Chard Guevara: Gardening for the Climate Revolution
Growing food is empowering. How could it be otherwise? You prepare the soil, carefully press the tiny seed or delicate plant into the ground, and lovingly nurture a wee green sprout into a crunchy carrot or mouth-watering Early Girl tomato. It is creative, healthy, satisfying, and, best of all, sustenance — the very foundation of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs. Sure, maybe it’s less inspiring after you’ve made your seventeenth zucchini dish, but at this point you can take solace in an even higher cause: Growing food is climate activism.
Gardens can serve to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. (Remember mitigation is what we do to prevent further climate change, and adaptation is what we do to live with changes that have already happened or are baked in no matter how we behave.) The former depends a lot on how you garden (making compost, planting perennials, and using a shovel rather than a rototiller all help). Adaptation is achieved by feeding pollinators, soaking up rain, and cooling your neighborhood, especially in urban areas that might otherwise be vacant properties or, God forbid, parking lots. The National Wildlife Federation has a great publication that makes the garden-climate connection very well. Now if you’re thinking “those are small-scale individual actions, and the point of this blog is big, bold political action which YOU say (Mark) is the only way out of this climate crisis!” . . . well, read on.
You see, empowerment is resilience, and resilience is adaptation. I had some personal experience recently that really brought this home to me. I have been a gardener for most of my life, even when I wasn’t a property owner — my first job out of college was running a community garden in Urbana, Illinois. I have mastered container gardening on apartment patios. Today I help with a student garden on the college campus where I work, and what a thrill it is to help an inner-city 18-year-old discover their inner agrarian!
My own “woke” moment came last month thanks to that student garden. I was invited to attend a conference at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I met some true political activists that made me aware of the statement an urban garden can make. St. Thomas faculty members Adam Kay and Eric Chapman convened academics like me from all over the country under an NSF grant to talk about training undergraduate biologists through urban agriculture (that would be “TUBA,” I’m afraid). These gentlemen and their initiative are amazing, but I want to tell the stories of two other revolutionaries I met there who truly embody the back of that three-peso bill.
Raymond Warthen is an engineer in Florida who lost his father to cancer a few years ago and had a bit of an epiphany. Teaming up with a marketing manager named Cherette, the pair started growing vegetables on an abandoned lot in a poor neighborhood northwest of Orlando with no wholesome food for miles around — a food desert. People who only had a convenience store or McDonald’s nearby suddenly could walk to the freshest, greenest food anyone could have, and it was affordable, and organic to boot!
That was in 2016, and today the Zion Farm & Market is the non-profit collective Infinite Zion Farms, with the goal “. . . to establish urban farms throughout Central Florida and be an affordable source of organic produce and education to our community at large.” And, by the way, Ray and Cherette are now huband and wife.
Ray’s focus now is managing a parcel in another underserved, impoverished neighborhood in the heart of Orlando called Parramore. His staff and volunteers nurture an abundance of produce in a .29-acre oasis amidst the projects, where people come to buy greens or pick up peppers as part of their membership in a CSA. Subscriptions for a regular supply of veggies from October to May— this is Florida, remember — start as low as $5/month, and during COVID the urban farm gave away 2000 pounds of food to over 100 needy people. A greenhouse has sprouted and a GoFundMe campaign is under way to set up a dozen aeroponics towers inside. Residents can take classes in establishing their own gardens and students from all walks of life learn to do what humans have done for 10,000 years but has been largely lost. Ray describes the apprehension with which some of those students arrive, asked to till and plant in a place where drug deals, thefts, and drive-by shootings are not uncommon. He must, as he puts it, make them “comfortable” in this foreign environment, and soon they’ve learned skills and made friends they never would have while improving lives and unknowingly battling climate change.
How so? As climate-driven fires and drought spread through the California bread-basket, the Colorado River dries up to the point that irrigation is no longer possible, and crops in the South are submerged and contaminated under the Waters of Ida, food becomes more expensive or outright unavailable. High temperatures alone reduce yields. The food shortages disproportionately affect the less fortunate and people of color, like climate change generally, both in the U.S. and globally. In fact the current food scarcity in Southern Madagascar, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, has been described as the first “climate change famine.” So growing your own food, especially in urban areas, becomes a critical climate adaptation.
It is also a blatantly political act, especially in the Black Lives Matter world of inner cities where Zion Farms is decidedly located. But if Zion is a Florida focus on empowerment for people of color, the American epicenter is surely northern Minneapolis, just a stone’s throw from George Floyd Square, and my conference at St. Thomas University. Enter Michael Chaney.
Sporting a baseball cap and dreadlocks, Chaney joined Ray Warthen on a panel at the conference, and began by reciting a powerful poem. With equal passion he described his work as an activist and founder of Project Sweetie Pie, an all-volunteer urban farm training program in horticulture and entrepreneurship in North Minneapolis since 2011. The multi-faceted project focuses on education and empowerment (it began as a successful effort to save North Minneapolis High School from closure, with which it continues to work closely), but as a by-product it sells and gives away all manner of vegetables from its twenty urban garden sites. Tree-planting in the concrete jungle, collaboration with the University of Minnesota’s Grow North Minneapolis program, and over 29,000 internships through a project called Step Up are among Sweetie Pie and Chaney’s contributions.
When Michael was honored with the state-wide Environmental Initiatives Award last year, the climate connection was made clear in his biography: “Michael works to develop visions for climate justice . . . (he) is known for his visionary leadership and ability to bring together key stakeholders to find solutions to mitigate climate concerns and build a green workforce.” Whatever the climate crisis unleashes on food availability and prices in the Twin Cities, Chaney has built resilience in his community, which means adaptation.
There are countless more fascinating and uplifting stories of the urban farming phenomenon, from Orlando to my own Philadelphia to Dallas, where Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell has converted a football field — the sacred college football field! — to a farm. You can support this brand of political activism by buying from and donating time and money to such efforts near you, and by working the land that’s your own back yard. So dig in, climate guerrillas, chanting the little verse below from Project Sweetie Pie. ¡Viva la Revolución Climática!
North Minneapolis is going green.
Give us a call and learn what we mean.
Where once lay urban blight
Now sits luscious garden sites.
Gardens without borders,
Classrooms without walls.
Architects of our own destinies.
Access to food justice for all.
