4.
The Grassroots Garden through Food for Lane County in Eugene, OR. This organization is committed to teaching the Eugene community about food security through their use of their outdoor kitchen and 2.5-acre garden. They teach classes about how to produce your own low cost and environmentally friendly food right in your backyard.
5.
Taking into account the readings we did with Speth, our group chose to partner Grassroots Garden with Green for All. Green for All would widen the community base that Grassroots Garden has and give it the ability to have increased democratic involvement. “In short, many of those who have given the future of our democracy the deepest thought have concluded that empowerment of citizens to decide matters of common concern and to legislate the results themselves is essential not just to better decisions but also to better citizens” (Speth, 223) We thought that this would give them political mobilization for long-term solutions by creating strong community groups that actively teach hands-on ways to be sustainable and creating public interest. This partnership would create interest in the topic and with Dewey, community interest and involvement is key to the success of democracy because more people would be able to communicate the mission of both organizations. Communication on every level is impactful and supports the idea of community outreach and the connection between human and nature, which is exactly what both organizations aim to achieve. Dewey claims that group activity is about the creation of a community but it is also about the association or status that comes along with it. So when people feel as though they belong to a group that is doing good things for the rest of the community, they hold themselves to a higher standard and aim to protect the organization “From the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the group in which one belongs and in participating according to the values which the group sustain.” (Dewey, 327) It is disregarding their own personal interest for the benefit of the community that would help with political organization.
Adding in the perspective of Klein and the Pope only further emphasizes the importance of community. When you’re willing to give up personal values for the betterment of the community it will help the environment more as well. “Not surprisingly, the people who understand this best are those whom our economic model has always been willing to sacrifice. The environmental justice movement, the loose network of groups working with communities on the toxic front lines of extractive industries has always argued that a robust response to emission reduction could form the basis of a transformative economic project.” (Klein, 155) The government now uses political action to try and debunk the idea of climate change happening but it truly is them acting out of self-interest to advance their own political agenda. If both Grassroots Garden and Green for All teamed up to enact environmental change then they would be doing more for the environment than some politicians who garner support for trying to enact change. With the Pope, he claims that we want to create a relationship with the environment, where nature and society can equally coexist without any sort of damage. “We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.” (Pope, 139) All of the reading that we have done in and out of the classroom only validate the decision to make Grassroots Garden politically mobile with the help of Green for All.
With the “Taking Climate Action to the Next Level,” they argue that “climate leaders are just not going far enough” to make effective climate change. With the combination of the two organizations and the support, they would accrue from the community that their mission would build, could fill in the gaps that climate change leaders can’t fill themselves. Grassroots Garden would be able to align themselves with the three interventions the article suggests would garner them the most attention and community engagement: “quantitative easing for the planet, public ownership for energy democracy, and anchor strategies for the energy transition.” This Grassroots garden would have substantive reasoning other than food security and environmentalism to back their initiative up.
6. As Grassroots Garden relates to all the readings we have done, the five steps that Grassroots Garden would need to take are doable in the immediate future. I think partnering with Green for All (as mentioned before) is one of the most important things they could do. It would give them the political spine to structure their mobilization around. Because Green for All focuses on combating food insecurity while also enacting policy change, it would be a refreshing way for the educational side of Grassroots Garden to represent themselves on a more political playing field. This is something Klein would describe as “counter-power” (156), meaning that Grassroots Garden already has a strong stance on sustainable food production, but the addition of Green for All would structure them more and give them some more ground to stand on in another societal area.
Next would be to understand and teach the community the effects of public policy on food security and sustainability. They would do this through weekly classes on the current state of food security in the community. To me, putting quantitative evidence as the face of a very broad issue, helps people understand its effects. A lot of people do not understand the importance of food security because it doesn't affect everyone, so I think classes on how public policy helps not only people who need more food security, but those it doesn't affect on a day to day basis as well is something that is very important to understand. We can connect this to something Pope said: “It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. Time and space are not independent of one another, and not even atoms or subatomic particles can be considered in isolation. Just as the different aspects of the planet – physical, chemical and biological – are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand.” (pg. 93) While one person may not be directly affected by certain food practices, many others are, and public policies connect them all together.
I think the last few things that would benefit Grassroots Garden would be to align themselves with another organization that was talked about in class; Native Plant Nursery. I think that a lot of time people are hesitant to produce their own food because they do not have the knowledge of what kind of plants would be beneficial to them. Both Grassroots Garden and Native Plant Nursery have the ability to educate their community about the benefits of food sustainability and the importance of native plants to the land they would be producing it.
I think from there, with the insight from the Dewey readings, Grassroots Garden can play on community outreach. Working with sustainable practices is something that they pride themselves on and the perfect organization to align themselves with would be Sustainable Eugene. They could offer more volunteer opportunities to help garner support of sustainable and secure practices of food production. Going back to how organizations like these create a community for people to gather support around, both move people away from the mundane and mechanical society we have come to know today. “Emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the mass of men create the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment and opinion only take advantage.”(341) I think that if Grassroots Garden convinced their community that sustainable food practices can be habitual in everyday life, they would have so much ground to back it up.