Introduction
…[S]ome people have a different definition of gardening. I am one of them. I do not wait for permission to become a gardener but dig wherever I see horticultural potential. I do not just tend existing gardens but create them from neglected space. I, and thousands of people like me, step out from home to garden land we do not own. We see opportunities all around us. Vacant lots flourish as urban oases, roadside verges dazzle with flowers and crops are harvested from land that was assumed to be fruitless. In all their forms these have become known as guerrilla gardens. The attacks are happening all around us and on every scale—from surreptitious solo missions to spectacular horticultural campaigns by organized and politically charged cells. This is guerrilla gardening:
THE ILLICIT CULTIVATION
OF SOMEONE ELSE’S LAND.
The battle is gathering pace. Most people own no land. Most of us live in cities and have no garden of our own. We demand more from this planet than it has the space and resources to offer. Guerrilla gardening is a battle for resources, a battle against scarcity of land, environmental abuse and wasted opportunities. It is also a fight for freedom of expression and for community cohesion. It is a battle in which bullets are replaced with flowers (most of the time). (14, 16)
Method
The preceding quote from Richard Reynolds’ On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries, provides us with both a literal and an ideological definition of the agrarian phenomenon known as guerrilla gardening. For our last project, we will experiment with guerrilla gardening in our places—on or off campus. This project will be half background and half refined field-notes. You will research and write a background report on guerrilla gardening, informing yourself about the history, manifestations, and motivations of this movement (approximately 650 words). An excellent place to start is Richard Reynolds website, www.guerrillagardening.org. This background section will act as an introduction into a write-up of your own guerrilla gardening experience, wherein you identify and take responsibility for a small piece of earth. Combined, the two sections should be a minimum of 1900 words. You will need to provide visual documentation of your experiment as well—the before, during, and after photos that will enhance our reading of your involvement with the dirt, the weeds, the sun, the rain, and the seeds!
For your experiment, you’ll need to write about WHERE you garden:
o WHAT is there (or not there)?
o WHAT is the general condition of this space?
o WHY did you choose this spot?
o WHAT did you do? Did you germinate seeds? Did you plant seedlings? Did you pioneer a garden from scratch, or did you enhance an existing garden plot? Did you choose flowers, herbs, vegetables? Why?
o What rationale appeals to you the most and why? Beautification? Food and greater self-sufficiency? Creating community? Gardening for health (physical activity)? Could there be a business angle? Did you garden for expressive reasons (to leave a “mark”, a message, a memorial)?
Possible Organizational Strategy
Compose the first section, the background, like our other essays: grab the reader’s attention and introduce the topic of guerrilla gardening. Provide the reader with an understanding of this movement—its history, its mission and the various reasons why people choose to become guerrilla gardeners, and highlight a few important examples (such as the founding movement in New York in the early 70s, and perhaps the current movement in England that is inspired and documented by Richard Reynolds).
For the second section, you might consider documenting your own experience in a journal format. Keep a daily (b)log of your activities, beginning with your identification of a potential gardening space, and make daily entries that detail your continued activities. Take a picture or two everyday to accompany your postings in order to show the before, during and after phases of your experiment.
Requirements
The completed essay and photos must be submitted by Wednesday, April 28th.
Length: 1900 Words
Format: MLA-style documentation
A Mini-Manifesto for Engaged Ecology (E²)
1. We have the right to fresh air, clear water and healthy soil.
2. A government that cannot provide them loses legitimacy.
3. The earth is in a crisis.
4. Cities are not the problem, they’re the solution.
5. Cities are alive and should be treated that way.
6. Biodiversity is the best measure of a healthy place.
7. Humans have evolved to live in harmony with nature.
8. The public creates the best public spaces
9. People will care for a place they plant themselves.
10. Engaged ecology creates a community. (Tracey 20)
Works Cited
Reynolds, Richard. On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Tracey, David. Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto. New Society: Gabriola Island, BC Canada, 2007.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Project 2: Inventions of Activism (Present Tense)
English 1020
Spring 2010
Project 2: Inventions of Activism (Present Tense)
IntroductionNow that we’ve taken a look at inventions of activism from the past, let’s turn our attention to the ever-changing present. In America and around the globe, scores of activists, young and old, take to the streets, both the physical streets and the virtual streets of the world wide web, to promote, defend, justify, extend, explain (along with many other action verbs) their particular causes—the issues, situations, and beliefs that keep them up at night. We need only check the daily news to find an issue to rally around.
Who (or what) is an activist? What does it mean to activate? Some forms of activism are plainly radical. Radical activists can be provocative; that is, they actively seek to provoke the opposition, to push matters to a head. Since this type of direct action can put someone afoul of the law, often activists themselves wish not to be readily identifiable (such as these WTO protesters in Seattle, WA, 1999). Radical activism can be violent or nonviolent.
Many activists, from a wide array of causes, espouse nonviolent resistance. They, too, wish to move things to a head, but their approach is less confrontation. Often nonviolent protesters try to make themselves a nuisance, an obstacle. Environmental activists in West Virginia staged a sit-in in the state capital building, blocking the hallway outside the governor’s office. They were arrested and carried out, one by one, including an 80 year-old woman. Similarly, activists protesting at a Mountaintop Removal site chained themselves to a bulldozer, forcing work to a halt; other activists (including former MTSU student, Eric Blevins, right) erected platforms high in treetops of land slated for MTR mining. The main goal of these versions of nonviolent protest is simply to bring media awareness to the problem at hand—in this case, the systematic and irreversible destruction of the Appalachian mountains, all the ecosystems therein, and all the human environments, too.
For this second project, we’ll choose current forms of activism, get to know the conversations surrounding these forms of activism (through focused research), assess what we think we know and what we need to know, begin to formulate claims about these topics, consider a rhetorical stance and purpose, consider our audience(s), concentrate on the material we gather, take special care with documenting our source material, think carefully about organization, consider style and tone appropriate for an academic research argument on these particular subjects, consider how we design our presentations and what, if any, visuals might enhance them; and, finally, when we’re nearing completion, we’ll begin to meticulously proofread and edit our work.
Due Date: Monday, March 29th
Length: 1900 words
Format: MLA; a minimum of six (6) academic sources (NO WIKI!)
Spring 2010
Project 2: Inventions of Activism (Present Tense)
IntroductionNow that we’ve taken a look at inventions of activism from the past, let’s turn our attention to the ever-changing present. In America and around the globe, scores of activists, young and old, take to the streets, both the physical streets and the virtual streets of the world wide web, to promote, defend, justify, extend, explain (along with many other action verbs) their particular causes—the issues, situations, and beliefs that keep them up at night. We need only check the daily news to find an issue to rally around.
Who (or what) is an activist? What does it mean to activate? Some forms of activism are plainly radical. Radical activists can be provocative; that is, they actively seek to provoke the opposition, to push matters to a head. Since this type of direct action can put someone afoul of the law, often activists themselves wish not to be readily identifiable (such as these WTO protesters in Seattle, WA, 1999). Radical activism can be violent or nonviolent.
Many activists, from a wide array of causes, espouse nonviolent resistance. They, too, wish to move things to a head, but their approach is less confrontation. Often nonviolent protesters try to make themselves a nuisance, an obstacle. Environmental activists in West Virginia staged a sit-in in the state capital building, blocking the hallway outside the governor’s office. They were arrested and carried out, one by one, including an 80 year-old woman. Similarly, activists protesting at a Mountaintop Removal site chained themselves to a bulldozer, forcing work to a halt; other activists (including former MTSU student, Eric Blevins, right) erected platforms high in treetops of land slated for MTR mining. The main goal of these versions of nonviolent protest is simply to bring media awareness to the problem at hand—in this case, the systematic and irreversible destruction of the Appalachian mountains, all the ecosystems therein, and all the human environments, too.
For this second project, we’ll choose current forms of activism, get to know the conversations surrounding these forms of activism (through focused research), assess what we think we know and what we need to know, begin to formulate claims about these topics, consider a rhetorical stance and purpose, consider our audience(s), concentrate on the material we gather, take special care with documenting our source material, think carefully about organization, consider style and tone appropriate for an academic research argument on these particular subjects, consider how we design our presentations and what, if any, visuals might enhance them; and, finally, when we’re nearing completion, we’ll begin to meticulously proofread and edit our work.
Due Date: Monday, March 29th
Length: 1900 words
Format: MLA; a minimum of six (6) academic sources (NO WIKI!)
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