Why Baltimore and Ferguson might embrace gardening and find healing
|
Version 0 of 1. Words like “war zone,” “riots,” “gangs” and “looting” littered headlines about Baltimore this month. USA Today summed up the news on their front page with the words “Broken Baltimore” pasted in front of a phalanx of police in riot gear. President Obama spoke gloomily about how we can continue to expect cycles of urban poverty, violence and community reaction like we were seeing in Baltimore. But the president left out another cycle. Just like we have come to expect violence and looting after police shootings, we should also expect people coming out to show that they care about their community and the place where they live. Community members in Baltimore and Ferguson are reclaiming and repairing broken places through such acts as sweeping up the debris left after looting and planting community gardens. Such communal efforts are not just seen after rioting, but also after war, natural disaster and economic and environmental decline. It’s part of a cycle of chaos and rebuilding. And it’s a normal part of human behavior. Related: West Bank garden of teargas canisters - in pictures Why do people reclaim and repair broken places? One reason is to defy the headlines about looting and the demise of their city. After the unrest that followed Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, people reclaimed their city in part by planting trees. Cornell anthropologist Keith Tidball documented how tree planting became a symbolic act – of rootedness, resilience and unwillingness to believe the media frenzy about New Orleans being finished, never to come back. Signs throughout neighborhoods damaged by the hurricane read “Roots Run Deep Here.” Landscape architecture professor Kenneth Helphand captured defiant acts of caring for nature in a different setting: during wartime. In his book Defiant Gardens, Helphand wrote about World War I soldiers in the trenches of France, US soldiers in Iraq and even Jews in the Polish ghettos with no hope of survival – all of whom planted gardens as an act of defiance to the horrific conditions they faced. And after writing the book, Helphand received thousands of emails from people eager to share similar wartime experiences. Today we continue to see defiant acts of greening in conflict zones, like residents of the West Bank who have transformed teargas canisters into memorial gardens for lost loved ones. While a defiant will is one reason to reclaim broken places, there are plenty of other explanations. Biophilia, or a love of life, is one possibility. People have an innate love of nature and during times of stress, they turn to nature to help them heal. Another love – love of place, or topophilia – explains why people reclaim places where they have lived for many years. And as people reclaim places, they also reclaim a sense of community or feeling they belong and can make a difference. In our book Greening in the Red Zone, Tidball and I captured stories of people caring for nature, for place and for community in dozens of “broken” or “red zone” places – from urban gardens in post-Soviet Russia to urban parks in post-earthquake Haiti. Acting together for the common good is not only normal, it is associated with lower crime rates. In a 1995 survey of 8,782 residents living in 343 neighborhoods in Chicago, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson and colleagues found that neighborhoods with higher levels of “collective efficacy” – defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene for the common good – had lower homicide rates. Similar to Baltimore 20 years later, intervening on behalf of the common good in Chicago was not only about telling people not to loot or harass others, but also about tending community gardens. The struggles people in broken places are up against are massive. It will take much more than cleaning up and reclaiming local spaces to combat racism, poverty and unrest. Yet these localized reclaiming actions are not isolated and in aggregate are catching on to form a movement – often through social networking. In India, what started as one cleanup of one garbage-strewn lot in Bangalore five years ago has spread to a “reclaiming” movement in 60 cities across the subcontinent. Cleanups, community gardening and related civic ecology practices where people demonstrate care for their community and for nature are becoming part of national and global civic renewal and civic environmental movements. Whether they are defying the media, expressing biophilia, recreating a sense of place or demonstrating collective efficacy, people cleaning up the streets and tending community gardens in Baltimore and Ferguson are not alone. In fact they are part of a normal cycle of chaos and renewal and of a larger movement. People, tired of degraded places, and tired of crime and even war, are defying what others are saying about them, and the horrible conditions that surround them. It’s time to recognize the importance of these defiant acts and to support the people who undertake them. In the process, we might just find ourselves reclaiming the broken places in our own backyard. |