Partisan Gardens

In this episode of Partisan Gardens, we share a conversation between Ryan Richardson, a writer and activist born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains, and Steven Stoll.  Dr. Stoll teaches at Fordham University and is the author of Ramp Hollow, a celebrated agrarian history of Appalachia.

 

Stoll seeks to revive the memory of agrarian life and its destruction through capitalist enclosure.  Emphasizing the commons and the ecological dimension of survival in the mountains, he wrangles in Ramp Hollow with the complex legacy of the colonial expulsion of the indigenous peoples of the mountains, as well as the ways in which the mountain people's autonomy was co-opted by the coal companies.  Stoll's notion of the "captured garden," in which agrarian subsistence was used by employers to maintain low wages, offers an important warning to contemporary advocates of food sovereignty.

 

Indeed, the struggles of Appalachian people offer a range of lessons for contemporary food politics, not least the dangers of capture, but also the possibility to carve out forms of collective subsistence that instead grow autonomy.  At the end of the conversation, Richardson and Stoll reflect on this potential, via Los Angeles' South Central Farm - an urban oasis maintained by hundreds of immigrant-farmers that functioned as an "uncaptured garden."

On this episode of Partisan Gardens, we are sharing a vital summary of the ongoing mass farmer protests in India. For almost six weeks, Indian farmers have blocked the major highways leading into the capitol, New Delhi.  More than 100,000 people are maintaining tent cities on the highways themselves, in conjunction with a broader movement that mobilized 250 million farmers in strikes in November.  These protests are pushing back on a suite of three neoliberal reform laws introduced by the ruling, right-wing BJP party, intended to remove protections for small farmers and increase the power of large corporations in the agricultural sector.

 

Last week, we spoke with Gaurika Mehta about the Indian agricultural sector, the neoliberal reform laws, and the massive movement organized by Indian farmers to shut down the capitol until these laws are withdrawn.  Ranging from the self-organization of the blockades - including makeshift libraries, kitchens and self-published newspapers - to the role of the state in organizing food markets, her analysis helped us understand the movement and gain lessons for thinking about agricultural struggles in North America.

 

Further, her observations on the role of state racism and pernicious efforts to spread conspiracy theories discrediting the farmers are enormously timely, just as the farmers' intelligent efforts to link themselves with other recent movements offer important instruction for us here.

 

On January 12th, the Indian Supreme Court suspended the laws until the government enters into a new committee-based consultation with the unions, farmers, and other actors.  However, farmers have maintained their blockades, while continuing to demand the full repeal of these laws.  Further, many farmers are refusing to engage with the consultation at all.

For our second episode, we visited the small city of Carbondale, Illinois. Carbondale is a shrinking college town at the southern edge of the state, with a long history of racist segregation.  Since winter 2019, though, a broad range of residents has made a wager on a different future.  Grasping climate change and white supremacy by the horns, they've laid out a plan for municipal-level transformation, calling for police funds to be redirected to local structures of care and sustainability, with the aim of rendering irrelevant the economic system which has failed them.  Their food autonomy plan is at the core of their proposal, and has led to the growth of a constellation of gardens and food distribution structures aimed at empowering communities and addressing long standing inequities.

To prepare this introduction to their wager, we visited a number of their gardens, inspected their chicken coops, spoke with neighbors, bakers, and board members, and asked about next steps.  We're excited to invite you on this journey through a Midwestern town that's been turned upside down amid the pandemic.  When we were there, it was clear that Carbondale Spring has re-enchanted this small world in southern Illinois, as they propagate herbariums, orchards, community kitchens, and neighborhood collaborations.

You can find out more about their work here.

Special thanks to the folks in Carbondale for speaking with us, and Lyn Rye for our music.

Welcome to the debut episode of Partisan Gardens.

For our first episode, we wanted to take you on a tour through radically different ends of the food system.  We will begin by speaking with two farmers growing vegetables for CSAs and schools, with an eye towards building autonomy and power. After that, however, we speak with someone working in a hyper-exploitative grocery store in an impoverished neighborhood in Connecticut.  The fact that our interviewee can open up space for covert mutual aid and sharing, even in this corporate environment, speaks to the potential of the undercommons.