[Sdpg] GUERRILLA GARDENS AND URBAN ECOLOGY Avant Gardening: a book about ecological struggles taking place right in the Big Apple.

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Comments: big supporter of guerrilla gardening (circa Philadelphia). 
writing article for CA\'s HopeDance mag about community gardens, renegade 
and otherwise. thankyou

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Article by: Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Thursday 20 Dec 2001

Email: carmelo_ruiz at yahoo.com

Summary:Avant Gardening: a book about ecological struggles taking place 
right in the Big Apple.

Reference at indymedia website: 
http://nyc.indymedia.org:8081//front.php3?article_id=15311

Article:
GUERRILLA GARDENS AND URBAN ECOLOGY

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero

In the minds of many people, the terms \"ecology\" and \"environment\" 
evoke images of rural landscapes and wilderness, of lands that haven\'t 
been touched by human hands. But, are cities spaces all but lost to 
ecology? Does the environmental movement have anything to do with the big 
cities?

  \"Avant Gardening: Ecological struggle in the city and the world\"  is an 
anthology of essays edited by Peter L. Wilson and Bill Weinberg containing 
writings about the cultural, social and political aspects of ecology, with 
particular emphasis on the ecological struggles currently taking place in 
New York City. In this megapolis, which for many ecologists represents 
everything planet Earth shouldn\'t be, thousands of citizens have taken the 
initiative of rescuing empty lots and turning them into community gardens. 
In their essays, contributors John Wright, Bernardette Crozart and Sarah 
Ferguson (probably not the British duchess, but a New Yorker namesake) 
describe the efforts and accomplishments of activists that have created 
these guerrilla gardens in the midst of the concrete.

In New York there are right now some eleven thousand vacant lots in the 
city\'s possession. Just in Harlem, the city owns 1500 such lots and 1800 
abandoned buildings. These spaces are a danger to nearby residents, 
particularly children, since they\'re used for illegal trash dumping, with 
roaming crack addicts and rats the size of cats.

Faced with this situation, groups of citizens undertook the task of 
rescuing some of this land to transform it into green zones. Today, New 
York has about 700 community gardens comprising 200 acres, which is four 
times the size of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It sounds like a lot, but 
it\'s not even a tenth of the area occupied by the vacant lots of the city.

The creation and maintenance of these gardens has unleashed an extremely 
positive social dynamic. Neighbors get to know each other, and Puerto 
Ricans, Anglo-Saxons, Dominicans, Colombians, Poles and immigrants of other 
nationalities work together planting trees and edible vegetables, painting 
impressive murals, investing millions of dollars in materials and labor, 
soliciting grants from foundations, lobbying politicians to obtain their 
support, organizing poetry recitals and jazz concerts. In short, everything 
in order to maintain and care for these gardens which have turned out to be 
vehicles for social organizing, cultural renaissance, ecological recovery 
and spiritual regeneration.

One of the better known gardens was the Chico Mendes Garden, on the corner 
of 10th St. and Avenue B in Manhattan, in an area known as Little Puerto 
Rico. In the decade of the 80\'s it was nothing but a horrible wasteland, 
and the community cleaned out the garbage, the rubbish and the junkies (the 
latter after pitched street fights). After the clean-up, they planted 
tomatoes, cauliflower, beans, garlic and cilantro, built a wooden shed and 
a chapel to Santa Clara, set on bushes of mint and roses. Also, a pond with 
fish surrounded by religious icons, including a Buddha, the Virgin Mary, a 
statue of a Native American and an African idol carved on wood.

Why do I speak of the Chico Mendes Garden in the past tense? Because in 
1997 the city bulldozed it. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has set out to put an 
end to all community gardens as if it were a campaign promise. Giuliani and 
his political allies, who are basically the developers, the landlords and 
the speculators, have a vision of New York\'s future in which there\'s no 
room for the poor (who are predominantly African American and Puerto 
Ricans) and even less for their bothersome little gardens that interfere 
with \"progress\". Giuliani\'s favorite color is gentrified white.

Sarah Ferguson writes the following in her essay \"The Death of Little 
Puerto Rico\":

\"At the very least (the movement to preserve the community gardens)
should open people\'s eyes to the quiet, yet fundamental role that
gardens play in humanizing an otherwise overcrowded city of 
strangers.  More than green spaces, New York\'s gardens are microcosms of 
democracy,  where people establish a sense of community and belonging to 
the land.  Like the antic shrines and altars they construct in their flower 
beds,  these eclectic havens are in a very real sense churches, where 
people find faith- both in themselves and in their neighbors.  When I 
first  moved into my building in 1994, I resented the all-night salsa 
and  merengue that the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans on my block blasted 
from boomboxes on my front stoop.  By the end of one summer gardening with 
them, I\'d come to love them as an extended family.\"

Avant Gardening provides not only an account of these social and 
environmental struggles, but also examines the different aspects- cultural, 
economic, political and ecological- of gardening and the production of food 
stuffs, discussed in articles written by Lyx Ish and Miekal And. It also 
contains an extensive critique of the new genetic engineering technologies 
written by this author.

The book is dedicated to the memory of fellow Puerto Rican Armando Pérez, 
who was brutally murdered this past April. Armando, whom I had the pleasure 
to meet a couple of times when I was living in New York, was one of the 
founders of the Puerto Rican cultural center Charas, located in 
Manhattan\'s 9th St., in the middle of Loisaida. Against the attempts by 
the Giuliani administration and the speculators to evict Charas, he said 
that they would have to kill him before they could evict the cultural 
center from the building where it was. He was assassinated a few days after 
uttering these words.

All social and ecological struggles are interconnected on a global level, 
whether it is the struggle against the U.S. Navy in Vieques island, against 
suburban sprawl and WalMart-ization in Puerto Rico and North America, for 
the preservation of the Amazon rain forest, or for the community gardens in 
New York City. Avant Gardening illustrates these connections.


Carmelo Ruiz is a Puerto Rican journalist and a research associate at the 
Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, USA.  His articles have appeared 
in NACLA Report on the Americas, Against the Current, the Earth Island 
Journal, The Ecologist, High Times and other publications.


Avant Gardening: Ecological struggle in the city and the world. Peter 
Lamborn Wilson and Bill Weinberg, editors. Autonomedia, 1999. 165 pages.

To buy the book, contact Autonomedia, P.O. Box 568, Williamsburg Station, 
Brooklyn, NY 11211.  E-mail: info at autonomedia.org  Internet: 
www.autonomedia.org


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