Guerrilla gardening is a movement of radical environmentalists and sustainability advocates searching out marginal, forgotten, and/or neglected spaces and planting beneficial vegetation. Imagine recurrent visits to abandoned lots to take over green space for vegetables to supplement your fresh produce. Conceive of weaponry as seed bombs, filled with a variety of beneficial plant seeds in a compact compost fertilizer mix, shown below. This movement represents a force a collaborative coalition-based organizing (versus oppositional, e.g. anti-Iraq war organizing) as we have the bright potential to solve the problems we see regarding derelict, marginal public/abandoned spaces.
The LA Times Home and Garden Section recently featured the brooding movement of guerilla gardening in SoCal. It traces some of the history of other vacant/neglected space gardening movements. As urban designers and landscape architects, we are charged with providing legal policy and informationally supportive frameworks to support such citizen-led reclamation efforts. Another strong historical reference beyond what I can personally prepare is from the British resource blog at Guerilla Gardening. This site also has community links to find local guerilla gardeners across the globe, though its highly tilted towards European/Neo-European resources. There are also blogs set up for GG groups working in LA and Santa Barbara.
Pollan eloquently describes the difference between a pseudo-logical based approach to defining human or “culture” from “nature” through the inspriations gained from working directly in a garden as a beneficial ecological being (just like we talk about pollination or dispersal being beneficial insects functions). What seems particularly interesting to me as a movement artist/dancer is the way in which this physical form of involvement in one’s environment/ecological community (gardening) rearranges ideas about the dualism of “man vs. nature” to a manageable scale. Environmentalists cannot rely on using Cartesian dualisms to explain or examine environmental problems, because they omit us from a sense of belonging–we are at best stewrds of a fragile system. Instead Pollan posits a regenerative form of land management (a rotational permaculture system) as the progressive example of placing humans back into a beneficial ecological role.
During this summer on Orcas Island, I was lucky enough to participate in constructing one of the most interesting forms of vernacular environmental engineering bred on the American continents pre-European occupation: chinampas.
The Bullocks had flooded a previously drained wetland to reestablish wildlife habitat and potential for thriving riparian vegetation, aquaculture resources, and water storage. They had set out over several years to construct chinampas by essentially pilling cut reeds and mud from the wetlands to create floating islands rich in nutrients.
The community labor proved to be the most enjoyable part, as a transient community coming together during our Permaculture Design Course to build something ancient and innovative that used what the wetland offered, rather than draining it from fear.
The result was a sturdy and fertile substrate for beneficial riparian and aquatic plants to utilize–willows, water chestnuts, etc. This effort also represents the permaculture mainstay of looking to obscure indigenous agricultural methodologies to develop the most productive and syngergistic utilization of extant conditions.
