During the last month I read a message on the Feedback board which proposed an opinion that rising population wasn't a problem so much as was population living in cities without land on which to feed themselves. I responded that I believe that rising population is a problem and an ever-growing one (pun intended), and that moving urban dwellers to plots of ground in suburban and rural areas is not necessarily a good answer to the dilemma. Then I remembered a book which does promote a partial answer to the problem of living in cities and still living an environmental ethic.
A Patch of Eden: America's Inner-City Gardeners is a description of urban gardeners who have reclaimed streets, vacant lots, and crime-ridden public parks. Through much hard labor, women and men (and it's mostly women) have recreated a green environment among the high-rise housing and publicly-neglected streets of inner cities.
Hynes described several different inner-city garden actions taken by people who took bits of land and created food and beauty, and by doing so, changed the psychology of the neighborhood. She introduced the book by first describing some very long-lived urban gardens.
Hynes seemed to have spent quite a bit of time with each group that she wrote about. She found that:
All the urban gardeners I have met in the course of writing this book have said, in one way or another, that what they love about gardening is that gardens give back. This mutuality between humans and nature--experienced in the mundane tasks of sowing, weeding, transplanting, and watering--reveals the capacity of urban gardens for teaching ecological literacy, a literacy that changes how people live, not merely how they think and talk....For the give-and-take of working in gardens attaches their gardeners to a particular place through physical and social engagement. Community gardens create relationships between city dwellers and the soil, and instill an ethic of urban environmentalism that neither parks nor wilderness--which release and free us from the industrial city--can do.Issues she explored are: how do the plants and trees make possible the sense of belonging, and how does working among them create a neighborhood? Can the food grown help in lean times? How are the garden items financed? What is done to clean up the soils from contaminants? Why are gardens within a prison system more successful at enabling inmates to change themselves than other skills-based projects? Why are women the prime movers of garden projects?
She met Bernadette Cozart, the founding director of the Greening of Harlem, who worked for the NYC Dept. of Parks and Recreations. The "Greening of Harlem" was the result of Cozart's and Barbara Barlow's (a pediatric surgeon at Harlem Hospital) project aimed at preventing childhood injuries in the school yards and public recreation places. They worked with neighborhood groups, the City, and charitable donors of materials to create safe and revitalized playgrounds which included gardens. Other Harlem efforts that Hynes reported included tree-pit gardens along a street that houses many senior citizens, who were once again able to put their long-ago rural memories to good use. This effort owed its impetus and success to one woman who decided to plant the tree-pit (a non-surfaced open area around a tree) in front of her house with flowers and put up a picket fence around part of it, and then organized her neighbors to do the same. This same woman also organized the restoration of Jackie Robinson Park, which had become a dumping ground and drug-dealing area ever since the lights stopped working in the early 1970s and the City never fixed them.
Hynes quotes Cozart's vision of Harlem as:
a community ready to burst forth. I see vacant lots as sources of jobs. I can see growing vegetables and herbs and going all the way from seed to shelf. I envision watermelon rind jelly, tomato preserve, and "cha cha" with labels that say "grown and made in Harlem." ...I view Harlem as my living room. How will we want our living room to look? Look at the buildings and structures here--they're gorgeous. Add the beauty of nature to Harlem and give kids who have only known New York City as concrete and steel the chance to get to know nature....We have to figure out a way to bring nature to the city.Cozart saw that other cities, suffering the same illnesses of spirit, could learn to "green" their vacant lots and recreate neighborhoods of caring people. She said:
Actually, Harlem stretches from ghettos here to shantytowns in Soweto. Harlem is global; it is replicated worldwide on every continent and in every race. And it's women. There have been many holocausts of women, but we are waking up.For those of us who think ourselves fortunate to live in the country (as I do), nature is here, surrounding us. As I look out my window at the now-fully leafed trees (finally!), I know and fully appreciate the beauty and the availability of garden-grown produce and flowers. I've often thought that I would get sick if I lived in a city, at least anything larger than, say, 15,000 people. There is something critical to my inner health: and that is the knowledge that I could walk out my door and walk for miles over hills and valleys, avoiding houses and people quite easily.
Urban dwellers don't have that opportunity, and some may not necessarily want it. But what is heartening about the stories that Hynes related is that the people who are working to "green" cities are re-awakening a similar need to see living plants, to touch things which grow by miracle of rain and sun and soil and which carry bits of divine essence.
It is that sense of miracle which comes through in something called the "Horticulture Project." Hynes visited Cathrine Sneed who started the Project for the inmates at the San Francisco County Jail in San Bruno where she was a counselor. In the beginning, the head of the jail, Lieutenant Robert Limacher, was skeptical as to the value of allowing inmates to plant seeds and pull weeds and harvest vegetables, but the results convinced him that participants "don't have the institutionalized jail mind" and they birth a sense of accountability that non-participants don't develop. Self-respect also rose in inmates who knew that the food they grew went to soup kitchens and programs for the homeless. Sneed went on to develop the "Garden Project," for former gardening inmates to work at once they are released, and the "Tree Corps," that planted trees up and down city streets. Her inspiration for that, Hynes said, came from Jean Giorno's The Man Who Planted Trees, which she would read to her prison garden crews.
In Philadelphia, Hynes described a partnership between the City's Garden Societies (a haven of wealth) and Philadelphia Green, a project that provides soil and other materials to gardeners in low-income neighborhoods. Hynes pointed out, however, that this can be a difficult partnership because people who are wealthy tend not to value the sweat equity of the poor. She noted:
The Gross National Product is enhanced by the formal resources of agribusiness, by the demolition of neighborhoods and the construction of highways, but not by the informal garden economy of the urban poor, nor the sweat equity that turns four acres of rubble into one hundred productive gardens.This reminds me of the other equities that are not valued in the economies of the world, the equities earned by women for the most part: in the caretaking of children and elder parents, in the growing of vegetables for families, in the cleaning and maintenance of a house, in the carrying of people hither and yon, in the carrying of water and wood for home use. Someone once came up with the dollar value (and this was back in the early 1980s) of an at-home wife and mother in the United States if one had to hire all the work done that a "housewife" did. Paying for a nanny, a housekeeper, and a driver would eat up an average middle-income salary and then some. Enough digression.
There is hope in the urban environment. It's a hope that is predicated on finding the people who love the earth and remember how it can produce good things to eat and beauty to enjoy. It is also predicated on finding the money to cart away rubble and toxic soils and inordinate amounts of garbage, and bringing in rich topsoils and organic fertilizer, and getting seeds and the equipment to help till the soil and plant and weed. Even getting garden hoes costs money, whether it's out-of-pocket or someone's time in getting donations.
It takes people with strong determination to make city parks departments incorporate urban gardens in their budgets and to find the organizer to bring the knowledge into the neighborhoods and find the people who will really make it happen. But it's possible. And that gives me hope for the people who live in cities, and should I ever find myself living in one, I would look for "greening" efforts as the way to keep a healthy spirit.