[Community_garden] Milwaukee Carpenter's "Victory Gardens Manifesto"(revised)

[James Godsil]

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
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