Local Food, Urban Gardening, and Art: Urban Garden Toolbox

What can I do? The question follows me as I turn and face the world. A world where human actions increasingly alter ecosystems, the climate, and the environment without fully understanding the consequences and the disharmony of these alterations. How can anything I do change the course of this overpopulated, quarreling, economically addicted, and technologically religious human force hurtling further into discord with the movement of the planet? Especially in the Western world, where individualism runs so thick through our veins?

These questions prompt me into action. Inch by inch, what can I do?

Inch by inch. I can grow food. Right here, right now. I can grow foods of many varieties, learn the trials of the Earth, the water, the sun, and share with others what I’ve learned. By daring to do, I can experiment, succeed, revise, and grow with the sprouting seedlings. There, something in my control, something manageable.

Inch by inch. I can grow connections. It bears underscoring the fantastic abilities this age offers, interconnecting billions of people across the planet, across nations, states, cities, communities. Individually, we build many marvelous monuments. Communally, grow exponentially in creative adaptive capacity. Synergy. Using the technology we build as a sharply honed tool, we can tap into this immense creative energy. I can grow connections, and through them, share with others what I’ve learned, and learn and adapt from others through what they share.

Inch by inch. I becomes we. We, the People. But more than just our human-sphere. We, the Land. The Land Community. We change the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. We become what the Greeks called kosmopolites, “citizens of the world.” We can grow our own roots into the Earth, share with it what we have learned, and by accepting our citizenship, learn a great deal from the Land Community.

Inch by inch. We build a Toolbox. With our own hands, with our own inspiration, our own processes, we assemble an adaptive, evolving, and stacking movement towards land citizenship. Through the direct, unconverted, and un-interpreted experience of making a home for living members from the Land Community, caring for them, and taking sustenance from them, we build connections with the essence of our Earth, with each other, with ourselves. We begin to assemble knowledge, we begin to expand awareness, understanding. We begin to balance our disharmony.

“Inch by inch—

Little snail

Creeps up and up Mt. Fuji.”

~ Kobayashi Issa