This mission is a difficult one for many people, myself included. Food is fundamentally essential for life, of course, so you would think we would think about it more. "We" being the part of the world that has arranged that we have plenty of food, we don't have to worry about it too much. So what do we need to do? And what about the rest of the world?
Where does our food come from?
But our sense of security about food is actually rather misleading, and the situation is much more precarious than we would like to imagine. Primarily, we are hugely dependent on fossil fuel energy to grow our abundance of food, process and package it, and ship it to our homes. We are also dependent on the willing cooperation of nature to continue allowing us to strip it of its minerals, washing them downstream to the ocean, adding an excess of nitrogen and other pollutants along the way. We are dependent on regular and clean water and predictable weather patterns to know when and how much we should plant and how much we can expect to harvest. All of these things that we depend on, and more, are coming loose at the seams, threatening to fall apart, and any one might not be so bad, but they depend on each other as well, and we are building to a crisis point where one system falling apart could lead to a cascade of several other systems falling apart. (image from
Understanding Food, Water and the Energy Crisis)
Another thing to consider is that people have become very distant from the source of their food. It is often difficult to find the origin of any particular food we might buy in the grocery store. I just watched a news show about some famous British cook (whose name I forgot) going into US schools and showing kids a set of vegetables, and it was rather amusing how few they recognized.
Grow the source of your own food
So knowing all this, I have been pushing for growing more food locally myself, and helping many more people do the same, even if this goal is not aimed at growing all the food we need now in this way. I do have a small garden in my backyard, and I have gardened much more in the past. I will certainly continue gardening, and probably make time to do more each year. Sharing with our neighbors is also part of this process.
We each need to do at least this much. But how can we do much more than that? It is fine that we are dependent on others to do their part, to trust that they will do so. But how can we help many more people, to facilitate that they will find it easy enough to start doing what they can and actually follow through?
Interconnections, local and global
One answer, it seems, is fairly obvious. We have the enormous resource of the internet, the web in particular, to help us build connections online, to share what we know with others, and to listen and learn from them. This applies to food, and to so much more.
Food is a great place to start because, again, it is so fundamental to our survival, people know they need it, and it requires a modest amount of planning to make it happen. It is also difficult to get all the food, all the nutrition we need by our own direct efforts, and this can be viewed as an opportunity to foster community cooperation. We need each other to survive, at the very least on a local community scale.
But just as individuals depend on communities, our communities are not discrete entities, and all of us already have many connections to other individuals in other communities, and the boundaries between communities blur one to the next. This extends to our towns, regions, states, nations, and international communities.
So what's the big idea?
So the idea I am settling on is that we need a global service, a web site, or federation of coordinated sites, that will help everyone around the world build more of these community-level gardens. One reason for a global service is to promote networking and sharing of information on a wider scale even if we don't necessarily distribute as many physical resources globally. We have a lot to learn from each other since we are all humans with the same basic physical needs. We all have differences too, of course, and learning to appreciate those differences is one thing we all could use more of.
I don't think such a service exists yet, but I will of course investigate that first. Certainly there are global collaboration networks we can leverage as well, but this service will benefit from a few widgets targeted at the needs of community gardening, and the geographic-based networking. How this all comes out as an implementation is part of the challenge. Obviously this is a long-term project, but initiating it is the first step.
I'm not sure how this will turn out (that depends on what else is
happening and who gets involved in helping with this project), but I am
thinking about something that might be considered a cross between Ning
(for the social networking, groups, blogs, wikis, etc) and several
components that support
Open
Data, map navigation, visualization, all with an emphasis on lots
of networking.
Community gardening sites, networks, directories, and articles
Here are a few related projects that I have found out about already (thanks to refs by others):
Urgent Evoke Projects
Elsewhere on the Web
- Freedom Gardens "We're forming community bonds through the power of networking. It's easy to find your neighbor on this site." 6629 so far.
- Dave's Garden is a vibrant community with more than 500,000 members.
- Kitchen Gardeners A global community cultivating change, with 20,000 members from over 100 countries.
- American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) Connect at Communit... "Growing community across the US and Canada", includes a Community Garden Database of 18,000 community gardens, and a list of Links to Community Garden Websites, and also including Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network, and in the UK, National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners Limited
- Allotment gardens in several countries, including Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Philippines, Sweden, US, UK, and Norway. See translations of "allotment gardens" below.
- Another World is Plantable! "community gardening around the world". partly political, combating "global neoliberalism" hmm...
- International Gardens "are garden projects, where concepts are of intercultural learning, international understanding and the integration of the center" Literature and Links
- Intercultural gardens in Germany
- Intercultural gardens in Switzerland
- Intercultural gardens in Austria
- European City Farms and Community Gardens
- European Federation of City Farms. including members in Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Spain, and Portugal
- Black Environment Network: www.ben-network.co.uk
Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens: www.farmgarden.org.uk
Women's Environmental Network: www.wen.org.uk
- Peace Garden Program at the American Friends Service Committee
www.afsc.org/criminalJustice/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/5216 - Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Green Thumb, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (supports more than 600 community gardens in New York City) www.greenthumbnyc.org
American Community Gardening Association: www.communitygarden.org
- The Association, in Peru Agent Nick says "a great resource for community gardens in Latin America". From their "Challenge" page: "We live in a global context where [we] are taught values and practices that jeopardize our ability to sustain life on the planet. The environmental crisis we face is largely the result of our disconnection from the natural world."
- City Farmer News "This website is a collection of stories about our work at City Farmer here in Vancouver, Canada, and about urban farmers from around the world."
- SOUTH AFRICA: Community Gardens Contribute to Food Security
-
- Garden Africa
- Africa Community Gardens Project "Bringing together local and international expertise for food security in Africa" - this is a superstructgame project.
- Around the world in 80 Gardens, well there is at least one community project.
- Community Gardens Meetup Groups around the world
- Community Gardens in Tokyo
- Food Security Learning Center - Community Gardens - International "Community gardens in the United States are part of an international movement. The following are selected links to international community gardening and urban agriculture networks. In some of these international cases, community gardens merge into the wider reality of urban farming which includes vegetable plots in community gardens, food production in thousands of vacant inner-city lots, and commercial farms in and around cities." followed by a great list, but it needs updating.
- ... Help me out folks. Where are the community gardens around the world? Japan, China, India seem most important
Translation of "allotment gardens" into other languages
- Czech: "Zahrádkářské kolonie"
- Danish: "Kolonihave"
- Dutch: "Volkstuin"
- Finnish: "Siirtolapuutarha"
- French: "Jardins familiaux", "Jardin communautaire"
- German: "Kleingärten", "Schrebergärten" or "Kolonie" for the group and "Parzelle" or "Datsche" (mostly in former GDR) for the single, in former times also "Armengärten", "Sozialgärten", "Arbeitergärten", "Rotkreuzgärten", "Eisenbahnergärten" according to the concept of granting
- Italian: "Orti Sociali"
- Japanese: "クラインガルテン"
- Norwegian: "Kolonihage" or "Parsellhage"
- Polish: "Ogródki działkowe" ot colloquially "działki"
- Portuguese: "Hortas comunitárias"
- Russian: "Дача" ("dacha")
- Spanish: "Huertas comunitarias"
- Swedish: "Odlingslott", "Kolonilott", or "Koloniträdgård"
- Swiss: "Familiengärten", "Jardins familiaux"
- Welsh: "Rhandir" (plural rhandiroedd, rhandiredd or rhandirau)
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