SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27TH,

ST. MARK'S CHURCH - 9th Street and 2nd Avenue
12:00-1:00 Food and Gathering
1:00 –3:30- Program of ritual, music, poetry, video and reminiscence
3:30 –whenever- a procession to La Plaza Community Garden- 9th and Avenue C to share songs, and fire.

Earth First article from More Gardens! around May 29th 2001 written by Brad

In the belly of the beast, New York City (NYC), a handful of folks
organized the first ever Earth First! regional rendezvous in an urban
center to focus on radical ecology and urban living. Though many
don't admit it, they spend a great deal of time outside of the forest
and even in large cities. This gathering was an attempt to highlight
rampant environmental racism, failures of urban planning and to bring
disparate communities together, bioregionally, to further radicalize
both young white activists and people of color in the communities
that feel the brunt of urban environmental blight. The gathering was
organized to take people around the city to see its green spaces,
hold workshops and celebrate public space.
The gathering began in the Green Dome Garden, a community garden in
Brooklyn. Just a block away a demolished paint factory has lead
content in the soil 10 times the legal limit. Luckily for this
predominately Puerto Rican community, the gardeners were not so slow
in taking action. They chose plants that help to trap lead and other
toxins. After a composting workshop, the EF! crew moved to the East
Riverfront where a row of abandoned warehouses and derelict piers
have rewilded into a stretch of free space, with a do-it-yourself
rubble-constructed skate park amid the husks of torched cars and
covert shanties. A snapping turtle slowly cruised by without
altercation. During the evening in Brooklyn, we went to Eco Books for
workshops on the animal liberation campaign against Huntington Life,
Car Busters' call for a car-free city and Rainforest Relief's direct
action campaign to stop the use of tropical rainforest hardwoods in
the city's benches, boardwalks and bridges. Late that night we
cruised through the Jamaica Bay wildlife refuge by subway and emerged
on Far Rockaway beach for a bonfire and camped out on the edge of the
city, unmolested.
Next was a day in the Project Harmony garden in Harlem, as well as a
tour of green spaces and creeping gentrification. In a short walk we
saw 11 empty buildings on the same streets as four bulldozed gardens.
When the bulldozers came for Project Harmony, a brave soul climbed a
tall tree and stopped the destruction for the day. Now a court order
protects the remaining 500 gardens, but the stay of execution could
be lifted at any time. These gardens are living proof of a community
empowering itself to take back its land from landlord arson, drug
dealing, refuse and city neglect to create safe green spaces for
children, elderly people and those who can't afford summer homes and
vacations outside the city smog.
We held a workshop on environmental racism in the prison industrial
complex. The issues of prisons and the environment don't often come
up together, but the increased prison construction and privatization
is uniting these struggles. Some people have tried to use
environmental laws as a way to fight prison building. The impacts of
instantly transplanting 2,000-plus people, with increased sewage and
waste disposal, are disastrous. The prisons are often built over
smaller productive farmlands or wildlands, destroying food, habitat
and watersheds.
Who is in jail? Predominately people of color. Almost everyone in the
neighborhood was impacted in some way by the prison industrial
complex. Haja, co-founder of Project Harmony, spent some time in
prison and was politicized inside: "A prison is a microcosm of the
larger society." Later in the evening we breached the fence
surrounding the half of Project Harmony that was destroyed and began
replanting it with donated plants and seeds. After this, we joined a
moonlight critical mass through Central Park to end a beautiful day
uptown.
On our agenda for the next day was the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
mecca for the gardening movement and tenant and anarchist organizing
in NYC. We began the morning in the Stannard Diggs, a threatened
community garden, with a history of the More Gardens! Coalition and
their direct action campaigns to protect and actively create new
community gardens. A workshop was organized on how to deal with grand
juries, due to the intense and scattershot repression in Long Island
following a series of Earth Liberation Front actions. Bob Lederer, an
anti-racist and ACT-UP activist, led the discussion charting the
history of activist resistance to the grand jury beginning with the
Puerto Rican liberation struggle in the 1930s through the dark days
of Nixon, to his own sentencing of two and a half months during
investigations into the Black Liberation Army. He argued that
cooperating with the police on any level is dangerous.
Next we had an anti-sexist workshop for men. This is a developing
movement in the activist community in NYC. We created a safe space
for people to speak openly about our own sexist behavior and develop
creative solutions for destroying sexism, not only in our society but
also in our movement and in ourselves.
We moved to another threatened garden, La Plaza Cultural, for a
large-scale play organized by college students, gardeners and youth
activists from all over the city. Climbing trainings went on in
magnificent willow trees that crown the community space. We ended the
evening with music and festivities in a squat just down the block.
Our final planned day was spent in the South Bronx, one of the
poorest communities in the US, hit hard by pollution from highways,
waste transfer stations, sewage treatment plant, incinerator smoke
and power plants, but also home to more than 100 community gardens,
countless lots gone wild and community driven restoration of city
parks and marinas.
In a small inlet next to the largest scrap metal yard in NYC is the
restored Hunt's Point Riverside Park on the Bronx River. We navigated
it in a boat built by local high school students. We rowed the length
of the mammoth Hunt's Point Market, where more than 20,000 trucks per
day drop food from far away. The market is dubbed the worst
ecological disaster in the city. We navigated the rotting skeletons
of pier pilings getting sucked back to the depths by a renewed burst
of gribbles and shipworms. Riker's Island prison and a monolith steel
prison barge, opened for overflow in Mayor Giuliani's time, came into
view near a break in the endless seawall where cordgrass flourishes
despite decades of subjugation.
Throughout the day, the Cherry Tree Association hosted a restoration
of a marina reclaimed from city neglect. The NYPD sometimes uses the
space as a firing range and it is directly adjacent to a brand new
power plant construction site. Stiff competition, but squatting land
was never easy.
We ended the evening cooking over an open fire in the Cherry Tree
Garden and listening to Dr. Paul Makiewicz of the Gaia Institute who
talked about their efforts to use indigenous plants and so-called
waste products to restore the watershed and intertidal marshes. "NYC
is an environmental disaster or an incredible opportunity spitting us
in the face. We don't need to abandon the city, we need to rebuild
it. " Case in point is the landfill from subway excavations that went
into the Harlem River and is now a fully restored salt march, a
stone's throw away from where the Dutch conned the natives out of
their island. Now it is home to great blue herons, snowy egrets, big
cordgrass and fiddler crabs. A healthy salt marsh feeds the entire
estuary ecosystem surrounding NYC. Salt marshes are among the most
productive ecosystems on the planet, nurturing fiddler crabs, ribbed
mussels and microscopic plants and animals.
The next day a group of activists paid a surprise visit to the NYC
offices of Governor George Pataki. We were kept out, so two
individuals blockaded the rush hour traffic while supporters
performed acrobatic stunts forming a human-constructed windmill. This
was a protest against the construction of 10 power plants in poor
communities in NYC. The quasi-public New York Power Authority (NYPA)
pushed through the plan, just below the size requiring a full
Environmental Impact Review which would have forced public comment
and appropriate biological studies. The plants will emit thousands of
tons of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen
oxides and volatile organic compounds such as benzopyrenes and
formaldehyde per year. The construction is being rushed to pre-empt
court cases that have already been filed. The NYPA has installed
solar cells at other sites. There is no shortage of electricity;
there is a shortage of common sense.
In the week following the gathering there was a huge rally to save
community gardens and a protest to end the bombing in Vieques at the
United Nations with 28 people arrested.
For more information visit the following websites: More Gardens!
Coalition www.moregardens.org; Gaia Institute www.gaia-inst.org; New
York City Indymedia, www.nyc.indymedia.org.