LIVING FOR CHANGE

GARDENS AND BIKES ARE POLITICAL

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, July 22-28, 2007

Can we give up our supersize life styles in time to avert the looming planetary emergency? Can we discover within ourselves the wisdom and will to relinquish the SUVs and Sunday shopping sprees that for millions of Americans have replaced going to church and visiting family?

In the July-August Sierra Club magazine Mike Davis, a baby boomer who was a movement activist in the 1960s and now teaches at University of California Irvine, provides a hopeful answer to these questions.

“In the 1940s,” Davis writes, “Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history….

“The most famous symbol of this wartime conservation ethos was the victory garden…household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national ‘Food Fights for Freedom’ campaign.

“By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables…. Although suburban and rural gardens were larger and usually more productive, some of the most dedicated gardeners were inner-city children. With the participation of the Boy Scouts, trade unions, and settlement houses, thousands of ugly, trash-strewn vacant lots in major industrial cities were turned into neighborhood gardens that gave tenement kids the pride of being self-sufficient urban farmers. In Chicago, 400,000 schoolchildren enlisted in the ‘Clean Up for Victory’ campaign, which salvaged scrap for industry and cleared lots for gardens.

“Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn’t yet exist) and self-reliance. In Los Angeles, flowers (‘a builder of citizen morale’) were included in the ‘Clean-Paint-Plant’ program to transform the city’s vacant spaces, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden taught the principles of ‘garden culture’ to local schoolteachers and thousands of their enthusiastic students.”

“The war also temporarily dethroned the automobile as the icon of the American standard of living. Detroit assembly lines were retooled to build Sherman tanks and B-24 Liberators. Gasoline was rationed and, following the Japanese conquest of Malaya, so was rubber. When shortages and congestion brought streetcar and bus systems across the country near the breaking point, it became critical to induce workers to share rides or adopt alternative means of transportation. Car sharing was reinforced by gas-ration incentives, stiff fines for solo recreational driving, and stark slogans: ‘When you ride ALONE,’ warned one poster, ‘you ride with Hitler!’

“With recreational driving curtailed by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike…Public health officials praised the dual contributions of victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the already ominously increasing cancer rate.”

“Without cars, people moved at a slower pace but seemed to accomplish more.”

That was over sixty years ago. Since then, under the influence of television and an economy of abundance, consumerism has replaced citizenship and most Americans cannot distinguish between Needs and Wants.

But times like these could also grow our souls. If, for example, the movement to impeach Bush and Cheney continues to gain momentum, it could radically transform our understanding of what it means to be not only an American but also a planetary citizen.

More than thirty years ago in an amazingly prophetic statement ,Jimmy Boggs wrote: “The revolution in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more things.” eHe For this to happen it would “take a tremendous transformation.” “But potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed. Those who have already given up on America, those who have condemned it as hopelessly racist and fascist, will never make an American revolution.” (Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century, p. 140)

One of our mantras was “Love America enough to change it.”

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