An Evening About... Guerrilla Gardening...with Chris & Jan
by Tim Barton "The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land." - From A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England, Gerrard Winstanley, 1649
Wednesday 26th May, at the Friends Meeting House in Hastings, saw a full house for Guerrilla Gardeners Chris Tomlinson and Jan Goodey. Chris is from St Leonards, runs an allotment, and is a freegan; Jan is involved with Brighton's 'Lewes Road Community Gardens'. Their talks introduced Guerrilla Gardening ideas to a local audience of interested parties, some of whom already had a real awareness of the subject, and some of whom had only heard a little before. The evening was 'dedicated to Is A Car Necessary'.
Chris spoke first. He talked of being the entire current membership of the Hastings & St Leonards Guerilla Gardeners, and of his hope that others will be inspired to join in. The Guerrilla Gardening idea has, in its current form, come over from the US (see Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City & the World
on Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group, active from 1973 in the Bowery Houston area of New York). Chris looked at its roots in older traditions, including Gerrard Winstanley's 17th Century experiments in Kingston, Surrey with the Diggers. The thread of anarchism in the green movement might be argued to run right from the Diggers and Levellers through to today's Guerrilla Gardeners, and allied groups. Chris himself first became aware of the ideas behind these movements via bands such as The Levellers and Crass (based around Dial House, an open house / intentional community near Epping, Essex), and from activism at the Twyford Downs protests.
He began his Guerrilla Gardening in the early hours, cultivating neglected patches of land in his neighbourhood, but police harassment (from unmarked cars doing 'stop and search', legislated under the Thatcherite 1984 PACE act, and further enhanced under Blairite 2000 anti-terrorism legislation!) meant he shifted his stints at it from 2am to daylight hours. He targets unused land, currently maintaining 8 patches. He avoids council land and private private property where possible, unless he has permission.Plants laid in include Apple and Pear trees, plus some vegetables such as spinach and brassicas / nasturtiums (more time intensive, so done more locally than trees), and flowers too (such as poppies). He likes to set in clover and other easy to grow green manures first, to fix nitrogen etc. To get seed to hard to get at bits of neglected and derelict land, Chris recommends 'seed bombs' (or seed balls).
Chris recommends the book On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries by Richard Reynolds (see books in the column to the right - book attained via the links there, which are Amazon.com, will allow a small donation to running the ESEI website: meanwhile, the paperback is available in the UK from Amazon.co.uk at this link). Meanwhile, Chris researches at the public ibrary and on websites such as RHS Online. He keeps a notebook full of times and locations that he has planted. He strongly suggests wearing gloves, due to urban detritus such as needles and broken glass.
He recommends starting with a window box for those not yet brave enough to go for neglected land not owned by yourself, as a way of getting the skills and idea sorted in your head.
There are many reasons to consider such an approach to the urban landscape, besides aesthetics. It gives a measure of preparedness for peak oil and economic downturn, teaches self-sufficiency and gardening techniques in a public way. Chris sees the movement as dovetailing with others, such as permaculture, the 'free economy' movement and other skill share organisations, and the transition town movement (Hastings has a transition town group, based in St Leonards - email transitiontownhastings@live.co.uk for info).
The consumerist lifestyle is in direct opposition to our sustainability as a society. Chris sees his activities (including as a freegan) as pointing the way to a more appropriate lifestyle. We have basic needs such as food and shelter: money has no real value, nor do excessive amounts of possessions, the spread of supermarkets and superstores represents problematic over-development way beyond needs, creating 'need' out of mere 'wants'. Pandering to this is, ultimately, destructive of society, environment and community. As one of aspect of an alternative lifestyle, Guerrilla Gardening is sustainable and efficient.Chris has a slogan for those intrigued by Guerrilla Gardening - "Don't Just Talk, Do It!".
On Mayday 2010, on Parliament Square, The People's Assembly has passed the following edict On Peace: 'Britain is no longer at war in Afghanistan and will never be at war again – we do not walk into other people’s countries. All service personnel have the right to join a union. Trident and all weapons procurement is cancelled. Trading in arms is outlawed. From now on, all decision-making in the armed forces is by consensus.'
Jan Goodey spoke next, of Lewes Road Community Gardens (LRCG) in Brighton.
Jan cycled over. It is 36 miles from Brighton to Hastings, but is quite hilly and it is difficult to avoid dangerous roads, so he was knackered - he planned to get the train back.
Jan spoke of the 70's New York origins of modern day Guerrilla Gardening, and of it's US base from which he gained inspiration. He is interested in the Democracy Village outside Parliament, where in addition to anti-War protest etc, there is also a healthy interest in taking back the land and gardening it. He spoke of the context in Britain, of Todmorden, Kew, Bristol and the many other Guerrilla Gardening ventures across the country.
Personally, he began gardening many years ago, when on the dole in Harlow, Essex. He started an allotment in Moulescomb when he moved down to Brighton, where he concentrates on fruit and veg. Like Chris, he too has kept copious notes over the years, of things he has learnt and advice he has been given.
The LRGC is based on an old derelict Esso garage site. It is a half-acre plot. When they group gardening it started, in early 2009, they first sought the landowners permission. They have cleared the plot and planted raised beds (sweetcorn, broccoli etc), put in a circular turf area and made found-wood furniture. The BBC have run a story on the venture, and it has become a cause celebre - one man even fetched in some prime turf in his van, all the way from Portsmouth. They have council support, and more ventures for local vegetable growing are being looked into. The Green MP, Caroline
Lucas, has been supportive, and, publicly at least, the other parties have also voiced support.
Nonetheless, Tesco supermarket chain wish to develop the site as a Tesco Express, and council support exists for that too. Locally, there is already a Spa and a Co-Op and there is a Sainsburys nearby as well. Due to the greedhead attitude of the supermarket, to what is surely a superfluous development, the LRGC are considering resisting any eviction order and squatting the land (although they do have their eyes on another derelict site nearby). They already have a 24 hour presence to protect the site from incursion and are running a local campaign to 'Say No! to Tesco on the Lewes Road' (email nolewesroadtesco@googlemail.com; tel: 07757903748 / 01273-241920). The news of the threat was announced last November (in The Argus). The group have already been served with a two month notice to quit the plot (see below). The group is setting up a land trust as part of their campaign to keep the site, but reckon they need a cool million to buy out the land from the developers.
The local community wants to avert the eviction. Why?
The group run Workdays on the first Sunday of each month, to encourage involvement from the wider community. They have shown films (such as 'Age of Stupid') against the walls of the adjacent building, garnering an large audience on occasion; they have had bands on (curfewed at 9pm to avoid causing upset); they have a regular market on the plot; they have received donations including statuary; and a mural has been painted on the walls (see pictures above). At least two or three people are onsite everyday, and a few lock-ins have emerged into the light of day to garden, as the venture rebuilds community spirit.
Audience:
After the talks, the room was invited to ask questions or otherwise contribute. A woman from Crowhurst Community Agriculture talked about their project. They have developed a garden on a bit of old farm land on the Link Road route: they also use workday's to get people involved, and are very environmentally conscious. The council plan to run the greenway for cyclists right through it.
Other projects that were mentioned include the Veg Box Scheme, based at The Bridge center on Priory Road (email them at bridgeboxscheme@yahoo.co.uk or telephone them on 01424-710492) and the http://bohemiawga.weebly.com/index.htmlBohemia Walled Garden.
Another person mentioned the old law that a person who erects a roadside dwelling and assembles the walls and roof between dawn and dusk of the same day cannot be evicted, wondering it is is still extant, if unused. This seems unlikely, but many old and unused provisions are still on the statute books, so it may be worth researching. If it is still an existing law, it may help get eviction notices quashed (at least until it is - promptly, no doubt - repealed). I myself have come across this idea (historically), in Colin Ward's Cotters and Squatters: The Hidden History of Housing
.
- – Tim Barton
The letter of intent was issued by a "Belfast-based developer" - Alburn Minos Development, who appear in many guises at Company House, all 'c/o' an address on Sommerton, Oxford - that they have reason to think may be a Tesco front: the company appears to specalise in "the redevelopment of a number of former petrol station sites into mixed use retail, office and residential developments" on this evidence; there is an Irish link though, as Alburn act there as landlords in retail parks, including Tesco sites - for example, in Tralee, where Tesco are 'anchor tenants' in an Alburn development.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/05/world-after-abundance.html
The World After Abundance
It has been nearly four decades now since the limits to industrial civilization’s trajectory of limitless material growth on a limited planet have been clearly visible on the horizon of our future. Over that time, a remarkable paradox has unfolded. The closer we get to the limits to growth, the more those limits impact our daily lives, and the more clearly our current trajectory points toward the brick wall of a difficult future, the less most people in the industrial world seem to be able to imagine any alternative to driving the existing order of things ever onward until the wheels fall off.
This is as true in many corners of the activist community as it is in the most unregenerate of corporate boardrooms. For most of today’s environmentalists, for example, renewable energy isn’t something that people ought to produce for themselves, unless they happen to be wealthy enough to afford the rooftop PV systems that have become the latest status symbol in suburban neighborhoods on either coast. It’s something that utilities and the government are supposed to produce as fast as possible, so that Americans can keep on using three times as much energy per capita as the average European and twenty times as much as the average Chinese.
Of course there are alternatives. In the energy crisis of the Seventies, relatively simple conservation and efficiency measures, combined with lifestyle changes, sent world petroleum consumption down by 15% in a single decade and caused comparable drops in other energy sources across the industrial world. Most of these measures went out the window in the final binge of the age of cheap oil that followed, so there’s plenty of low hanging fruit to pluck. That same era saw a great many thoughtful people envision ways that people could lead relatively comfortable and humane lives while consuming a great deal less energy and the products of energy than people in the industrial world do today.
It can be a troubling experience to turn the pages of Rainbook or The Book of the New Alchemists, to name only two of the better products of that mostly forgotten era, and compare the sweeping view of future possibilities that undergirded their approach to a future of energy and material shortages with the cramped imaginations of the present. It’s even more troubling to notice that you can pick up yellowing copies of most of these books for a couple of dollars each in the used book trade, at a time when their practical advice is more relevant than ever, and their prophecies of what would happen if the road to sustainability was not taken are looking more prescient by the day.
The irony, and it’s a rich one, is that our collective refusal to follow the lead of those who urged us to learn how to get by with less has not spared us the necessity of doing exactly that. That’s the problem, ultimately, with driving headlong at a brick wall; you can stop by standing on the brake pedal, or you can stop by hitting the wall, but either way, you’re going to stop.
One way to make sense of the collision between the brittle front end of industrial civilization and the hard surface of nature’s brick wall is to compare the spring of 2010 with the autumn of 2007. Those two seasons had an interesting detail in common. In both cases, the price of oil passed $80 a barrel after a prolonged period of price increases, and in both cases, this was followed by a massive debt crisis. In 2007, largely driven by speculation in the futures market, the price of oil kept on zooming upwards, peaking just south of $150 a barrel before crashing back to earth; so far, at least, there’s no sign of a spike of that sort happening this time, although this is mostly because speculators are focused on other assets these days.
In 2007, though, the debt crisis also resulted in a dramatic economic downturn, and just now our chances of dodging the same thing this time around do not look good. Here in the US, most measures of general economic activity are faltering where they aren’t plunging – the sole exceptions are those temporarily propped up by an unparalleled explosion of government debt – and unemployment has become so deeply entrenched that what to do about the very large number of Americans who have exhausted the 99 weeks of unemployment benefits current law allows them is becoming a significant political issue. Even the illegal economy is taking a massive hit; a recent NPR story noted that the price of marijuana has dropped so sharply that northern California, where it’s a huge cash crop, is seeing panic selling and sharp economic contraction.
What’s going on here is precisely what The Limits to Growth warned about in 1973: the costs of continued growth have risen faster than growth itself, and are reaching a level that is forcing the economy to its knees. By “costs,” of course, the authors of The Limits to Growth weren’t talking about money, and neither am I. The costs that matter are energy, resources, and labor; it takes a great deal more of all of these to extract oil from deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico or oil sands in Alberta, say, than it used to take to get it from Pennsylvania or Texas, and since offshore drilling and oil sands make up an increasingly large share of what we’ve got left – those wells in Pennsylvania and Texas have been pumped dry, or nearly so – these real, nonmonetary costs have climbed steadily.
The price of oil in dollars functions here as a workable proxy measure for the real cost of oil production in energy, resources, and materials. The evidence of the last few years suggests that when the price of oil passes $80 a barrel, that’s a sign that the real costs have reached a level high enough that the rest of the economy begins to crack under the strain. Since astronomical levels of debt have become standard practice all through today’s global economy, the ability of marginal borrowers to service their debt is where the cracks showed up first. In the fall of 2007, many of those marginal borrowers were homeowners in the US and UK; this spring, they include entire nations.
What all this implies, in a single phrase, is that the age of abundance is over. The period from 1945 to 2005 when almost unimaginable amounts of cheap petroleum sloshed through the economies of the world’s industrial nations, and transformed life in those nations almost beyond recognition, still shapes most of our thinking and nearly all of our expectations. Not one significant policy maker or mass media pundit in the industrial world has begun to talk about the impact of the end of the age of abundance; it’s an open question if any of them have grasped how fundamental the changes will be as the new age of post-abundance economics begins to clamp down.
Most ordinary people in the industrial world, for their part, are sleepwalking through one of history’s major transitions. The issues that concern them are still defined entirely by the calculus of abundance. Most Americans these days, for example, worry about managing a comfortable retirement, paying for increasingly expensive medical care, providing their children with a college education and whatever amenities they consider important. It has not yet entered their darkest dreams that they need to worry about access to such basic necessities as food, clothing and shelter, the fate of local economies and communities shredded by decades of malign neglect, and the rise of serious threats to the survival of constitutional government and the rule of law.
Even among those who warn that today’s Great Recession could bottom out at a level equal to that reached in the Great Depression, very few have grappled with the consequences of a near-term future in which millions of Americans are living in shantytowns and struggling to find enough to eat every single day. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, that did happen here, and it did so at a time when the United States was a net exporter of everything you can think of, and the world’s largest producer and exporter of petroleum to boot. The same scale of economic collapse in a nation that exports very little besides unpayable IOUs, and is the world’s largest consumer and importer of petroleum, could all too easily have results much closer to those of the early 20th century in Central Europe, for example: that is, near-universal impoverishment, food shortages, epidemics, civil wars, and outbreaks of vicious ethnic cleansing, bracketed by two massive wars that both had body counts in the tens of millions.
Now you’ll notice that this latter does not equate to the total collapse into a Cormac McCarthy future that so many people like to fantasize about these days. I’ve spent years wondering why it is that so many people seem unable to conceive of any future other than business as usual, on the one hand, and extreme doomer porn on the other. Whatever the motives that drive this curious fixation, though, I’ve become convinced that it results in a nearly complete blindness to the very real risks the future is more likely to hold for us. It makes a useful exercise to take current notions about preparing for the future in the survivalist scene, and ask yourself how many of them would have turned out to be useful over the decade or two ahead if someone had pursued exactly those strategies in Poland or Slovakia, let’s say, in the years right before 1914.
Measure the gap between the real and terrible events of that period, on the one hand, and the fantasies of infinite progress or apocalyptic collapse that so often pass for realistic images of our future, on the other, and you have some sense of the gap that has to be crossed in order to make sense of the world after abundance. One way or another, we will cross that gap; the question is whether any significant number of us will do so in advance, and have time to take constructive actions in response, or whether we’ll all do so purely in retrospect, thinking ruefully of the dollars and hours that went into preparing for an imaginary future while the real one was breathing down our necks.
I’ve talked at quite some length in these essays about the kinds of preparations that will likely help individuals, families, and communities deal with the future of resource shortages, economic implosion, political breakdown, and potential civil war that the missed opportunities and purblind decisions of the last thirty years have made agonizingly likely here in the United States and, with an infinity of local variations, elsewhere in the industrial world. Those points remain crucial; it still makes a great deal of sense to start growing some of your own food, to radically downscale your dependence on complex technological systems, to reduce your energy consumption as far as possible, to free up at least one family member from the money economy for full-time work in the domestic economy, and so on.
Still, there’s another dimension to all this, and it has to be mentioned, though it’s certain to raise hackles. For the last three centuries, and especially for the last half century or so, it’s become increasingly common to define a good life as one provided with the largest possible selection of material goods and services. That definition has become so completely hardwired into our modern ways of thinking that it can be very hard to see past it. Of course there are certain very basic material needs without which a good life is impossible, but those are a good deal fewer and simpler than contemporary attitudes assume, and once those are provided, material abundance becomes a much more ambivalent blessing than we like to think.
In a very real sense, this way of thinking mirrors the old joke about the small boy with a hammer who thinks everything is a nail. In an age of unparalleled material abundance, the easy solution for any problem or predicament was to throw material wealth at it. That did solve some problems, but it arguably worsened others, and left the basic predicaments of human existence untouched. Did it really benefit anyone to spend trillions of dollars and the talents of some of our civilization’s brightest minds creating high-end medical treatments to keep the very sick alive and miserable for a few extra months of life, for example, so that we could pretend to ourselves that we had evaded the basic human predicament of the inevitability of death?
Whatever the answer, the end of the age of abundance draws a line under that experiment. Within not too many years, it’s safe to predict, only the relatively rich will have the dubious privilege of spending the last months of their lives hooked up to complicated life support equipment. The rest of us will end our lives the way our great-grandparents did: at home, more often than not, with family members or maybe a nurse to provide palliative care while our bodies do what they were born to do and shut down. Within not too many years, more broadly, only a very few people anywhere in the world will have the option of trying to escape the core uncertainties and challenges of human existence by chasing round after round of consumer goodies; the rest of us will count ourselves lucky to have our basic material needs securely provided for, and will have to deal with fundamental questions of meaning and value in some less blatantly meretricious way.
Some of us, in the process, may catch on to the subtle lesson woven into this hard necessity. It’s worth noting that while there’s been plenty of talk about the monasteries of the Dark Ages among people who are aware of the impending decline and fall of our civilization, next to none of it has discussed, much less dealt with, the secret behind the success of monasticism: the deliberate acceptance of extreme material poverty. Quite the contrary; all the plans for lifeboat ecovillages I’ve encountered so far, at least, aim at preserving some semblance of a middle class lifestyle into the indefinite future. That choice puts these projects in the same category as the lavish villas in which the wealthy inhabitants of Roman Britain hoped to ride out their own trajectory of decline and fall: a category mostly notable for its long history of total failure.
The European Christian monasteries that preserved Roman culture through the Dark Ages did not offer anyone a middle class lifestyle by the standards of their own time, much less those of ours. Neither did the Buddhist monasteries that preserved Heian culture through the Sengoku Jidai, Japan’s bitter age of wars, or the Buddhist and Taoist monasteries that preserved classical Chinese culture through a good half dozen cycles of collapse. Monasteries in all these cases were places people went to be very, very poor. That was the secret of their achievements, because when you reduce your material needs to the absolute minimum, the energy you don’t need to spend maintaining your standard of living can be put to work doing something more useful.
Now it’s probably too much to hope for that some similar movement might spring into being here and now; we’re a couple of centuries too soon for that. The great age of Christian monasticism in the West didn’t begin until the sixth century CE, by which time the Roman economy of abundance had been gone for so long that nobody even pretended that material wealth was an answer to the human condition. Still, the monastic revolution kickstarted by Benedict of Nursia drew on a long history of Christian monastic ventures; those unfolded in turn from the first tentative communal hermitages of early Christian Egypt; and all these projects, though this is not often mentioned, took part of their inspiration and a good deal of their ethos from the Stoics of Pagan Greece and Rome.
Movements of the Stoic type are in fact very common in civilizations that have passed the Hubbert peak of their own core resource base. There’s good reason for that. In a contracting economy, it becomes easier to notice that the less you need, the less vulnerable you are to the ups and downs of fortune, and the more you can get done of whatever it is that you happen to want to do. That’s an uncongenial lesson at the best of times, and during times of material abundance you won’t find many people learning it. Still, in the world after abundance, it’s hard to think of a lesson that deserves more careful attention.
Posted by John Michael Greer
