker, when the corn in an adjacent garden will be growing just as tall. For trees under about 6 feet then, defiance must go beyond the stultifying implications of community garden regulations, as well as beyond the idea of garden-as-food. Examples will include those plants and trees that will assist in deciphering the genetics and epigenetics of human disease, the evolutionary associations of other living things with those plants and trees (many of which are natives), and the conservation of such evolutions.
