Subject: Viridian Note 00028: Viridian Gardening Key concepts: Gardens; aging populations; Viridian Inactivism; horticulture; allotment movement; urban decay; xeriscaping Attention Conservation Notice: The term "Gardening" may be too dull to engage anyone's interests. Presumptuous and patronising assumptions regarding the tastes of the elderly. Elements of fiddling while Rome burns. Links: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/xpz05/ http://www.the-hastings.demon.co.uk/herenow/here20/5.html http://www.slug-sf.org/ http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/sp'96/newsp.htm#G15.7.96 Danny O'Brien remarks: Gardening is an obvious Viridian pursuit. It's ephemeral; it is a labour-intensive act that somehow manages to convince its practicers that they are relaxing; and anyone who has lovingly tended a compost heap has truly grasped the principle of "Embrace Decay." For sundry reasons, gardening is also a massive attention sink for retirees. Could gardening be tuned even further to comply with Viridian principles? The ALLOTMENT MOVEMENT in the UK is a political tradition dating back to the enclosure acts of the 19th century. After protests by the suffering working class, concerned politicians allocated small patches of land that could be rented cheaply by dispossessed commoners. These smallholdings still exist today == they're generally hidden away in urban areas, are around 30- 300 square yards per plot, and are supplied with water and supplies for growing foodstuffs. They've recently enjoyed a boom that tracks the ageing of the British population. http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/close/xpz05/ http://www.the-hastings.demon.co.uk/herenow/here20/5.html (good Viridian URL, that) Encouraging gardening to spill out from the private gardens of the gated aged, and into small micro-plots scattered across urban environments, would provide a number of advantages: * Conspicuous conservation * Personal stewardship of public space, which looks to be a Viridian meme * Prevents the isolation of the affluent, powerful older age groups * Useful as a reinforcer of climate indicators: a sparse network of small plots, provided with enough amateur sensors (human eyes and ears, even), would provide a useful set of local pollution sensors as well as re-enforcing climate change indicators to its patrons. As it is, both the allotment movement and the nearest equivalent I can discover in the US, the Urban Gardening movement (http://www.slug-sf.org/), suffer from one major limitation. They're both, currently, chokingly dull. The whole topic stinks of granola. May I suggest an investigation into the possibilities of a mutated Allotment movement: namely, Guerrilla Gardening (alternate titles: Biosquatting, Random Acts of Forestation). This would involve small groups of Viridian non-activists selecting a disused location, and targetting it as their "allotment." The organisation of the gardeners would be as a paramilitary cell: individual members of the cell would not necessarily know the identities of other members, nor how many plots were in existence. Tasks would be minimal: work would be shared between enough inactivists for it to demand little, and degrade gracefully if apathy killed off a chunk of the participants. All they would see is that, for minimal involvement, an area of the public landscape would go from a barren lot to blooming greenery. And, of course, with some suitable appearance of "Big Mike," the area would also become an advertisement for the Viridian movement. The unofficial tending of a public space may well lend itself to decentralised management, with limited involvement by the forces of law-enforcement, while nonetheless carrying the cachet of an illicit prank. ********************************* Why "Guerrilla Gardening" is Not Viridian ********************************* The gardening instinct among senior citizens is already super-served by their own fine gardens. "Guerrilla" element unashamedly stolen from youth movements (http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/sp'96/newsp.htm#G15.7.96). The tacit encouragement of unrestricted bioengineering may be contrary to Viridian precepts. Recreational fiddling with fringes of urban ecology may be poor use of time and attention. The revitalisation of the urban center is a "problem" that may have already bottomed-out in developed countries. Developing countries may lack the necessary affluent, aged, middle class. It might be better to explore other potential horticultural extensions. (((Bruce Sterling remarks: I concur that gardening sounds mighty dull, but trying to jazz it up by making gardening illegal merely attracts the kind of sad yahoo who is reflexively fascinated by anything illegal. If anyone is going to form militarized cells and throw weed seeds around, it ought to be *cops and soldiers.* Cops in particular frequently find themselves tagging shooting victims in vacant urban lots. If they had a packet of mixed local wildflower seeds on their utility belt along with the baton and pepper-gas, they could do a lot of good over a multi-year period. (((There is a deeper Viridian aesthetic issue here. In America in particular, most people have no idea what the native vegetation of their area looks like. Instead, they try desperately to re-create the rolled lawns of Britain on the soil of an alien continent, despite the grim fact that this involves huge energy-consuming subsidies of fertilizer, water, notoriously polluting lawnmower engines, and so forth. This highly counterproductive activity really should be made illegal. (((Of course, if you simply abandon your American lawn through complete inactivism, you will find it taken over by alien invader weed species, most of which are of Asian and European origin. These species may be even more noxious than the original monocultured lawn. But xeriscape groups are flourishing among the wealthy-aged demographic, and it is in fact still possible to restore whatever small landscape you possess to a tamer mimicry of the original pre-Colombian landscape (minus the many wild species that sting, scratch and stink). A pocket of biodiversity soon sets in. You find the place swarming with butterflies, beetles, small birds and so forth. Replacing fuel-supported, bland monoculture with colorful, insect-rich, inactivist biodiversity is an intrinsically laudable act. We certainly must declare this activity 'very Viridian.' Weirdly, in many urban areas, natural xeriscaping is, in fact, illegal. Imagine the cachet and the illicit thrill! (((Unfortunately, given trends in climate change, natural xeriscaping may become impossible. Colorful, exquisitely adapted, original native plants will no longer be able to thrive in their original biomes, because they'll die from the Greenhouse heat. Once can then imagine a future gardening movement, probably government-mandated, that methodically replants all urban areas with natural species that had formerly existed *many hundreds of miles to the south.* Farfetched? People are harvesting bananas in Austin this winter.))) Danny O'Brien (danny@spesh.com*)