Occupy your lawn: guest post from Alex

My friend and garden guru Alex Zieba recenty wrote a piece called Occupy the lawn- with food! which I requested permission to reprint. Alex teaches philosophy and history, and as his PhD thesis, he lived sustainably in a house of his own construction, growing his own food and creating his own solar and wind energy, and wrote about the experience. Needless to say, he is one of my mentors and inspirations. He has the most remarkable garden, using organic techniques and heritage seeds, and has been generous with advice, seeds and plants along with friendship. He wrote about an angle of gardening which is one I have not touched on nearly enough which is the approach of growing your own food as an act of political protest against the destructive practices of the large food producing corporations which impact on our daily lives and the future of our planet.

Occupy the Lawn-With Food!

By Alex Zieba

As the weather warms, widespread occupation of publicly-owned but privately dominated spaces is rekindling.  And gardens are starting.


Some have tried to dismiss this massive mobilization of community power as the unfocused discontent of the unemployed-because those of us who are still employed have relied on our neighbours to represent us at the occupations, and yes, many of our neighbours are unemployed, underemployed, homeless, disabled, retired, students, parents and children.  A community is more than a labour force.

Many of us understand the hold that major corporations have on governments around the world.  Citizens occupy public places to regain democratic control of our nations and resources.  The fact that the top 10 contributors to the U.S. Republican and Democratic campaigns alike are the same corporations shows that this is not a right-wing or left-wing question, that there is little to choose between in these administrations, and trying to understand it as if it were a philosophical difference just divides us and draws our attention away from corruption.  We occupy, because we have no representatives on our ballot.

Occupying your lawn with food turns out to be a powerful political act.  To the extent that we produce food for ourselves instead of grass clippings, we will be withdrawing financial support from major corporations (from the chemicals and GMO's in farming, to commercial processing, to retail, to the companies who serve grass-clipping production).  We would also be diminishing our dependency on unstable job markets to eat, so there is no way to lose individually by participating: you'll at least have some healthy fresh food you did not need money for.

We have to be conscientious about our target here, and not remove financial support from the local organic farmers who are already occupying their land in a way that gives us real choices.

Alpine strawberries

 So growing vegetables instead of grass-clippings is a good idea, particularly if we were going to buy processed food products instead. Even though it is your lawn, occupying the lawn intrudes deeper into corporate profitability and so corporate domination if we begin growing the field crops that dominate conventional farming and the GMO market: corn, soy beans, and wheat primarily, then oats, rye, buckwheat, other beans, etc.  Corn, Soy and Wheat are bulk staple foods, the vast majority of which are fed to livestock or processed into oils and processed, packaged foods.

Garlic and basil

  Many traditional varieties of wheat, corn and soy are already actually illegal to grow in Canada and the U.S., or illegal to market, or to thresh, because they are perceived as a threat to GMO's.
The difficulty with producing our own grains is that they need to be milled and ground.  One solution is to grow other kinds of grains which do not need milling, like Amaranth, but this means changing our diet too.  If you have a little more space, you could occupy your lawn with a few chickens, let them eat the grass and bugs already in the lawn, or eat the unprocessed grain you (or a neighbour) grows, to make eggs and meat.

However, every town and city has hundreds, even thousands of people who are good with their hands, with tools and metals, who can make small milling equipment and serve their community from their garage or workshop.  Information for all of this is online. Gardeners and Tradespeople will need to cooperate, and every little bit helps, even if none of us can do it all perfectly.

Taking wheat as an example, a community may in this way provide flour for a local bakery, whose role in the community is therefore improved rather than eliminated.  We will discover that some companies perceive the new machines we've made and a free and independent organization of our food as crime.  Once two neighbours decide to mill some flour in one of their garages, we might find bi-law officers investigating them according to rules meant for commercial operations, just as we saw an Ontario neighbour facing jail time for "running an illegal abattoir" because he and two friends shared a pig.  We will have to be clean about ourselves of course, and aware that, since growing our own food really is a political act, some will use whatever laws exist to prevent our success.

It would be an appropriate gesture, and a true measure of success, if we were able to feed the occupation by bringing bread, tortillas, tofu, eggs, turkey., to those who will have been occupying public spaces all summer.  We have already demonstrated the ability to organize food for these events.  By October (Thanksgiving?), foods that had been grown in place of grass-clippings will already have been the object of media attention and an obvious change to the look of neighbourhoods that occupy their lawns, boulevards, flower boxes, vacant lots, park corners, and so on.  The occupation will have been feeding itself little by little already, occupying corporate profitability.

Feeding the occupation will bring together those who occupied their lawns with food, and those who occupied their garages and workshops with local processing, and those who occupied public spaces, and anyone else who would like to occupy themselves.

Occupying your Lawn and Feeding the Occupation therefore mean more than withdrawal of our financial support from the corporations involved.  It means that we as a community were able to organize ourselves and achieve our goals without them, maybe better.  It means we learned independence and team work.  Instead of giving-in to a politics of division, we turn to each other and cooperate in occupying our community, and to that extent genuinely take back democratic control.

Video Links:

The Corporation - a 2003 Canadian documentary about how corporations acquired the rights of citizens, and how they have exercised their citizenship.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+corporation+documentary+full&oq=the+corpo&aq=1&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_l=youtube.1.1.0l10.49267.51704.0.54496.5.5.0.0.0.0.97.462.5.5.0...0.0.

The World According to Monsanto:  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+world+according+to+monsanto&oq=the+world+accor&aq=0&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_l=youtube.1.0.0l10.192571.194238.0.196615.11.8.0.3.3.0.117.569.6j2.8.0...0.0.

Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ancient+futures+learning+from+ladakh&oq=ancient+futures&aq=0&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_l=youtube.1.0.0l4.70116.72417.0.74349.15.9.0.6.6.1.183.935.6j3.9.0...0.0.