Guerilla Gardening, Seed Bombing, and Food Security

Today during my lunch break I came across three fascinating Wikipedia articles:

Feel free to peruse the above links if you like, I’ll talk about each of the three below:

Guerrilla Gardening: As usual, Wikipedia has the best one-paragraph summary for what this means:

Guerrilla gardening is political gardening, a form of nonviolent direct action, primarily practiced by environmentalists. It is related to land rights, land reform, and permaculture. Activists take over (”squat”) an abandoned piece of land which they do not own to grow crops or plants. Guerrilla gardeners believe in re-considering land ownership in order to reclaim land from perceived neglect or misuse and assign a new purpose to it.

While I’m sure it would be fascinatingly easy to devolve into a political discussion regarding this topic, but as usual, this isn’t my aim.

I’m more surprised to learn that this is the formal name for the practice that Shane Claiborne describes in The Irresistible Revolution for planting flowers in trashed TV’s in abandoned neighborhoods of the poorer areas of Philadelphia. I also wonder what the effects are on a community of this type of action, for the better or worse. Things to think on.

Seed Bombing: This one’s just awesome, and heavily related to the previous topic:

Seed bombing, also known as “Seed Grenades” is a technique of introducing vegetation to arid soils or otherwise inhospitable terrains. A seed bomb is a compressed clod of soil containing live vegetation that may be thrown or dropped onto a terrain to be modified.

How awesome is that. Wonder how hard it is to make a seed bomb. All you’d really need is soil, water, a very hardy plant, and then maybe some sort of biodegradable netting that would encase the “bomb.” My gut tells me (or rather, the place where my gut would be if I had a gut, so perhaps “the place 2 to 3 inches in front of my stomach tells me”) that the Internets most certainly has the answers I would seek on such a topic.

Food Security: This one was listed a related article to Guerrilla Gardening:

Food security describes a situation in which people do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. World-wide around 852 million men, women and children are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty; while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty.

I had never considered there would be such a succinct term to describe this problem. The article goes on to explain some views held by various organizations on how to bring food security to more people, and some potential risks to food security world wide.

Its good idea for us to have reminders such as this of what our brethren worldwide face as a daily reality. How and when and with what means we alleviate such a problem, I have plenty of ideas and few answers.

Oh, and between this blog post and this one, I must be becoming a hippie or liberal or communist or something. Sorry about that. I think I’ll blame it on Josh, as he’s the only hippie liberal communist I know.

FL: Awesome slideshow of 101 odd pictures - Instead of trying to describe this funny link better… look at the following photo. If it makes you giggle, you’ll appreciate this link.