Farewell to the South Central Farm
Chris and I had a great talk about the destruction of the South Central Farm today. The cops raided it early Tuesday morning, arresting farmers and supporters and having the nerve to bulldoze people's crops. There are a bunch of photos online, including on LA Indymedia, of plants, including perennials, that have been uprooted.
Several points that we had:
-When I heard that Julia Butterfly and other celebrities were doing a tree-sit, I said, that's the death knell for this garden. (wonder if they saved that one tree like they did with Luna). I was right about the garden not being saved. Oh god, here is the article about that tree- it IS an endangered, legally protected black walnut tree. The famous folks joined the campaign too late to be able to help.
-We were surprised that perennial plants were still in the ground there. Chris pointed out that people should have gotten those plants out, either in pots in a vacant lot, or distributed to people for their front yards, or even given to friends and family who work as landscapers and gardeners. (this would be what i would call "community organizing")
-It's time to get Food Not Lawns going in that neighborhood to replace the farm. Chris says that people there have decent-sized yards. They could hide the gardens just out in their backyards for safety, even, and be producing food for themselves.
-The best help that the famous folks could have given would have been to have either bought this lot (unlikely, due to the Wal-Mart influence against it), or to have purchased another one for the farmers.
-There were only approximately 40-50 people onhand to get arrested when the farm was raided? There weren't any networks with the people in the community to get people to show up to stop the police from carrying out the takeover (like, if they made phonecalls when the cops arrived)? Chris pointed out that if they had worked with local gangs, there could have been a lot of people out there real quick. I mean, had there been 10,000 people, maybe they could have stopped the cops-- or at least they could have made more of a political statement and felt good about having built up a large community to defend the farm. Instead it sounds like there weren't a lot of people who were invested in this project. (That's not to say that I wasn't in favor of it or whatever, but let's face it-- I've been spending half my time at a farm that is actually OWNED by most of the people who work it)
-Chris had a slightly un-PC comment about how they could use the Annenberg Foundation money to buy some land near Bakersfield or somewhere. It could be twice as much land, and he suggested that they could bus the folks out there to work on the land. He wonders why people would leave a country where they have access to land to come here and not have any. I was trying to defend these folks, talking about the social (and i guess financial) pressures to move to the US...
-Anyhow, another urban garden bites the dust. We talked about how the only smart thing that the ashby garden kids could do would be to buy it. I used to fantasize about like Zak or his parents buying it (back when it was one lot), and then I realized that if I owned it, I'd want to have a lot more say in what goes on there, and I'd probably just put up a fuck-you fence to keep people out, and I'd only let people I wanted to have there in to work on it, and that would just get ugly. Private property is a really gross thing.
posted by mahtin @ 11:11 PM
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