US Social Forum: Organic growth

from the Detroit Metro Times:



U.S.S.F.: Organic growth
June 25, 2010

By Robert Guttersohn


On the backside of Cobo Hall, Lizzy Baskerville and a handful of U.S. Social Forum attendees are up with the morning sun, ready to load up a van and head out to three urban farms in Detroit.

Baskerville is in charge of the Community Food Security project for the social forum. Each day, she has been driving people visiting for the forum to different urban farms across the city. The project works in two ways. First, visitors help set up community gardens here, and second, they take what they learn and apply to where they came from.

This morning, they huddled over directions to Permaculture and Resilience-Detroit or simply PRIDE.

PRIDE is located just north of Harper Avenue and west of Gratiot Avenue in a quiet neighborhood set along Georgia Street. The neighborhood is the antithesis of Harper and Gratiot, which are lined by fast-food restaurant, strip malls and dollar shops.

Georgia Street has evolved into a quiet haven for urban farming. If one closed their eyes and listened to the chickens, the roosters, the push-powered lawnmowers and the dirt shifting under the prongs of a rake, they would think they were in the mid-Michigan, not Detroit.


Killian O’Brien runs the 80 by 37 foot community garden – although he said not to call it a garden.

“Gardening is different from permaculture,” O’Brien wanted to clarify.


He described permaculture as a human structure in which everything within the garden stays in the garden and is recycled. O’Brien walked around his house and pointed out a blue barrel positioned beneath the gutter. Eventually he plans to use the water to irrigate the garden essentially freeing PRIDE from city water. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://blogs.metrotimes.com/index.php/2010/06/u-s-s-f-organic-growth/

Will check it out. Thanks! :hi:

People taking back their economic power and means of survival from the elite. Why do we work? So we can eat. Why else? So we can have a roof over our heads. What if we were able to provide those things for ourselves, and we didn't have to depend on the meager scraps that corporate America gives us? Scraps which often aren't even enough for what we consider a substandard existence in this economy.

Why do people refuse to challenge the system? They're afraid of losing their jobs because then they can't eat. What if they didn't have that worry? It begins with a few gardens, but if this takes off and becomes a movement, the elite could be in real trouble in ten or fifteen years.