Ecologies Part I: Garden as Revolutionary Act
04.29.05Ecological Observations of the Everyday
For the past few days my wife and I have been progressively tackling our upstate New York yard. After spending the past 5 years in New York City we recently moved to the upstate Rochester area due to the death of my father. My grandfather has been I’ll and living with my mother and she just couldn't take care of him alone. We have basically taken the summer off from our business and academic work. This sudden move has allowed us to be quickly immersed in suburban culture and because I am (I hope) a critical thinker I have become increasingly interested in the suburban landscape and its revolutionary potential for community and political transformation.
What I have been struck with most - and I believe that much more thought can go into this in future entries - is the amount of unutilized yard space the common suburban household has. Yards seems vast occupied only by the dreaded suburban "lawn". Everyone has a lawn! And lawns are large! It has become apparent that this is a product of mechanized landscaping tools (the lawn mower) and the desire to suppress all that might grow, a fear of "the void". As Nietzsche stated in The Genealogy of Morals, "man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose...."(1)
It seems that the effects of the "Protestant work ethic" - see Max Webber (2) - have been in full effect dividing the labor of work (the job) and the labor of life. The yard has been systematically affected by this strict division becoming an area that is void of work (labor) and into an area of pure leisure (swimming pools, baseball, riding lawnmowers). With this transformation from and area where traditionally "the land" was meant to be an area that was vital to the sustainability of life - mainly food and resource production - it has fallen victim to certain predictability. The ecosystem is reduced to a weekly schedule - the lawn grows, the lawn is cut.
Food systems now rely on large industrial markets. The pay that is received from labor in the workplace is used in trade for mass produced agricultural industrialized products. Personal control over these products is reduced. Diversity suffers.
I am just giving my brief thoughts here. My thoughts have really nothing to do with sound research or evidence but instead I am arriving at this thinking though the very act that I am now critiquing - namely mowing the lawn with a lawn with a riding lawn mower. I do believe though that this is an important area for further research and investigation. The "lawn" and the "garden" seem to be and area that has very interesting cultural and sociological implications. My questions are: What would be the sociological and community implications be if local organization turned from a Lawn economy to a garden economy in American suburbia? Can a private garden be a revolutionary act by taking commerce away from large global industrial systems and allowing more localized food production and power to exist? Could garden systems replace currency exchange with DIY barter exchange?
These are some questions that I will be attempting to tackle over the next several months and as our lawn slowly begins to develop from a "lawn" structure into a "garden" structure. Just to note, I was particularly inspired by the Peter Lamborn Wilson edited book Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City & the World.
(1) Nietzsche, F. (1956) The Genealogy of Morals.
(2) Weber, M. (1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
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