The Garden is the Foundation of a better society... not more car sales?

[Guest guest]

hello....imagine the difference it would make to the world.... if we gardened more and drove less... think about it...?

 

the key to a more sustainable world may lay in the opposite direction to the trillions dollar plans being layed out now... what are your thoughts?

 

this is an ever green, long read, but you'll soon get the gist...and i am not even mentioning the V word... c sky.

 

Cultivating the Butterfly Effect

Cultivating the Butterfly Effectby Erik AssadourianWorld WatchJanuary/February 2003Monarchs, anise swallowtails,gulf fritillaries:these are just 3 ofthe 15 species of butterfliesthat nowinhabit the 2nd StreetElementary SchoolGarden. Begun 10 years ago in a few flowerboxes, thegarden has expanded to the size of two classrooms.Kidswho walk into it find themselves sharing space notonlywith butterflies, but with sunflowers, ladybugs, andyellow-rumped warblers. The National WildlifeFederationhas even designated this little plot a certifiedwilderness area.This would be a commendable achievement for anygarden, but it’s especially impressive for one thatiscontained on all sides by freeways, and is located inaninner-city Los Angeles neighborhood that suffers froma severe degree of gang-violence. The garden hasbecome a refuge of green within the gray smog-filledjunction of Interstate 5, Interstate 10, and Route 60,with chirping birds now defying the rumble ofdownshiftingtrucks that exit the I-5—the freeway whoseretaining wall is shared by the school parking lot.Like countlessother gardens aroundthe world, the 2ndStreet ElementarySchool Garden is havingnoticeable effectson its community.While it can’t quite neutralize the smog of thethreemajor highways or the aggression of nearby gangs, ithas brought a new vitality to both the school and itsneighborhood—restoring a piece of the localenvironment,fostering a sense of community, and providingthe school with fresh vegetables and a fresh approachto education.Brandyn Scully, the teacher who started the gardenin 1992, says the project has become the students’“reason to learn,” and is consistently voted theirfavoritepart of school. “It helps me teach,” she says. Forexample,it provides a creative way to discuss the intricaciesof math and science, as when the kids investigate thelifecycle of flies that grow in marigold seed pods.Forstudents who are just beginning to learn English, thatkind of hands-on setting also helps to reduce the dif-ficulties of learning only in a classroom setting. IthasCultivatingthe Butterfly EffectGulf fritillary caterpillar visits the 2nd StreetElementary Schoolby Erik AssadourianChaos theorists suggest that the waving wings of evena single butterfly affect the weather around theworld. All life affectsall life. And so, in a vastly larger way, does thegrowth of even the smallest home or neighborhoodgarden. The millions ofgardens growing around the globe are having a powerfulcumulative effect on people, communities, and theenvironment.fostered a newfoundrespect for the environment,as teachersand students becomepartners in restoring anatural system that balancesthe needs of theenvironment—like milkweed for the monarchs—withthe needs of humans.The 2nd Street Elementary School is one of about3,000 California schools that have maintained gardenswith the encouragement, materials, and funding of astate Department of Education program, “A Gardenin Every School.” A primary mission of the program,which began in 1995, is to provide “an opportunityforchildren to learn about nutrition, healthy eating, andbasic food preparation.” According to theprogram’scoordinator, Deborah Tamannaie, the program isworking.“Instead of eating junk food, the children areeatingwhat they grow,” she says.One indication of the program’s success comes froma recent study of 97 children, conducted by JenniferMorris and her colleagues at the University ofCaliforniaat Davis. Morris found that the 48 children wholearned about nutrition and worked in a gardenthroughoutthe school year were significantly more willing totry new vegetables than were those of a control group,who did not have gardens or nutrition education.Critics might question whether school systems thatare financially stretched can really afford gardens.Butin fact, these gardens address a rather urgent need.Inthe United States, with obesity having reachedepidemicproportions, the health of the school-age populationis at stake. About 13 percent of American kidsare overweight or obese, and only 1 percent meet thedaily U.S. Food Pyramid Guide recommendations forall five standard food groups. As they grow older, iftheireating habits remain poor, their vulnerability togettingfat is likely to rise dangerously. Already, a record61 percentof the adult population is overweight or obese.According to a 2001 report by the U.S. SurgeonGeneral,this epidemic contributes to 300,000 deaths peryear—just shy of the400,000 deaths associatedwith tobacco.School gardens alsohelp to counter thedamage done by twoother notorious trendsin U.S. schools: cutting back on physical educationclasses, and signing sales contracts with soft-drinkcompaniesand fast-food restaurants. Gardening may not beas strenuous as soccer or tennis, but it gets the kidsoutdoorsdoing something physically active. And the pleasureof eating a sun-ripened tomato or fresh carrot mayoffer a refreshing alternative to processed potatoes,which currently make up about a fifth of thevegetablesconsumed by Americans.Along with schools, other institutions are discoveringthe benefits of gardens. The Metropolitan Remandand Reception Centre, a correctional facility builtfiveyears ago in an industrial zone in Sydney, claims thehonor of being the largest maximum security prison inAustralia, and indeed in all of the southernhemisphere.Yet, in the middle of the forbidding concrete compoundlies a virtual oasis, complete with a pond, peacocks,and even endangered green and gold bellfrogs.For both the staff and the prisoners, entering thegardenoffers an opportunity to “forget that you are in ajail,” according to Patty Angre, who supervises theMRRC garden. And given that many prisoners have hadtrouble with angry or violent behavior, there’sanotherbenefit as well. Angre explains that the therapeuticactof gardening helps to calm the inmates. “The gardenimproves people’s spirit,” she says, “it changestheirwhole outlook on life.”Angre’s observation has been corroborated by mentalhealth professionals. Over the past decade,psychologistshave conducted ample research showing thathuman contact with nature—even with just a fewtrees—correlates with better mood, recovery from stress, andimproved concentration. In a recent study of 145 urbanpublic housing residents, Frances Kuo and WilliamSullivan, co-directors of the Human-EnvironmentGuard and inmate gardeners in the Metropolitan Remandand Reception Centreat the University of Illinois,even found thatthose with more accessto greenery were significantlyless likely touse aggressive tacticsor commit violence against their partners.As a result, urban gardens are being established asspirit-lifting refuges not only for restless schoolchildrenor prison inmates, but for the residents of hospitals,domestic abuse shelters, and nursing homes. In fact,gardeningis taking root as one of the newest forms of mental-health treatments, with “horticultural therapy”organizations being established in countries from theUnited Kingdom to Japan. According to Mitchell Hewson,a horticultural therapist at the Homewood HealthCentre in Ontario and founder of the CanadianHorticulturalTherapy Association, “horticultural therapyis having a profound effect, helping patients withailmentsranging from depression and addiction to posttraumaticstress disorder.”In a way, the mental health benefits of gardens arean added benefit. Their primary purpose, in mostplaces,is to augment the local food supply. On a globalscale,according to the UN Food and AgriculturalOrganization,840 million people are undernourished. Another1 to 2 billion suffer from a deficiency of necessaryvitaminsand minerals. But gardens are helping to combatthese deficiencies. For example, in Dakar, Senegal,localharvests—largely consisting of small familygardens—supply more than 60 percent of the city’svegetables.In Havana, Cuba, over the past decade, gardens havebecome central in creating a secure and healthy foodsupply. With the fall of the Soviet Union and theendingof Soviet-sponsored industrial agriculture, the U.S.embargo cut off Cuba’s access to petroleum andagriculturalchemicals. The country had little choice but todevelop localized, small-scale, organic foodproduction—both in farms and in home and community gardens.According to Catherine Murphy of the Institutefor Food and Development Policy, there are more than26,000 popular gardensin Havana,spreading across 2,400hectares of land andproducing 25,000 tonsof food. In addition tosupplementing family food supplies and incomes, thesegardens provide food donations for local schools andday-care centers.The contribution of gardens to food security is notjust a boon to the developing world. In the UnitedStates, while saving individual families hundreds ofdollarsin food costs per year, gardens also supply food tolocal poverty assistance programs. In Huntsville,Alabama, more than a thousand volunteers help togrow food at the CASA (Care Assurance System forAging and Homebound) community garden. In 2001,volunteers harvested and delivered almost 9 tons ofvegetablesto elderly and homebound people in the surroundingarea. The CASA garden is part of a nationalprogram, Plant a Row for the Hungry, which since1996 has mobilized community gardeners to donate aportion of each year’s harvest. So far, the programhassupplied over 800 tons of fresh produce to localassistanceprograms.The potential, of course, is vastly greater than that.During World War II, 20 million community and homegardens across the United States provided more than40 percent of the fresh vegetables consumed bycivilians,so that farms could feed the troops. If gardeningcould be done on that scale again, local food securitycould be improved while freeing surpluses to assist inareas suffering from food shortages caused bypoliticalor environmental instability.The kind of land-use shift required to grow gardenson that scale could have an ecological and healthbenefitfar beyond that of providing fresher, more chemical-free food. At present, the largest “crop” in theUnited States is lawns, which cover 10 millionhectares.By one estimate, the average U.S. lawn (aboutoneeighthof a hectare or one-third of an acre) absorbs upto 4.5 kilograms of pesticides, 9 kilograms offertilizers,and 773,000 liters of water annually—along withthe countless hours of labor and liters of gasolineconsumedby mowing. Even converting just 1 percent ofthese lawns into organic gardens would reduce thetoxic pesticide exposure to families and wildlife byupto 3.4 million kilograms per year, while also helpingtoreduce reliance on energy-intensive commercial foodtransport. Along with reducing nutritional value andcreating vast amounts of packaging waste, shippingfood over long distances—by ship, truck, orplane—leadsto increased production of carbon dioxide emissions.In the United Kingdom, agricultural products traveledan average of 125 kilometers in 1999, producing4 million tons of carbon dioxide in the process. Yet,125kilometers is relatively short; in the United States,theaverage food product travels from 2,400 to 4,000kilometers,more than 20 times as far as in the U.K.Aware that the agribusiness food industry has becomehugely wasteful, the 45,000 residents of HöjeTaastrup,a suburb of Copenhagen, are implementing aregional plan to become nearly self-sufficient in foodproductionby 2005. By increasing the number and efficiencyof gardens and boosting purchases from local farms,thetown is reducing its dependence on imports fromunstableareas, on chemical-intensive farms, and onpetroleumdriventransportation. In addition to growing vegetables,the plan entails increasing hen production, which ishelping to close the agricultural nutrient cycle.Insteadof importing chickens from industrial agricultureoperations,which are fed on imported corn meal and generateoverwhelming mountains of chicken waste, manyof the Höje Taastrup residents use food scraps tofeedthe hens, then use the manure as fertilizer for theirgardens—thus helping to close the nutrient cycle by preventingusable food waste from entering landfills andmanure from entering the rivers.Conceptually, that closing of the nutrient cyclepoints to a virtue of gardening that may be ofparticularimportance to planners who recognize that citieshave ecological relationships with their environments.Gardens aren’t simply added to the landscape likeinertstone walls or benches; they participate dynamicallyinthe region’s life processes. Just as they helpabsorbwaste carbon dioxide from human activity and convertit into needed oxygen, they also help to dispel wasteheat. Tokyo, like many large cities, suffers from a“heatislandeffect,” wherein the concentrations of asphalt,cars, and factories render the air several degreeshotterthan in the surrounding area, which in turn increasessmog, asthma, and heat stroke. Responding to thisenvironmental health problem, the Tokyo metropolitangovernment passed a law in 2001 that required newprivate buildings with rooftops larger than 1,000squaremeters, or public facilities larger than 250 squaremeters,to cover at least 20 percent of their area withgardens.The Tokyo government recognized that gardens helpcool the city by utilizing solar energy—both inphotosynthesisand in evaporating water from the foliageand soil. The plants, by absorbing rainwater, alsohelpto reduce runoff and pressure on municipal sewagetreatment. Plus, installing the gardens on rooftopshelps to more effectively maintain the internaltemperaturesof the buildings, thereby reducing both theenergy needs of buildings and the heat and pollutioncreated in generating that energy.Urban gardens aren’t without their problems. Whilethey can improve the local environment, they do takemore time and effort to maintain than empty rooftopsor vacant lots. And in some areas, air, soil, andwaterpollution can compromise the safety of the produce. Insouthwest Poland and especially in Upper Silesia, a200-plus year history of concentrated heavy industry,energyproduction, and mining has rendered the soil so toxicin some places that eating locally grown produce canbe a health threat. Yet, many residents depend onpublicgardening plots to supplement their food intake andto break the monotony of the densely builtenvironment.In response to these health risks, Silesianenvironmentalorganizations have helped gardeners to shiftcultivationto flowers and other ornamental crops that canbe sold or traded for food from unpolluted areas, ortofoods that absorb toxins at a lower rate (e.g.,legumesand grains instead of green leafy plants). In anycase, the✦January/February 2003 WORLD•WATCH 35ability of plants toabsorb toxins actuallyoffers another potentialbenefit of gardens—their use inhelping to clean upcontaminated plots—aprocess known as phytoremediation. In Hartford,Connecticut,Jack Hale, the executive director of the KnoxParks Foundation, started a garden in order to extractlead from the soil of an abandoned site where a paintstore once stood. With the help of local collegestudents,he planted Indian Mustard, a plant which effectivelyabsorbs lead. After one harvest, the soil readingsfell inmany areas to half of the 1,000 parts per million atwhichthey started. While the project was discontinued afterone season, it demonstrates the efficacy of gardens inenvironmental remediation projects.Finally, there is a benefit of urban gardens that istoo often overlooked by urban planners and governmentofficials. People often congregate to work, relax,and enjoy communal spaces, and through theseinteractionsbuild community. In a study of communitygardens in upstate New York, Donna Armstrong of theState University of New York at Albany found that in54 of 63 gardens surveyed, people worked to somedegree cooperatively—sharing tools, work, orharvest.Having a garden often helped to foster pride in theneighborhood, evidence of which could be seen inreduced littering rates and improved maintenance ofother properties in the neighborhood. Further, inonethirdof the gardens, more expansive communityempowerment initiatives were generated byparticipants—initiatives that included the creation of a newpark and the establishment of a neighborhoodcrimewatchprogram.Along with empowering communities, gardens canalso help to integrate them—facilitatinginteractionsbetween diverse populations. La Plaza Cultural, agardenfounded in 1974 in New York City’s Lower EastSide, functions as a cultural center and performancespace—holding regular performances that range fromKing Lear to Sufidancing. At the sametime, it providesorganic produce tolocal food shelters and,like the 2nd Street ElementarySchool garden,serves as a registered wildlife habitat.Gardens can be venues for community building andempowerment, either by providing a communal space,cultural activities, or—sometimes—by providing acommoncause when the garden itself is threatened. Often,as gardens transform previously rubble-littered vacantlots into green havens, they attract not justbutterfliesbut bulldozers, sent to convert the now pristine landintonew developments. In the United Kingdom, aboutonethirdof the half-million allotment gardens that existedin the mid-twentieth century have been destroyed.La Plaza Cultural is another of these threatenedgardens.For many years, a developer wanted to build asenior citizen housing complex on its city-owned lotin Manhattan. When public housing and open spacecome into conflict, the former is usually regarded asthemore urgent of the two—and the garden is lost. InNewYork, a city known for both its beautiful gardens aswellas its 18-year-long conflict between the citygovernmentand gardening community, these two constituenciesreached a major compromise this past autumn, resultingin an agreement that preserves 391 of the 838contestedgardens. While some (including La Plaza Cultural)are not covered, the settlement dramatizes how muchthe social value of gardens has grown. If these spacescan survive in a city where real estate is some of themostexpensive in the world, they can thrive anywhere.Erik Assadourian is a staff researcher at theWorldwatchInstitute.2nd Street Elementary School butterfly collectorsprepared for actionFor further information on the global impacts ofgardening,including more on food security, horticulturaltherapy, andenvironmental improvement, see www.worldwatch.org.Courtesy Brandyn ScullyLive Simply So ThatOthers May Simply Live

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