In this day and age, growing your own food and saving your own seeds has become a revolutionary act. Creating and maintaining local autonomy free from the clutches of global financial institutions and agri-chemical 'Life Science' corporations is the only alternative we have if we are going to save the planet's inhabitants including ourselves from extinction. We rely on large corporations for so much of the basics of our livlihood and it is time to show that there are alternatives to industrial agribusiness and that given the opportunity and the resources, we are ready to put them into place.

We are a group of urban community gardeners in solidarity with the millions of poor farmers in the world who are being driven from their land and forced to grow cash crops by the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. We are visionaries who see a future free from this corporate slavery that defines our global economy and are working daily in our communities to take back local control of our lives - beginning with the food we eat.

"The land is for those who work it - liberty is for those who take it."

As gardeners, we recognize that the reasons we don't want monocultures of chemical industrial agriculture on our land are the same reasons we don't want a monoculture of CocaCola, Starbucks, and McDonalds in our cities.

Global commodities cannot afford to be different and local communities and businesses are unable to survive in a world of chain stores, sweatshops, and plantations. Diversity gets in the way of profits and control. The will to dominate and control nature sees diversity as a disease and deficiency. But diversity in our lands and in our cultures is what keeps us alive and makes our lives rich. As we stand our ground we must remember that we are fighting to keep the bankers from turning the planet into a big strip mall.

desertification from monoculture ploughing

It is up to us to take the future into our own hands. If we leave the responsibility of healing this world up to institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, we are dooming ourselves to a future of corporate feudalism and ecological catastrophy. For more than fifty years the record is plain and simple: the people who design the policies at these institutions are not interested in alleviating poverty and creating an equitable distrobution of wealth, they are only interested in integrating people from all over the world into the market economy without regard to it's impact on peoples lives. Their skewed developement policies kill people everyday. The World Bank and IMF have created a system of modern day colonialism that make the people in the developing world poorer and the multinational corporations richer and take the power away from all of us. It is time we take a stand and say "no more!"

Seeds of Liberation

All creation is sacred. Seeds, plants, animals, and micro-organisms are our common heritage and not private property. Any claim to own or patent life is a theft from and a cultural assult on indigenous people. Indigenous peoples, farmers and women seed-keepers have the right to save, share and exchange seeds and medicinal plants. Seeds are the source of life. Peoples movements are the source of resistance. Up the pavement!

'Urban Guerilla Gardening - Growing Food in the City' by Sascha Scatter

We need to start growing food where we live and reclaiming all this knowledge for ourselves and future generations. We can't keep importing and trucking all our food all over the globe and let big corporations control the most basic aspect of our lives for us. There is so much potential for growing food in the cities and suburbs. Taking over abandoned rubble lots and roof tops and lawns and starting community gardens. Building compost with all the organic wastes from supermarkets and restaurants and our kitchens. Catching water before it runs off into the sewers - building ponds and attracting birds and insects. Creating urban woodlots of fire and timber wood grown around industrial zones can filter pollution from the air, produce oxygen, provide habitat for birds and small animals, and not make all the buildings so damn oppressive. Local parks could be full of fruit trees and berries. We could graft scion wood of good fruit trees to crab apples in alleyways or non-fruiting cherries and peaches and plumbs in parks, come back later for the harvest. We can dumpster tons of bathtubs and tires and milkcrates and refrigerators and other good stuff to grow things out of. There's more edge and vertical growing space than you can shake a stick at in the city. The possibilities are rich. It's all like sculpture and art - dealing with living systems that change over time. It's so important to bring this stuff into the city, bridge connections between people of different generations and cultures, teach the kids that there's more to life than concrete and hate and fear.

Survive