Garden Politics

NPEC member and former chair Evan (Mid-Hudson Valley) talks about his journey into socialism and garden knowledge, and how our hopeful politics of renewal, intention, collectivity, and cooperation are made practical and material by digging around in the dirt.

Evan recommends the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer for anyone interested in knowing more about his own learnings, and where he started to become interested in growing things in our world. You can find it for sale from the publisher here.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yes, as we typically think of uh nature in this kind of like competitive capitalist sense where everything's out to get each other, you gotta survival of the fittest. You do also have systems out there that are more mutualistic, and among those are mycorrhizal fungi. So I do support that.

SPEAKER_03 0:20

Hi, comrades, and welcome to CLAS, the podcast of Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC. My name is Michaela, and I am the current chair of NPEC and a member of North New Jersey DSA, and today we're talking with Evan, a former chair of NPEC, who still sits on our committee for all this time and is a member of Mid-Hudson Valley DSA. Before we dive in, just a reminder that CLASS is available on all major podcast platforms. Please consider becoming a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. You can also send us a message about the episode and sign up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter, using the provided links. As socialists, we're always looking to connect material conditions and the political terrain and historical juncture we're in. And speaking of terrain, today we're talking about terrain, as in dirt and cultivating it, gardens and gardening. What could gardens have to do with, you know, everything we're trying to do and all the fires we're trying to put out in the more important, desperate, real politic world? What does it have to do with political education? A lot, it turns out. On an abstract level, how humans make the world anew has long been likened to gardening. And education itself is synonymous with cultivation. How we grow people is a form of care and tending. More materially, how people attempt to grow their own sense of place and belonging has long been based around land, farms, and gardens. And this has demonstrable political valences. Israel's decades-long occupation and destruction of Palestine contains a history of systematically burning olive groves and banning the foraging of native plants, though starving a people and colonizing their common way of life. Across time and space, the displacement of some forms of cultivation, growth, and gardening with other forms of growth and gathering that are decreed to be productive have been a telltale harbinger of capitalism and its attendant exploitations and crises of people, land, air, and water. So it happens that the garden is more than just a metaphor. It can be a material center of socialist politics and part of our fight back against the fascist co-optation of this basic human desire to grow and care for each other in the world. To talk about that with us is Evan, who, in addition to being in DSA, is a gardener and is starting a plant nursery in the Hudson Valley. Welcome, Evan.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

All right. So we always start with the same question. So you have to go through it too. How and why did you become a socialist? And how and why did you join DSA?

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Good question. One I enjoy answering, uh, because it was something of a winding path for me. It wasn't an instantaneous woke up and now I'm a socialist. The first political event that probably radicalized me was the murder of Mike Brown. Um, that's when I was in, I believe, high school. And it started making me ask questions and I had a lot of anger, but I didn't have a lot of answers. I didn't have any political structure to attach myself to to make a meaningful change. And so I felt desperate, but not sure where to put my energy. Then later came the first uh Bernie campaign. Um that was also, I think, around the time I was in high school, towards the end of high school. And it was then that I started to develop an actual politics that I could follow. Bernie showed that there was a different way of thinking that aligned with my own, that there were possibilities I had not previously considered, and that they could be realistic. They weren't just considered utopian. These are things that we can actually attain. Uh, and then really, it was COVID, um, during the age of COVID that I became a socialist. It was in 2021 I I joined the organization, DSA. As a type one diabetic, uh, that is also radicalizing, living in a country where as much as 20 to 25% of type ones have to ration their insulin because they're under or uninsured and can't afford it. Uh, just in in my case alone, if if on my income I did not have insurance whatsoever and I had to pay my medical expenses, I would have no money for pretty much rent, food, or anything else. It is very expensive. It is one of the most expensive chronic illnesses. So that in itself is radicalizing. And we're we're in an age of a pandemic and seeing that this would be the time for universal health care, and it's not happening, right? Um, that on top of the George Floyd uprising was creating even more questions for me. And I found those answers in DSA. Uh, DSA was a local organization that I saw was doing really good work. Uh, so I decided to join, meet up with people who I thought were thinking like me, who were doing the work that I always felt like I should have been doing, that I finally got answers to those initial questions that I had. And it became a political home for me. Quickly, I started doing poly ed. I spent all this time reading books, and I felt to myself like, well, this information is only useful if I bring it to other people. It's not helping me to just contain it within myself. And so I quickly became the co-chair for the chapter for poly ed. Uh, and then later on became a member of NPEC until I also became chair of the National Political Education Committee. Um, so it has been a, you know, now a five-year commitment and one I hope to continue for a lifetime. Um, and then in that same span of time, I also developed a love of plants, um, which I felt corresponded very well with the politics I was developing at the time.

SPEAKER_03 5:30

Thanks for sharing that. I think it's interesting that a lot of people, of course, were radicalized by Bernie, but that you, you know, were also radicalized by um sort of this event, this, you know, this domestic political event and your own experience of having been a person in need of, you know, expensive medical care and not actually being able to reconcile the fact that this is something and type one diabetic uh diabetes is not an uncommon disease, right? Or it's not a it is a common disease. Am I right about that?

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Much more common than people realize. Yeah. I mean, if you don't know someone who has it, you might just not realize that they have it.

SPEAKER_03 6:07

I know, I know several people who have it, but I do think that the fact you're kind of pointing up that how come this is something that's so expensive and that so many people would die if they if they didn't have insurance, it's you know, inhumane and and horrible. And I'm really glad you're with us. And I'm glad I actually met you probably when I joined NPEC, because you've been on it for such a long time that when I joined, what, in 2021 or so? I think uh that's when I met you. So yeah, I wanted to talk to you about how you got into plants and you just mentioned that you developed it over the course of were you already a socialist, or did you kind of grow into it at the same time?

SPEAKER_00 6:46

I feel like it kind of dovetailed for me uh a little bit. It was more or less around the same time. And I'm also the type of person who goes headfirst into things, which is also evident by immediately seeing if I can help lead any efforts in the political education department. So, in the same respect, a friend gave me some plant cuttings, some house plant cuttings, and I was like, wow, this is phenomenal. And now I have over 150 houseplants, and when I have my garden in peak season, there's over 150, 200 plants outside. But you know, what I found interesting is that uh this is an opportunity for me to kind of piece together things that people normally don't piece together. I I found that the socialist politics has made me a better gardener, and being a gardener has also made me a better socialist, that I've been able to kind of have these skills work with each other and build each other up in a way that now I feel like I'm fairly proficient in both fields, um, that I'm able to be an effective communicator and also a cultivator.

SPEAKER_03 7:42

Yeah, it's kind of crazy how that happens, right? Where like organizing and education and like whatever other vocations you're in often kind of like support each other in a way. And I I do think that that has something to do with how, at least in NPEC, we're also trying to kind of encourage people to become better communicators, but also just having to talk about your politics in a world that is often hostile, not just to politics, but specifically social, socialist politics or anything out of the mainstream causes you to have to develop like certain skills. And so then whenever you're able to talk about something that maybe people want to talk to you about, it's like all of them the easy, it's all the more easy to do that. So I think that what we want to talk about today is kind of the politics that like the way that these things have kind of like developed for you. Like your love of plants, obviously, there's lots of people who like to garden. Gardening's a huge industry. And we're gonna talk a lot about maybe like how you see your own life like kind of fitting into that because you're starting a nursery. But then also like cultivation, gardening. I mean, this is like all of human civilization, really, right? And like as socialists, we're interested in this. We're interested in the ways that these things kind of like, you know, form the actual political terrain that we're on, land, dispossession, cultivation, um, the political economy of food, you know, like there's all of these kinds of areas we can go into. But when we're talking about the garden historically, we also have to acknowledge the wild or the waste, uncultivated land. I just side note, I did used to teach a course in college uh called Law and Waste, because I was teaching in an interdisciplinary law department. And waste has this meaning in the law that means like to destroy land that doesn't belong to you. And you can be, you know, charged with a civil violation if you do that. Um, but it also has a meaning that means like kind of not cultivated. Basically, the wild is called the waste in a lot of sort of early modern texts and even all the way up until like the 19th, 20th century. Even before capitalism, gardens and farms have been expressions or extensions of private property for some or the commons for others. And John Locke, uh, who was an early modern thinker, his version of Manifest Destiny in his writings was an argument or kind of like a sustained argument for turning North America into Devonshire, which is an area of England. What he meant by that was having a bunch of productive private farms, because private ownership, in his view, results in a more productive and virtuous use of land than gathering food in the waste. And there was a lot of sort of racialization of that, right? Like where it was like the natives here just gather acorns. And that is sufficient, but not enough to actually like make the land productive. Of course, enclosures in England, if you're any sort of level of socialist, you may recall sort of the basics of capitalism, how it came out that the industrialization of England was the product of a lot of enclosures acts or the closing off of common land where people would go and maybe till, but also like gather things, gather food, fish, like, you know, kind of take advantage of the land. That was well underway when John Locke was writing and systematically turning common waste into private property to cultivate or build on for profit, and then turning out landless people to find habitation or sustenance elsewhere, or they would have to starve. So basically how people were introduced into capitalism by the millions was through dispossession often to turn those places into productive, useful spaces, whether it was building on top of them or whether it was turning them into big farms. So that's kind of a lot to sort of maybe base this on. But I'm wondering where you're gonna go with a socialist approach to gardening. Like if we're thinking about this in terms of the ugly history of colonization or the the sort of like turning land into farms was often a process of dispossession. What do you think? Like, I mean, are we kind of thinking through this in a third way or synthesis kind of way? Or like is there like a philosophy that you draw are are more drawn to than any other?

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Yeah, I mean, indigenous practices are definitely one that I look towards. Uh, you know, if we're talking historically, uh gardens is something of a load loaded term. When we think of gardens, you usually would think about an ornamental garden where you have all these fun, colorful, maybe tropical plants that are existing in a space together, but very neatly and orderly, or maybe you're thinking of more the cottage core type garden where you have uh all these edibles and medicinal plants. Um, but all of those are embedded into political ideologies. These aren't just innocent images from history and the current day. You know, when we think about class society, uh what a garden is depends on where your class sits in society. So if we're talking royalty, if you were royal and you had these gardens, you weren't using these gardens to produce food for yourself or for the peasantry. That was a display of wealth. You were showing that I had access to these arable lands. And instead of putting things there that would feed people, I have so much of it, I will simply put grass. And then that legacy lives on today in you know, the little kingdom of private property that we have in the US, with having a you know small plot of land uh in front or in back of your house in modern-day suburbia is kind of like your little kingdom. Like you have this land that could be used for other things, but generally it's just putting grass down. So it's kind of like a little bit of a display of wealth for the quote unquote middle class these days. But again, gardening is also in colonization, um, this conception that the gardens have to be productive, um, that we have to import non-native plants, that it must be orderly and structured to be productive and effective, uh, is a colonial kind of mindset in the approach to gardening. It's much more efficient and effective to follow more indigenous practices of building things like food forests that are things that you are observing in an active ecosystem, you're acting as a steward of it. So rather than controlling and exploiting, you are looking at the patterns that already exist through observation, taking notes on that, applying some minor changes, some introduction of different plants or other things that might affect the way that the ecosystem is working, but you are enhancing an existing ecosystem. You are you're learning about what is already native and indigenous to the land that you're on and enhancing it so that it better serves already the functions that it does, but also potentially providing food and medicinal herbs to the people who are living there, uh, which is totally against the conception that the Europeans had that they were importing. Uh I mean, even our red regular worms are technically invasive here uh in the States. And most people don't know how to do that. Are worms worms? Yes. Um they're not the most of the worms that existed in the the northeast of the US had actually died with the ice age. Uh, and so our forests had become adapted to not having uh that aeration in the soil. Uh so worms that were brought over with the Europeans as part of their gardening practices uh is actually starting to change over time uh the environment, not as quite as dramatically as some other invasives that we have. Uh, it's not the kind of urgency that we have with other living things, and it's so uh endemic now, I doubt that they're going to be taken out. But it is one of those interesting things working in a system of ecology that normally we don't think of. They're good for the garden, um, but less so for forest floors that are less used to having those, those like, you know, tunnels that they create, which again, very good for garden plants, not so much for the Northeastern woods.

SPEAKER_03 15:28

Oh, that's so interesting. Um, I had no idea. And I'm wondering about this too, because it seems like you're kind of in favor of a more indigenous, well, you said indigenous, but then a kind of more like restoration approach to fight back against maybe the suburbanization or like this sort of, you know, uh, everybody has their own patch of grass, which of course there's huge impacts of that because to keep grass looking good, you also have to use a ton of fertilizer, which is bad for the water supply, as well as a ton of water that could be used to drink, um, to actually, you know, like maybe have a more productive or uh a more uh common use than just watering somebody's patch of grass. I'm I'm curious about this. And as somebody who's not really a gardener, but I intend to try all the time. Um, I'm just, you know, haven't really focused on it myself, but I'm just curious about them. Is there anything really that bad about planting something that doesn't come from here, especially if it's just flowers or vegetables or whatever? Because I'm also wondering about the sort of creative or like the the aesthetic aspects of this and what that might inspire in people that is a more gentle way of life. What you're kind of describing also sounds like it's like maybe there there is a sort of strictness to it that is like if you're not doing it this way, then you're you're doing it badly. Whereas I think gardening maybe is like it's a hobby for some. Obviously, it's a huge industry and and kind of a a way also for people to enhance their properties, right? Like to enhance their private property, make it more valuable because they have all of these decorative plants. But there's also this question, maybe, maybe this is a weird way of putting it, but this sort of migration of like different plants into different places, different animals into different places. From your perspective, do you think that this is like actively destructive? Or do you think that there's like openings for that? I'm I'm not even saying this on behalf of myself, but to the extent that maybe for our listeners, like it's like, can you actually be a good gardener, a good socialist gardener, and still, you know, have the occasional shrub that didn't originate in the United States?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah, yeah, that's totally fine. It's more about just, you know, how are you fitting this into the broader picture, right? So I I have houseplants that if I put them outside, they're not going to make it because they they can't exist in this environment. I have more of a cultivated environment indoors for them. But if you have something like a kind of mint that's not native, that spreads like wildfire. Uh, and that will be very hard to remove. But you could still grow mint. I still grow mint. Um, that's something that I enjoy having fresh from the garden. I just make sure that where I plant it, I'm making sure that it has no ability to spread beyond the bounds that I've set for it. Uh, so you can totally have non-natives. Uh, another thing to consider though is depending on what you're growing, um, there are other environmental impacts that it could have. Uh, it might not be healthy for other critters that are in the ecosystem who might be visiting your garden. Uh, they might carry some of those things out with them or might have compounds in it that aren't necessarily healthy for them to consume because I have plenty of grazers that come through and like to nibble at all the things that I have. So I try not to have anything too dangerous for them as well, because I want to be bolstering the environment here or working with it, not against it. Um, so you could totally have things that are like that, but you just want to make sure that you're being very mindful of it. And and that also goes into kind of like the socialist aspect where, you know, it's not this very uh strict has to be done this way thing. It's more about developing and and cultivating the skill of observation. You know, you're looking at the different systems that are at play, the different forces that are dependent on each other. And everything that you do in the garden space is playing on those systems. So you might not realize it, um, but it has a pretty big impact. So, for example, um, we have hummingbirds that come back every single year. So I always have things that support them. So I have a little thing for them to drink out of, I have places for them to sit and rest in the shade. Uh, and they fly around me. Like I have a feeling like they've they've come to know me long enough um that they keep coming back every year. And you're so lucky.

SPEAKER_03 19:38

Oh my God, that's so exciting.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Yeah, it's it's very squeaky. But those are migratory birds, right? So they fly down to Mexico. And so now I'm potentially affecting an environment that is way out from where I'm currently living and cultivating, but what I do here can affect a bird population somewhere totally else. And I might not see that or see the effects of it, but I also have to be mindful of what I'm doing in the garden to make sure that I'm keeping it a safe and healthy and productive environment for the ecology that's there.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

Oh, wow. So instead of the butterfly effect, you have the hummingbird effect where you're just like, my garden is affecting all of my all of Mexico potentially. Um, maybe that's a little bit far reaching, but I I think what I'm hearing you say is that on a practical level, balance is key. You shouldn't also think of this as some kind of like, if I if I'm if I mess this one little thing up, then I'm you know gonna destroy everything. But rather just do things intentionally and like also think about things in terms of if you really want something, how are you doing it in the in a way that's the least destructive, if there is a potential for destructive, or like, yeah, just being intentional, I think maybe is the is is the key here. And I think this is why I think gardening maybe is thought of as like you have to have all this leisure time because of how much thought has to go into like a really nice garden. Whereas, you know, just sort of casting seeds here and there is just kind of a little bit more of a, you know, whimsical thing. I'm not really, like I said, an expert, but I'm kind of wondering about like if there is a sort of like socialist structure to a garden, or like, you know, you you already mentioned native, you know, plants and like sort of indigenous practices, but you also mentioned like I like to have some some things around. Describe like maybe what your favorite plants are, like what kinds of things do you like to have like together? Um, is there anything that you've invented or like something or you know, that you've thought like, oh, like here's a little experiment that's like turned out well. Like, share, share some of that with us.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah. So one of the things that I do in gardening is it's primarily container gardening, uh, which does make it a lot easier to prevent things from escaping the garden because everything is in more or less its own container, uh, which lets me control. Things a lot more than if I was in an open field, for example. One of the things that I've been doing year over year is developing better systems that require less input from me. So, yes, this idea that you have to have a lot of time for a garden is commonplace because usually the kinds of gardening practices I see people using or just tends to be like the industry standard out there is based off of kind of exploitative capitalist practices. It's this, you know, you have to constantly fertilize. Uh, it's not about like how do you build a healthy soil system? So, like one thing that I've been doing is I inoculate my soil. So I make sure that it has a healthy microbiome. So I might not see everything that's happening in there other than the hyphae, the little fungal strands in there that are mycorrhizal. So those are helping with nutrient extraction for the root system because they grow through the root. It's also called socialism of the soil. Uh, it's one of the terms of the colour. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 22:51

There's a real socialism of the soil then.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

Yeah, so as we typically think of uh nature in this kind of like competitive capitalist sense where everything's out to get each other, you got a survival of the fittest. You do also have systems out there that are more mutualistic, and among those are mycorrhizal fungi. So I do support that um as much as possible so that it's less work for me. Um, you know, they're eating dead material, creating more nutrients, again, more of the water retentiveness. Uh, then there's the structure to the garden itself. So, like one thing I'm looking to deploy more this year is creating uh something of a barrier to pests because it does become I'm kind of nestled in in the woods here. It becomes an extension of the woods. All the things that are out in the woods kind of end up in the garden more or less because to them it's free from or you know, it's you know, it's it's just something that they can they can also take advantage of if they can. But so I try to build out like relationships. I know that there's going to be pests, and I try to do things as organically as possible. I'm also on a mountainside, a hillside. So, you know, I I pick berries, uh I forage berries in the area that grow here, but it's fed by water that comes from up on the mountain. So I just as I'm being careful about what I'm potentially releasing into the stream that goes down the mountain, I'm also hoping that my neighbors, it's more of the communal aspect, are also being responsible about what's going into the water upstream because I'm eating that in the berries. Uh, that's that's what feeds the berries every year when I pick them in July. Um, but yeah, so I'm hoping to do more of a flower border that might be a mix of natives and non-natives, but it will help to keep either pests away or it will attract them, but off of the things that I don't want them eating. Uh, and then not every pest is also something that's you know terrible either. I have these little tortoise beetles that absolutely love to eat all of my solidum. So that's eggplants and tomatoes, particularly. So I'll just move them from one plant to the other because one of them handles it a little bit better. Uh, and then they seem to be fine. So I'm I'm not trying to actively fight an infestation. It's more how do I coexist with this? Since this is going to be a thing every year, more or less a problem. Um, and so instead of treating it as something that I have to completely eliminate, because that would require a great deal of effort and time on my part, and also potentially be harmful to the ecosystem, I'm recognizing that it's a natural part of it and I'm building structures around it so that I can get what I need out of the garden and so can everything else.

SPEAKER_03 25:09

I think that's really cool. And I would love to learn more about that. Maybe I can ask you for some tips for my own, like, you know, kind of foray, because I would like to set up something uh this year that's container-y, you know, like I'm trying not to overshoot it because I I fear disappointing myself. But um, I'd love to hear some tips on that because this idea of coexistence, I guess, or you said you know, sort of like mutualism, it's bringing that into a gardening setting. Like there's a sense in which it's like, well, it's not just that you have like a new agey or like a like a sort of floaty idea of like everything deserves to live. Maybe you do personally, but it's also a time-saving mechanism, which I think is actually a really important part of a socialist view because, you know, we spend a lot of time doing socialist things, you know, like we're in DSA and everything. But the fact that our time is precious is actually like a key part of what it means to fight capitalism. We spend so much of our time doing things that we're forced to do under the system, right? And we're we're also encouraged to buy things that we don't need in order to spend the time doing something that might even feel eventually like a chore, right? I mean, you happen to really love gardening, but I know that when I was a kid, my mom gave me the dandelion hook and was like, go outside and dig dandelions. And I hated it. I hated it, I hated it. For what, right? Like I was like, I like dandelions. I don't see why we need to pull them up, you know, but my mom hated them. Um and so it was a job to do. And we had an implement that was like, you know, here's the thing. It's a little side note, but it's what you're saying about the fact that this is also about not just saving the beetle or, you know, what have you. It's about creating a system that allows you to have more time and also probably in some ways allows you to enjoy things a little bit more, right? Um, rather than it being like, oh God, here come, here comes this thing that I don't want to see again. How am I gonna fight it today? Right. Instead, it's like, nope, it's it can kind of you can kind of divert it rather than totally get rid of it, fight it or have or whatever. And I'm I'm also just thinking about like the expense that people go to in order to fill up their garages or their basements or whatever with like gardening stuff. I'm sure you probably have a lot of gardening stuff because you're trying to be a gardener, right? And you have like a kind of professional interest in it as well. But, you know, we would have broken lawnmowers like everywhere, you know, like when I was well, maybe not everywhere. That's an exaggeration, but it just seems like something that is like uh an American, very capitalist view, or maybe just sort of like ignorance, you know, not intentional, and ignorance that the most important thing is making sure that the grass is short, right? Um, to make sure that the private property looks, looks right, rather than what if we just like let it grow, but like decided to kind of try to train it in a certain way, um, rather than you know, having to fight it every every week or however long. I do have to say though, I think my dad just enjoyed mowing the lawn. He was very, you know, sort of typical that way. But I want to hear your view on that, like, you know, maybe go a little deeper, but I also want to talk to you about like maybe the distinction or the nuances between like a socialist garden and like a non-socialist garden. Um, but what do you think about like the sort of wreckage of the lawnmowers scenario?

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of uh exploitative practices, consumerist uh ideas that kind of pervade this space. Um, you know, what's the the hot new plant? Or if I just buy this tool, maybe my life will be easier. But it's not really so much about just buying this one thing or having so many things. I mean, most of what I do is I try to recycle as much as possible. So I'll I'll use food grade buckets instead of going out and buying things that you know might potentially not be healthy for the plants or for me or might cost more to do. I use the same dirt and I just refresh it every year. I'll try to add some more compost into it so it can naturally disintegrate into the dirt, um, make more humus for it to eat. And so, yeah, I mean, also a lot of the labor problems that exist in agriculture are also present in this because people are more, you know, concerned with just buying this fun thing that they want to have in the garden or in their house. But, you know, there's uh uh companies in Florida that are also, you know, not just doing agricultural things, but they're growing houseplants. And they have workers dying of heat stroke while the company uh petitions against or lobbies the government uh against passing in a bill that would protect them from the heat stress at their job. So much as that, you know, even extends into the more, you know, less agricultural to feed you and more just for the houseplant industry. But anyway, so you're talking about like these um the garden pools, you don't really need that much. You know, I I do have things like fertilizers, I do have things like small tools, the hand tools to do things with. I'm working at a scale that I don't really need to have any large tools. Um, but these are more, in my view, like corrective measures than they are something I have to do as constant maintenance. Uh, so if I have a really bad pest infestation, using something like an organic pesticide can help to reduce the population enough that things are more in dynamic equilibrium. But I'm not approaching this like I have to spend all this money and do this all the time so that I can have perfect results. Uh again, it's about that balance. It's about trying to figure out what things are actually needed and what things are just kind of like being promoted as the next new thing and isn't necessarily helping me achieve results. Um, and you know, you're talking also about the socialist versus non-socialist. Well, one thing, we're not utopian socialists here. We're we're more the scientific socialist flavor. And that's an important distinction uh because gardens will not save us. Uh no amount of having home gardens will stop climate change. So from an eco-u-socialist policy standpoint, that's a non-starter. But it's still important to do. And I would argue this because it's about your orientation, uh, your relationship with nature and your community. This is an opportunity through gardening for you to reconceive what it means to be a person in a community, where your food comes from, you know, kind of de-alienating yourself from the process that creates the food that you consume and doing it in a way that you're building community, which we don't have very much of these days. I mean, beyond the church, most people don't have an opportunity to meet with people locally and build ties. And this is one of those things that you can do as a communal action. Um, that you see yourself as part of nature, not just taking advantage of it. You see yourself as part of a community. You're you're doing the scientific planning and study to better understand this relationship and expound on it. Uh, and it stands in direct contradiction. So you were kind of talking about um like the John Locke kind of view of, you know, bringing, what was it, Derbyshire? Uh Devonshire. Devonshire, bringing Devonshire uh to the States. Well, at the same time, the the Nazis uh had something of an ecological view, but theirs was in this Volk ideology of making it Germanic. It was not about supporting the local ecology, it was about putting plants in non-native areas to make German folk more comfortable, to expand what they felt was the right ecology, right? Um, totally dissuading uh any use of natural ecology that already existed there and making use of that. So from the socialist standpoint, you know, one, we're we're not trying to, you know, form an autarchical relationship with nature where if we all just had gardens, we'll all just have enough food. Uh, you know, in order to have enough productivity in our crops to feed everybody, we'll need more industrial measures. But that can still be done in a way that acknowledges and makes use of indigenous practices that puts us into more of a relationship with nature rather than exploiting the soil, emptying it of its nutrients, constantly having to add mind fertilizers into that. So I think it's important because it's it's how we reshape ourselves. And I think that's that's this the socialist part, not just that this has a lot of analogs to building campaigns where you have to kind of identify your power players, know where to put people, your energy, your time, resources. All of these are applicable skills, but it's also about who you are politically and also existing within a communal setting. Um, how you conceive of yourself, you know, it's kind of like, you know, it's not socialism window iPhone, right? It's more this idea of we shouldn't wait for some revolution to become the kind of people and the kind of society we want to see. There's things we can do now here that accomplish that.

SPEAKER_03 33:52

Thanks for that. I think um what you just said about us being more scientific socialists rather than maybe utopians or maybe hippies. I don't know if you know, I personally have a lot of uh sympathy for the maybe hippie aesthetic, but that is also maybe because I'm I'm from Alaska. And so that's kind of what you get. My inclination is to think about this through the lens, and you brought up the Nazis, which of course had like a territorial kind of scenario going, right? Where it was like we're trying to spread Germany all over Europe and maybe the globe. So what we want to do is export that. So the idea of the blood and soil was also about kind of a natalism that was very tied into a kind of you know conquest of the land as well as the people, kind of transforming everything in a fascist way in order to allow a particular type of person to proliferate. Currently, and maybe more concretely, we have the so-called Maha movement, the make America Healthy Again, and this anti-feminist trad wiffery trend that's maybe not even a trend. Maybe it's, you know, something that's actually a movement, a social movement that really does also valorize this sort of home gardening or farming, getting things from the soil, the healthy, healthy soil, right? There's a lot of contradictions there. And I want to, you know, sort of maybe talk about that or a lot of hypocrisies maybe. But when we're talking about like the socialist view as opposed to this, there's actually like maybe not as much daylight in like the concrete practices, unless you want to tell us about them. But from a sort of broad like schema view, like if we're looking at it from way above, a lot of these people are falling into this stuff in a well-intentioned way. They're falling into a politics of fascism or nationalism accidentally as they're being pipelined through this. And this is maybe the topic for another, another podcast, but the ways in which people get maybe channeled through um these various kinds of home practices or these um habits for them don't start political and then they become political as they um kind of gather a community around them. So I'm I'm curious to hear what you you have to say about that, um, kind of maybe both sides, which is what is the difference? And then also what are the the kinds of like conjunctures or things that people should like look out for, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

I definitely think it's interesting how I I've been politically active long enough, or at least invested in in observing these things, to to notice that you know in the last like 10 years, we went through a shift where these were kind of liberal-coded things, and now suddenly it's not completely transitioned to being a right-wing coded kind of concept of the homestead of of uh you know having a cottage to whatever.

SPEAKER_03 36:40

You know, this kind of like homemade notion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Right. Yeah. So I I found that transition interesting. I feel like that's in some sense a reflection of how well capitalism is able to co-opt things, uh, to turn things that were once something completely else into something in service of capitalism. Um, because it is still built around this consumer mindset, but it's also this unattainable one. A lot of people who have gone off to try and live this lifestyle, even in an apolitical sense, have not found success in doing it because it is a lot of work. And solely living off the land takes a lot more than people realize. That's certainly not something I would be able to do. Uh, and again, this is not done in a communal setting. This is I idealized as the family unit, right? Which is maybe part of this pipeline into the political sphere, right? Uh, where from the socialist perspective, um, we don't necessarily like turn the family unit into something that has to be this exact structure of the man, the woman, the child. But in the right wing kind of perspective, uh, this is a way to reinforce that, right? And and these health trends that we, you know, you have these crunchy granola moms that were on Instagram who were again, maybe not super political and maybe more just oriented around the aesthetics of it. Um, it has become for them and and their followers a pathway to the right wing uh where they don't even realize they're on this pipeline. The algorithms are just driving it because people are inoculated with this idea. And then it further pushes more content that's now, you know, for example, you have a neo-Nazi community in northern Idaho that is kind of trying this uh homesteader lifestyle, but exclusively for whites, right? And so, like there is some manifestation of this where it's not just online, but it's actually formed in real life as a result of it. Uh and, you know, the kinds of ideology that I don't know how to suffuse or or change this pipeline, but I also think that gardens are not a neutral space. Um, that when we talk about the idea of cultivation, uh, it is something that gets infused with politics, but it itself is not. So I could give the example of slave gardens. You know, today we talk about cottage core and you know, living off the land and you know, kind of taming the wilds. But if we're looking at slave gardens, that was a point of resistance. That was an opportunity, uh, an option for them with what little time and resources they had to still provide for themselves. They get additional nutrient nutritional intake and at times also uh sell some of the crops for some funds to have. Uh, but that was a point of resistance. That was a way for the enslaved to support themselves. Um, this is also true for some union organizing in the South where it was able to supplement, um, not being able to eat during strikes and so on. Again, not enough to like totally carry everybody through a strike or totally feed all of the enslaved people. Uh, but it is also a way for people to maintain community, do it in a way where you have this philosophy of everybody eats. It's not just for some, it's for all. And it's again cultivating um this relationship with yourself, with nature and the people around you. And so the socialist approach is definitely differentiated from who's included in the garden? Who is the garden for? You know, what do we consider when we're building the garden? Is the intention to be uh purely a political expression? Is it something that's supposed to be an individualist expression? Or does it represent something bigger that we're part of a larger system that we see ourselves as part of that system? And then how are we making decisions that incorporate ours further into that system where we're in that mutually beneficial relationship, where we can learn from each other? Uh, we can learn, you know, I think nature is one of our greatest teachers. We just have to learn how to listen, how to speak its language, right? But for most of the practices that have been done historically and presently in agriculture and even the houseplant industry, it's not so much interested in making those observations so much as it is more of the conservative Protestant ethos of the garden was made for us. So we'll take care of exploiting it rather than take care of it.

SPEAKER_03 40:28

Yeah, I I think that's really interesting because what you were just sort of saying about the pipeline, often like maybe the sort of internet mom's pipeline or like the keep your kids healthy pipeline. And then this idealization really of this particular form of homesteading ownership exclusion, right? Or a kind of rehash or or reenactment of Manifest Destiny in settler colonialism, right? Where it's like you can go out and find your piece of land and that's yours, and then you can pass it along generation after generation after generation. This is what Locke was talking about when he was talking about property, this idea that binding it, making it your own is somehow a way to praise God, really, or like, you know, um be uh a real person rather than a so-called savage, um, what he called Native people, um, who were just, you know, he saw it as just subsistence, even though there was all of the skill that went into actually going out and cultivating land, but not being invasive about it, right? So I want to hear more actually about this idea of community that you're saying. Cause I think that community, yet another thing that is often liberal-coded, um, but often also tends to fall apart politically in a lot of ways, because there's this sense of the community is the most important thing. Well, what's a community really? Like I live in the the densest city in America, over 50,000 people, um, and it's a very tight-knit community. I actually do happen to have a space to garden and stuff. I probably am not using it well enough. I definitely am not. But the sensibility about like what it means to be part of a community and how that has to do with growth or has to do with sharing, and maybe how it has to do with politics, because one of the things you mentioned was about unions or like this idea of like the strike garden, maybe, um, where it's like this is a way for people to be able to eat when there's nothing to eat. But then also, what about other places? The Soviets, for example. Like, I mean, we talked a little bit before, and you'd mentioned this, uh, was part of it. But what does it mean to actually do this politically and create community around a politics of growth and gardening that isn't just about, I don't know, what you mentioned happening in northern Idaho, which is we're trying to be independent. I think there's a lot of libertarianism here that's like essentially like the unholy matrimony of libertarian, sort of like glorifying private property over all else and a kind of like nativism or you know, white supremacist nationalism. So speak to that, speak to what this means to do something that's communitarian, um, that's also like political and intentional, and strike the balance between that and just letting nature do its thing.

SPEAKER_00 43:28

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like the the way that people are attracted to the garden today is more in a nihilistic sense, where it's like, well, the world's burning, so I'll make my own little space of greenery. Uh, and I and I get the sense, right? I feel that myself sometimes. I totally sympathize with where that comes from. Um, but that retreat into the self, into the you know, your small plot is not going to save you because capitalism is everywhere and its effects are global, including climate change. So it will come for you someday. And so it's not just a matter of trying to escape. It but also kind of instead of coping, recognizing the reality that it will take all of us in some sense and building those ties now while we have the opportunity to develop those skills and develop those bonds. You know, we've we've tried doing locally um some community garden things. We don't have any like long-term sustainable things going on where we built a good community around it, but we are doing it again this year with a container gardening skillshare that I'm currently working on organizing with someone in the chapter. So I'm looking forward to doing that. Um, but these are opportunities to meet with other people and do it in a way that's not always explicitly political. Uh, that people might not go to this kind of Skillshare thing, thinking like this is a political event and I'm going because I am a socialist or want to be. But it is an opportunity for people to um discuss things that maybe they don't have the other opportunities to do. So maybe it happens to come up that there's some campaign that can be built out of, not even related to gardening, but people find out we are experiencing the same kind of issues, maybe with our landlord or something. And then that becomes uh, you know, the grounds for something to be built off of. You're creating opportunities for people to interact with each other in ways that they typically don't. Uh, you're not gonna really have that conversation with someone at the grocery store, but you might in the garden potentially, right? And also this sense of community, you know, I've been talking about how you kind of remake yourself when you're cultivating a garden, um, that you're kind of getting in touch with a different way of conceiving of yourself. It's not easy to build community. It definitely isn't. Just like our honestly, it isn't always easy to garden. I as much as I've been doing this for a few years now, I'm by no means an expert. And I think also having the humility to recognize that is an important thing. Um, I think that that makes people shy away from it. I think encouraging people uh who want to participate in this, who maybe haven't done it before or have done it, haven't been successful, treating it as like an even playing field, right? Like this is not a space just for professionals or experts. This is just for people who are interested, who want to meet other people, engage, again, develop those ties, develop those skills. Um, and that's true of political education too. I think that people shy away from it because they don't feel they know enough, but whatever you know is the starting place. Then you just start there and you grow from that.

SPEAKER_03 46:08

This actually segues nicely into the sense of like how gardening kind of leeches, you know, like out into like sort of other things. And the Skillshare sound really interesting because the political education aspect of this is also because you mentioned people might not want to read something because they feel like they don't already know enough. And it's like, well, that's why we're all here kind of trying to read it. And maybe something about it being a collective endeavor, even if you are there toiling away on whatever plot that you actually manage to find yourself on, there's a certain amount of like understanding that everybody's kind of in the same space and supportive of each other. Community gardens are a thing too. Like, I mean, that more and more people of our ilk, I guess, like kind of get into. But I've found that in the places where I've lived, they are already notoriously difficult to like kind of get into. You have to like know somebody or whatever. Um, and they're not, you know, they're they're really like this little tiny plot, and then people are able to kind of get their own little patch. But I think what you're saying is that there's a sort of sense in which like gardening is a platform for other things or can be a platform for other things, other ways of connecting and getting together. It can be a social activity, obviously, even if it is um, you know, kind of people have uneven skill sets or like are always like sort of learning from each other or like maybe fail too. So yeah, anything else you'd like to to sort of follow up on before we we wrap up here?

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Yeah. So you had mentioned the the Soviet model, and I want to revisit that, um, the Soviet doctrine. So that's that's something interesting that I was reading about. It's this little cottage with a little plot of land where people who are living in the urban center were able to kind of get out and experience nature a little bit more directly. Um, that was actually, I believe, I read that it was previously uh plots of land that the Tsar would give out as, and that's I believe what the word means. Um it's like to give because it was just kind of given out as like, you know, to other people that were that in the czar's circle or were favored by the czar. But it became more of a thing where you would maybe have your grandparents live there, you go out and visit there in the summertime, and it would be a break from the monotony of city life. Um, but it gave an opportunity for people who were living in kind of like you were saying, this dense urban area to experience the garden and working in a space like that and the greenery and getting in touch with nature in a way that they didn't really have accessible to them in the urban centers that they were in. It also helped to supplement with any food shortages, gave them the ability to develop new skills that they wouldn't have been able to do in the city. And I don't know that that model really exists anywhere else, but I definitely think going into the future as our urban areas continue to grow, uh, you know, one thing we have to keep in mind is things like COVID became more likely because bats are carriers of COVID. And as we expand into their territory, there's more interaction between humans and bats. And so there could be potentially another COVID cross that happens between species because we are continuously encroaching in their territory. So having more dense urban areas isn't necessarily a bad thing while we're also reserving areas to protect nature and experience nature, much in the same way how the Soviets also created some of the world's first national parks. But they weren't so much meant for visitors to go and see, so much as in the scientific aspect of we want to preserve nature for what it provides and then learn from that. And then so, like that different orientation towards nature, while that might have not been maintained in the same way or equally throughout the whole Soviet period, does actually show us a kind of different way of existing. And I think there's something valuable that we can learn from that. That even if we're not able to exactly replicate that system, and maybe there's no sense in doing that because we want to apply, you know, our theories to our local conditions and not just model what other uh socialist systems have done. There's still something there that I think provides valuable insight into the different ways that we can relate to nature and exist with each other, coexisting. And uh, I just want to jump in one more thing. The container gardening, I think, is an interesting thing because again, being in an urban area, you don't have access to the land. So let's say you don't have this little pot of land that you can go off to. If you have a balcony, even a window, or if you want to set up a tent inside, you know, there's there's multiple ways that you can still engage in these practices. You could do seed exchanges with your neighbors, uh, you can share the fruits of what you develop, what you're growing. Um, these are all things that you can still do without having much or any land at all. And so it does require a little bit more creativity, but it is still engaging people in ways that they might not only have the confidence to do, they might not realize that that's available to them. And so it is opening up this terrain for new ways of interacting, for new ways of developing politics, of getting into politics. And maybe it's part of the deprogramming from this crunchy granola to alt-right pipeline, offering a kind of alternative where people are able to really get down and dirty, but not in a way that brings them into an antisocial kind of politics where there's exclusion. Um, but it's more of like these are my neighbors that I don't really maybe know too well, but we could still grow a ton of things within the space that we do have with whatever limited resources and knowledge we have. Um, and so it's kind of bringing back some of those older practices while reinventing them for the current age, trying to figure out what works, what doesn't. Um, but it's also uh it's it's fun. It's it's it's a way for people to break from the monotony. I know you were talking about how it's more of a chore or was more of a chore for you. Um, so I always try to encourage people to think about how they can make this something that's a growth opportunity for them and the people around them. Like how how in the practice of doing these things do you see yourself growing into the person that you want to be? Like I want to have a better relationship with my neighbors. Well, maybe this is something I can talk to them about. We can build something, even if it's a rooftop garden, because some places have the ability to do that. It doesn't matter how big the plot is, it's just the ability and the action of doing it is creating relationships. And I think that's really important.

SPEAKER_03 52:10

Thanks for that. I I think there's so much more to say. And one of the things I'm I'm thinking here is um in the way that you're talking about the sort of sharing, um, even if you're making something in whatever place you have and like giving it to somebody else, that's making those connections. And that connection that you make with the neighbor might also develop into some other thing that you can organize around later, um, if it if it so happens. If we're thinking about it in like the sort of like the unintentional aspects of gardening, where if you're just open to it, if you're not valorizing private property or like thinking of it as a status symbol, or even thinking of it as like, this is mine and I have to save it, because I'm also connecting up the sort of survivalist, like we're gonna store everything. And so then when the apocalypse comes, then then we'll have our own little place and we'll we'll survive. This is also about just sharing what you have and making it such that people feel potentially that they could return the favor or that there's like a bigger circle that you can kind of be part of. I do think that, you know, the sort of nuances between like what's prefigurative politics and pretending like we live in socialism already, versus a kind of open socialist attitude towards the world that we're in is a fine, it's a fine one. But I think that what we've talked about today kind of like expresses the latter, right? Where it's not like you're fooled into thinking that this is gonna save you or that somehow this is gonna keep you from suffering the same ways that everyone does under capitalism. That's a class issue, right? That's something that has to do with our our economy. But the gardening aspect, the thing that you're sort of teaching us to think about and enjoy is more about like, yeah, like self-cultivation in a way, which is not anathema to socialism, right? And it's also like if you decide not to do that, that's fine too. You don't have to be a gardener. It's not, it's not virtuous in the in the strict sense to be doing this. It's just something that maybe people don't think about because they don't think they have the right stuff for it, the right land or the time or or what have you. But I think that if you're curious about it, you're just saying, why don't you try it?

SPEAKER_00 54:23

Yeah, and one thing that I think about too with this is you're developing agency because when you exist in this capitalist world, you're you're not really thinking so much about how you are an actor in it, so much as the world happens to you, right? So this is an opportunity for you to do something where you see the fruits of your labor. And then you can tell yourself, like, I did that in a way that's not just the personal achievement, but more like I am someone who can make a difference, even if it's small, even if it's only this little plot of land or in a container, it is building people's confidence in a way that I feel like is often a hurdle for them getting involved in socialist politics. You know, because socialist politics means you're making demands, you're out in the street, you're organizing campaigns, but you have to kind of step out of the bounds of yourself to do that. And I think to be an effective gardener is also to do that. So it compels you to do those things because you have to take risks, you have to be experimental. And then even one more reference to the Soviets um Zygotsky's uh ZPD, the zone of proximal development, is an important aspect too, because nobody can learn all this stuff pretty much on their own. You might discover some things on your own, but there's a large base of knowledge that exists in a community of people who are doing these things. And it's it all the knowledge that people have. You could still become an expert in a very particular thing because that's something you're interested in. And maybe, for example, it's something I want to do is hybridization. You might not have a lot of room where you're gardening. You know, I have a limited space, but I'm hoping to make novel cultivars out of heirloom seeds that I have and hopefully produce things that are more productive, things that are hardier that can withstand more adverse environmental conditions. And so while I might not have fed a bunch of people with the things that I'm making, the genetics that I've created in this new seed batch could go on to be something that's now feeding a lot more people in a larger agricultural setting. So what I've done in a small space, you know, just like I was talking about with the hummingbirds, now can have a large effect somewhere else that maybe wasn't my initial intention or or even what I set out to do once I did figure out how to do these things. Uh, but these effects scale, you know, like the things that you do today are building for whatever tomorrow you want to see. And I think that's part of the socialist politics of this, that you're developing your agency, you're recognizing that you are an actual actor in the world, that the world doesn't just happen to you. You can go out and change it. You can develop the confidence to do that. You're doing it in a community of people who are also interested in doing that and developing themselves. And that nobody's above anyone else. Just as everything in the garden works in its own ecosystem, you're developing an ecosystem of people. And from that can become the basis of building a stronger movement.

SPEAKER_03 57:01

Well, thank you, Evan. And thank you to our production crew, Emma, Michael, and Tim, who put this all together. CLASS is a podcast of DSA's National Political Education Committee, or NPEC, which works to expand the knowledge of DSA members and non-members in the service of winning the struggle for socialism and democracy. You can find out more about NPEC by searching for us online or following us on social media, but the best way to find out about what our committee is up to is by signing up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter. And if you aren't already, you can become a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. Okay, until next time, solidarity.