Partisan Gardens

Earlier this spring, people across the eastern half of the US organized neighborhood planting projects in order to widely distribute and plant food-bearing trees. Their motivations are diverse, and we'll hear from a range of them in this episode, but these tree-planters are often hoping to build a more verdant, autonomous, resilient, common life in the face of growing climate chaos and the frailty of capitalist supply chains. The Nacogdoches Food Forest, one of the early models for the Neighborhood Planting Project, specifically sought, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to create perennial abundance in order to better welcome refugees over the coming decades. For this episode of Partisan Gardens, we spoke to planting project organizers about their experiments with large scale tree distribution in seven different cities. Some of these projects are brand new, others are on their fifth year, but we'll be excited to continue reporting on their efforts over the coming years.

If you want tips on starting something like this on your own, please visit neighborhoodplantingproject.org to learn more about the various projects like this across the country and email us to ask follow-up questions about starting your own planting project. We have an article in a recent issue of the online newsletter  Territories, called “Rooted in Community: Lessons from Bloomington’s Neighborhood Planting Project” 

You might remember an episode we previously aired called “Carbondale Spring”. It is a profile of Carbondale, Illinois' food autonomy projects, and it won an award for Best Radio Documentary from the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists. Recently, our friends at another Bloomington-based podcast, In This Climate, visited Carbondale to talk to them about these initiatives. We want to encourage you to check out their episodes about where the Carbondale Spring is two years later. Please visit https://climatepodcast.indiana.edu and give it a listen.

Earlier this spring, people across the eastern half of the US organized neighborhood planting projects in order to widely distribute and plant food-bearing trees. Their motivations are diverse, and we’ll hear from a range of them in this episode, but these tree-planters are often hoping to build a more verdant, autonomous, resilient, common life in...

This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2022 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go...

This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2022 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go to decide what to plant or when to plant it.

The Earthbound Almanac, on the other hand, is situated in the present moment. Last year, we dedicated an episode to their first almanac- and we encourage you to listen to that, too. The book’s back cover reads:

This is a Farmer’s Almanac for the end of the world. We glimpsed one such world emerging after the storm last Summer, as people in the darkened city gathered around generators and grills to share the brief abundance from their thawing freezers. The crises all around us, and the attempts by the ultra-rich to flee the Earth entirely, make clear that none of the reigning institutions will make any effort toward our survival. The way forward, out of this mess, will mean charting a new course informed with Black and Indigenous knowledges developed through generations of struggle against land theft and enslavement. We will have to work together -- constructing and re-constructing the ability to sustain and care for each other. This almanac is for developing the necessary knowledge, infrastructure and practices.

In a moment when so many are refusing exploitative work, whether by striking, quitting, slacking, calling in sick or “lying flat”, it feels both more urgent and more possible than ever to reclaim the joy and value of our work as meaningful. The old farmer’s almanac presented conventional wisdom. This almanac is a place for experimentation, for finding new forms and retrofitting old ones, for sharing stories of lived efforts toward a collective exit from this colonial nightmare, this separateness from the Earth.

So for today’s episode we’re taking you on an audio tour of the almanac – less like an audio book and more of an interpretation and an exploration based on the almanac. We will have a few readings from the book, some tarotscopes, along with a couple brief interviews with some of the authors of those pieces.

The Almanac hopes to be back next year, so if you’re excited to contribute to future issues, send pitches to [email protected] with “2023 Almanac:” and the pitch topic in the subject by July 31st, 2022.  Thank you to all the contributors who sent in and read their pieces from the almanac for us. You can get a copy of the almanac and find out more by going to emergentgoods.com. Thanks to Xiamara Chupaflor for the tarotscopes. Thanks to Lyn Rye for our theme music.

This month, we spoke to Susanne Wengle, a professor at Notre Dame who researches post-Soviet political and economic transformation in Russia.  Her second book is Black Earth, White Bread; a Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food. We were eager to hear her perspective on the history of agriculture in Russia and Ukraine and the current war's ripple effects on food systems around the world.

Wengle's book, Black Earth, White Bread; a Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food is available here.

 

This month, we spoke to Susanne Wengle, a professor at Notre Dame who researches post-Soviet political and economic transformation in Russia.  Her second book is Black Earth, White Bread; a Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food. We were eager to hear her perspective on the history of agriculture in Russia and Ukraine and the current war’s ripple effects...

This month, we’re excited to share our conversation with David Holmgren, author of the recent RetroSuburbia and co-author of the landmark 1978 book, Permaculture One, with Bill Mollison, which launched the international permaculture movement.  Drawing on permaculture principles of recognizing existing patterns and incorporating them into design, Holmgren is calling for a bold and improvisational approach to the...

This month, we're excited to share our conversation with David Holmgren, author of the recent RetroSuburbia and co-author of the landmark 1978 book, Permaculture One, with Bill Mollison, which launched the international permaculture movement.  Drawing on permaculture principles of recognizing existing patterns and incorporating them into design, Holmgren is calling for a bold and improvisational approach to the problem of the suburbs.  Rather than start with a mythical blank-slate for perfect ecological construction, he sees rich possibilities in retrofitting suburban space, opening it up to distributed, small-scale food production and new forms of life.

In this episode, we discuss the crises we all face, what it means to write from a specific place, the power of speculative fiction for imagining alternative futures, and concrete visions for transforming suburbia.  This is a deeply terrestrial proposal, based on practical experiences in Australia, and which will develop via widespread experimentation, playing with patterns, and hacking suburban forms.  Holmgren speaks generously as a fellow practitioner and designer, not a policy maker with ready-made solutions applicable globally.  We are pleased to offer some of the prompts and visions he shared with us for experimenting in suburbia.

They are offering a pay-what-you-can model for the book, Retrosuburbia: The Downshifters Guide to a Resilient Future. You can find it at retrosuburbia.com

Our theme music is by Lyn Rye

For this episode of Partisan Gardens, we learn about the conditions facing migrant farm workers in California.

We share a two conversations: one between Partisan Gardens and Nikola Garcia, author of a recent article in Inhabit: Territories called “The Farmworker Caravan: Mutual Aid in California’s Migrant Worker Communities.” The other is a conversation between Nikola and Darlene Tenes, founder of a grassroots initiative called the Farmworker Caravan.

Through her organizing, Darlene has been able to witness the conditions of migrant farm workers in California and thus can paint a vivid picture of the harsh conditions under which much of the produce in North America is grown. Based on growing up in California with family who have also worked in the food industry, Nikola shares some of their experiences, contributing to Darlene's portrait of labor exploitation.

As people who are not undocumented themselves, both are able to freely speak to such things as the working conditions during wildfires and pandemics, and the ongoing use of child labor in agriculture. But Darlene is also able to speak to the joyful feelings and camaraderie shared by farmworkers and the caravan  participants as the caravan traveled through California’s migrant communities, distributing food and practicing mutual aid.

The farmworker caravan's success is impressive, and Darlene walks us their organizing methods. Coming from a background as an event planner, she shows the impact that a person can have; although, as she puts it, feeding 500 families at a single event is just a drop in the bucket given the desperate poverty created by the produce industry in California.

Thank you to Darlene and Nikola- you can find their interview in Inhabit: Territories.

Antonio Roman-Alcala analyzed other elements of the California food system and the exploitation of farmworkers in an episode last spring, Building Food Sovereignty.

https://wfhb.org/public-affairs/may-2021-building-food-sovereignty/

For this episode of Partisan Gardens, we learn about the conditions facing migrant farm workers in California. We share a two conversations: one between Partisan Gardens and Nikola Garcia, author of a recent article in Inhabit: Territories called “The Farmworker Caravan: Mutual Aid in California’s Migrant Worker Communities.” The other is a conversation between Nikola and Darlene...