Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

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98 agroecology and the struggle for food sovereignty 4 Hynes, H. Patricia (1996). A Patch of Eden: America’s Inner- City Gardeners. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. 5 Kurtz, Hilda (2001). “Differentiating multiple meanings of garden and community”. Urban Geography 22(7): 656-670. 6 Lamborn, Peter and Bill Weinberg (1999). Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City and the World. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. more than 20 U.S. cities, but with the increase in real estate development, these gardens were short-lived (Hynes 1996) 4 . The next revival of urban gardening came with the “liberty gardens” of World War I and then the postwar “victory gardens,” which were part of a national campaign to supplement food shortages and “maintain morale on the homefront” (Kurtz 2001) 5 . However, once the immediate need to produce food subsided, so did the government’s support. A similar story is now being lived in New York City, but this time communities are fighting to keep the gardens alive. In the 1970s, communities in low-income neighborhoods throughout New York City took over abandoned lots and built community gardens. These urban gardens were part of a grassroots movement to reclaim and revitalize a way of life to counter the decaying landscape. The loss of manufacturing jobs to a service-sector economy, the middle-class movement to the suburbs, and a decaying infrastructure led to widescale abandonment of tenements, crumbling buildings, and arson. New York City experienced one of the worst fiscal crises in its history. Cutbacks in public services affected low-income neighborhoods the worst. By 1977 there were more than 25,000 vacant lots in New York City (Lamborn and Weinberg 1999) 6 . A young artist from the Lower East Side, Liz Christy, became a leader in the urban gardening movement of the ’70s. She and like-minded activists, known as the Green Guerrillas, began taking over abandoned lots and planting gardens. The city’s solution to controlling crime in these vacant lots, which were serving to empower drug dealers and further the heroin and crack epidemic, had been to fence them in. Armed with wire-cutters, pickaxes, and seeds, the Green Guerrillas took it into their own hands to revitalize their neighborhoods by taking control of these spaces. The Green Guerrillas became an informal extension resource that provided technical assistance, tools, and seeds to new gardens. In 1978 they became a nonprofit, and to this day they continue to provide these services as well as community organizing assistance, garden preservation initiatives, and an urban agriculture program. Liz Christy was also instrumental in lobbying the city government to create a program that would serve the increasing needs of urban gardens and legitimize the use of cityowned land. In 1978 Operation GreenThumb was established as a Parks Department program. GreenThumb provided temporary leases to gardeners for a flat fee of $1, under the condition that if the city planned to use the land in the future, it would give 30 days notice for gardeners to vacate. Today there are approximately 650 community gardens in the five boroughs of New York City. These gardens range in size from 1,000 square feet to two acres. As the city’s fiscal crisis subsided, the threat to community gardens from developers increased. City development plans typically took over a few gardens at a time, and community gardener resistance occurred politically at the local level. However, this changed when in January 1999 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani placed 115 GreenThumb gardens on an auction list for developers. Community gardeners, greening groups, and garden supporters worked to stop the auction through continual street protests and acts of civil disobedience. Green Guerrillas, along with the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), filed two lawsuits against the city for yale school of forestry & environmental studies
case study: cultivating community, food, and empowerment 99 not performing the environmental and land-use reviews necessary to place gardens on an auction list. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit on grounds of discrimination against people of color. Community garden coalitions actively sought the support of community-based organizations, city council members, borough presidents, and other elected officials. In May 1999, the day before the auction, the Trust for Public Land and the New York Restoration Project (NYRP), founded by actress Bette Midler, negotiated with the city the purchase of 112 gardens for $4.2 million. These gardens are now protected in perpetuity under land trusts. But 152 gardens remain under threat and will most likely be bulldozed for residential housing or commercial space. Social Benefits In New York City, community gardens are open green spaces that play a central role in the social fabric of neighborhoods. Individuals depend on these gardens for such basic human needs as fresh food and open space, and as a social center. Local residents’ voluntary participation in the creation, establishment, and ongoing activities of a community garden instill participants with a sense of ownership and empowerment, which are key ingredients for building healthy communities. Gardens host diverse activities – concerts, theater pieces, sculpture exhibits, weddings – and are used for growing food and flowers, and as playgrounds for children and tranquil escapes from hectic city life. Education Education is provided both formally, through organized workshops, classes, or trainings, and informally, through practical gardening and social organizing experiences. Community gardeners and outside experts lead workshops, classes, and training sessions on horticulture, organic agriculture, food preservation, and community organizing. Local schools also use the gardens as outdoor classrooms for environmental education programs. Food Security A large percentage of community gardens grow food, but the intensity of production and distribution systems vary widely. Approximately 25 gardens throughout the city sell their produce either via an on-site farm stand or via a farmers’ market. Since the produce is being grown on city-owned land, the profits must go back into the garden (i.e., to purchase materials). The majority of gardens simply donate their produce, either informally to passersby who ask or more formally to a local emergency food provider, soup kitchen, or food pantry. About 15 gardens have formed partnerships with local rural farmers and established community-supported agriculture (CSA) systems. The NGO Just Food initiated this rural-urban partnership program in 1996. Through the partnerships, nearby rural farmers secure a market in New York City, where buyers purchase a ‘share’ of vegetables, which are delivered weekly to the community garden throughout the growing season. In many parts of the Bronx, yale school of forestry & environmental studies
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eakout session reports Food Soverei
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mcafee 9 Sustainability and Social
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mcafee 11 organizations or depicted
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mcafee 13 industrial agriculture, n
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mcafee 15 Producing Food or Produci
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mcafee 17 ● Major international d
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mcafee 19 Agroecology is not a mono
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mcafee 21 ● Land reform of a kind
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zimmerer 31 An Expanding Interface
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zimmerer 33 The Mesoamerican Biolog
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zimmerer 35 constellation of areas
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levins 37 A Whole-System View of Ag
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levins 39 Equity Versus Sustainabil
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levins 41 ● Small-scale to large-
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levins 43 commodities. The more fav
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levins 45 study is bigger than we i
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iographies of editors 161 Biographi
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participants 163 Workshop Participa
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participants 165 Jean Marc von der
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esources 167 Resources Farmer-to-Fa
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esources 169 ATTRA - www.attra.org
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esources 171 Just Food - www.justfo
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esources 173 International Institut
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cover photo captions 175 Cover Phot
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This report originated in an intern
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