Read The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Online
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
The victory gardens model suggests how prolific backyard and urban gardeners can be and how, scaled up, they can become major contributors to feeding a country and to food security. A recent study by Sharanbir Grewal and Parwinder Grewal of Ohio State University envisioned what it would look like for Cleveland—another Rust Belt city with lots of potential green space and lots of hungry people—to feed itself. In the most modest scenario, using 80 percent of every vacant lot generated 22 to 48
percent of the city’s fruits and vegetables, along with 25 percent of its poultry and eggs and 100 percent of its honey. The most ambitious proposal also included 62 percent of every commercial and industrial roof and 9 percent of every occupied residential lot: it could provide up to 100 percent of the city’s fresh produce, along with 94 percent of its poultry and eggs (and 100 percent of its honey again). It would keep up to $115 million in food dollars in the city, a huge boon to a depressed region. It would also improve health, both through diet and through exercise.
Clearly what might work in Detroit or Cleveland or Oakland is not so viable in superheated Phoenix or subarctic Anchorage. And then climate change can upset these enterprises as much as it can any agriculture: last year the Intervale Community Farm in Burlington, Vermont, at 120 acres the biggest urban agriculture project in the country, was devastated by torrential rain that washed out soil as well as plants. Spring deluges interfered with planting; Hurricane Irene did in many of the fall crops. The organization’s newsletter emphasizes that the summer season still produced a bounty of tomatoes, melons, and salad greens.
In an increasingly uncertain time, what is certain is that agriculture has invaded cities the way that cities have been invading agriculture for the past many millennia, that the reasons for this are as manifold as the results, and that the peculiar postwar affluence is over for most of us, and everything is going to become a little more precarious and a little less abundant. Given these circumstances, urban agriculture has a big future. Or several big futures, depending on the soil and the needs. Another lesson from the victory gardens is that with seeds and sweat equity, a lot can happen quickly: if the need to grow food arises, as it did during the Second World War, the gardens will come.
ATTACKS AND RETREATS
You can argue that vegetable seeds are the seeds of the new revolution. But the garden is an uneasy entity for our time, a way both to address the biggest questions and to duck them. “Some gardens are described as retreats, when they are really attacks,” famously said the gardener, artist, and provocateur Ian Hamilton Finlay. A garden as a retreat means a refuge, a
place to withdraw from the world. A garden as an attack means an intervention in the world, a political statement, a way in which the small space of the garden can participate in the larger space that is society, politics, and ideas. Every garden negotiates its own relationship between retreat and attack, and in so doing illuminates—or maybe we should say
engages
—the political questions of our time.
At its worst, the new agrarianism is a way to duck the obligation to change the world, a failure to engage with what is worst as well as best. In the ambiguously cynical end of Voltaire’s novel
Candide
, he concludes, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (we must cultivate our garden), which suggests that the garden can be a small piece of the world we can manage and order after giving up on the larger world. Certainly neoliberalism has been about destroying the public, privatizing the common, and taking care of yourself.
But you can’t have a revolution where everyone just abandons the existing system—it’ll just be left to the opportunists and the uncritical. Tending your own garden does not, for example, confront the problem of Monsanto. The corporation that developed genetically modified organisms as a way to promote its pesticides and is trying to control seed stock worldwide is a scourge. Planting heirloom seeds is great, but someone has to try to stop Monsanto, and that involves political organizing, sticking your neck out, and confrontation. It involves leaving your garden. Which farmers have done—some years back, the wheat farmers of North Dakota defeated Monsanto’s plans to introduce GMO wheat worldwide. But they didn’t do it by planting heirloom organic wheat or talking to schoolkids about what constitutes beautiful bread or by baking. They did it by organizing, by collective power, and by political engagement. The biggest problem of our time requires big cooperative international transformations that cannot be reached one rutabaga patch at a time.
The fact that gardens have become the revolution of the young is good news and bad news. Baby boomers of the Sixties revolutionary variety had their hectoring bombastic arrogant self-righteous flaws, but they were fearless about engagement. The young I often meet today have so distanced themselves from the flaws of the baby boomers that they’ve gone too far in the opposite direction of mildness, modesty, disengagement, and non-confrontation.
(At a recent conference on the Occupy movement, two youngish people in the audience suggested that the slogan “We are the 99%” might hurt the feelings of the 1%; they wanted a polite revolution that wasn’t exactly against anything and offended no one, which is a nice way to be totally ineffectual.) The garden suits them perfectly because it is a realm of quiet idealism—but that too readily slides over into disengagement or the belief that your activism can stop with the demonstration of your own purity and lack of culpability.
Feeding the hungry is noble work, but figuring out the causes of that hunger and confronting them and transforming them directly needs to be done too. And while urban agriculture seems like a flexible, local way to adapt to the hungry, chaotic world that climate change is bringing, we all need to address the root causes directly. Maybe there’s something in the fact that the word
radical
comes from the Latin for “root”; the revolutionary gardener will get at the root causes of our situation, not just cultivate the surface.
Churchill cast gardening and war as opposites because he saw gardening as a retreat into a peaceful private realm. Our age demands engagement. Gardens like Alemany Farm and City Slicker Farms produce it as one of their crops, while other gardens and food fetishism generally can be a retreat into privilege, safety, and pleasure away from the world and its problems. But gardening and all its subsidiary tasks are sturdy metaphors. You can imagine the whole world as a garden, in which case you might want to weed out corporations, compost old divides, and plant hope, subversion, and fierce commitments among the heirloom tomatoes and the chard. The main questions will always be: What are your principal crops? And who do they feed?
2012
1: WAR
Almost twenty years ago, a group of Nevadans took me with them into the center of their state, across hundreds of miles of rough, remote, little-known country. In all that distance we saw a few small settlements and occasionally a grove of cottonwoods marking a ranch house at one side or another of the long north–south sagebrush valleys. We had begun at the Nevada Test Site, an expanse the size of Rhode Island where for forty years most of the nation’s nuclear bombs were “tested.” More than a thousand bombs were detonated at the site in those years. There was no physical difference between a nuclear test and a deployment of a bomb in war except the site chosen; and so you can argue that a long quiet war was waged against the land and people of the deep desert, one that resulted in considerable contamination (and the suppression or dismissal of that fact before it was forgotten).
We skirted Nellis Air Force Base, a military site the size of Belgium or Connecticut, which contained the Nevada Test Site, and ended up at another site that had once been a Pony Express station and then become a one-time nuclear test site. The actual crater from the explosion of that atomic bomb was not far from where we camped that night. Fallon Naval Air Station, another vast base, was not far to the north, and Hawthorne was to the northwest, the premier ammunition storage site in the nation, full of earthen berms loaded with explosives. Along the way, the Nevadans explained what we were seeing, and not seeing, and a new world opened to me, or rather the world I had been living in all along began to look very different. A large portion of Nevada was given over to the military, and
civilian mapmakers often left these sites off their maps, producing instead the blank spots of which radical geographer and artist Trevor Paglen writes (in his book
Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World
). Other spots were blank because they were still nominally public lands or land illegally withdrawn from the public.
I traveled again in the area around Fallon Naval Air Station in the late 1990s with a local activist. We were in a beautiful green oasis, Dixie Valley, still home to a lot of migratory birds, though its human population had been driven out by naval aircraft testing sonic booms there, shattering windows, stampeding livestock, and generally making the area uninhabitable. The people of Dixie Valley fought back before their ranches and homes were condemned by eminent domain. Only ruins remained, and some contaminated tanks had been hauled in to use for target practice. My friend who’d fought alongside the former residents of the valley told me how her political career began in that same landscape: a military plane flew so low, for fun apparently, that it forced her car off the road. She had two small children in the car. “And that,” she told me with fierce satisfaction, “was when the Pentagon made its first mistake.” She fought well for many years, founding an organization that defended the rural victims of militarism.
That day in Dixie Valley, we were buzzed by a warplane that seemingly appeared from nowhere, as though it had ripped open the sky, and then roared low over us with a sound so loud and visceral the term
sound
hardly describes how it invaded my body and the air around. It then vanished again, as though into a hole in the sky, moving astonishingly fast out of the range of the visible in the blue, blue desert sky. By then I had come to understand that in some sense the United States was perpetually at war—and that war was a pervasive process, a mind-set—in a lot of places at home and abroad, and in some sense every place on earth up into the outer atmosphere and to some extent outer space. So pervasive that it is largely unseen, even beyond the vast realm of military secrecy that Paglen documents so powerfully.
Carl von Clausewitz, in his famous book
On War,
defined it thus: “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to
contend against violence.” That is, it contends against others’ violence, not against violence itself, the latter being a task at which violence is helpless. Asked what war is, most people would answer that it was a type of activity. A peculiar kind in which human beings as proxy for nation-states try to kill each other, the theory being the side that inflicts overwhelming or unbearable damage wins. Of course modern warfare involves huge quantities of civilian casualties, and the killing is done by increasingly remote means.
Spears, catapults, arrows; then guns, cannons, and bombs; and in the twentieth century, airplanes and then missiles; and in the twenty-first century, unmanned drones make the site of the killers increasingly removed from the site of the killed. Intercontinental ballistic missiles completed the transformation from, say, Gettysburg, where men killed each other at close range with screams and gore around them, to a system in which technicians in control rooms could wipe out civilians en masse on other continents. Drones in Afghanistan are now operated by men at a base near Las Vegas engaged in an activity that must be hard for them to differentiate from a video game, so removed is the violence when armed with these inventions of art and science. If the killer is in an air-conditioned room in Indian Springs, Nevada, and the killed are in a village in Afghanistan, the question of where the battlefield is arises and with it the possibility that battlefields are now anywhere, or everywhere. The drones seem to have a propensity for wiping out wedding parties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a photographic problem in part; the poor image quality results in poor judgment about what is a band of armed men and what is a family celebration.
We still tend to think of war as an activity, and an activity confined to a place, to the battlefield. The idea of the battlefield is still sometimes relevant, especially if you’re willing to recognize whole regions—much of Iraq, the Congo, and so forth—as battlefields of sorts, more violent and dangerous than elsewhere. Perhaps it would be better to regard war as akin to wildfire or contagious disease that may flare up anywhere in the affected region, though human beings and their weapons are in this case the pathogens or sparks. The kind of violent acts Clausewitz discusses are enabled by other acts committed far from the site of battle. Research, development, and mass manufacture of the technologies of killing and the supporting
equipment have become the very core of pork-barrel funding spread around the country so that almost every federal representative has a stake in continuing them. All this has an afterlife as well, as contaminated places and equipment, or shrapnel, or live ordnance in land that has returned to other uses, and as veterans, with all the damage, physical and psychological, veterans are prone to. There is a landscape of war, and it includes munitions factories, mines, ships, barracks, bases, recruiting centers, and afterward veterans’ hospitals. When the United States declared its war on terror, signs of it were intentionally planted everywhere, in the form of men with guns whose camouflage uniforms did the opposite of making them blend in to Penn Station or the Golden Gate Bridge. They were signs of what we had become.