Community Gardens in Detroit - A Lesson in Hope

A few weeks ago I was up in Racquette Lake, NY, teaching a course on the Environmental Issues of the Adirondacks as part of the Empire State College's Adirondack Residency. The theme for the residency was Food and the Environment. I was delighted to hear the first night's guest speaker, Phil Ackerman-Leist, Associate Professor at Green Mountain College in Vermont, speak about local food and sustainable agriculture. Phil recently published a book, titled Up Tunket Road, about his family's experience living off grid for 12 years, making a go of it growing their own food, etc.

What I found most interesting about his talk was the part in his presentation on the City of Detroit's vast network of community gardens (~1200) which cropped up in neighborhoods around the City after the last major supermarket pulled out of the city back in the early 1990s.

If you were paying attention to the news this summer, you may have heard about the fires which tore through parts of the city. I remember thinking how horrible & unfortunate, especially for a community which I know has been struggling for many years.

However, in terms of community and economic resiliency, Detroit may be in a good place of hope. According to Phil Ackerman, the community gardens started up in response to the lack of basic fresh foods in the community. About ten years ago, the last major grocery chain left the City - it was no longer economically viable nor was it "safe". That left residents with the only choice to buy groceries within the city limits at small convenience stores, which we know have higher prices and are extremely limited in the quality and quantity of fresh produce they carry.

So, drawing upon an older generation's knowledge of gardening within the African-American community, community gardens started to thrive. Phil said he recently visited the community and some of the gardens - after the fires this summer, and according to people he met they were mostly spared. That's good news.

Over the past few years I've heard and read about Detroit in snippets, 'an abundance of vacant buildings', 'outrageous unemployment rate', 'sky rocketing crime rate'. Learning about this network of community gardens and checking out their websites online, I'm left with hope. Hope that if we come together as communities, in neighborhood pockets and groups, we will find a way to create resiliency in this fast-changing world.

To think that Detroit has already started to create some resiliency to a vastly changing economy reassures me that when the oil wells go dry, we in other parts of America will figure it out too. Hopefully we'll start planning ahead. That's why supporting your own community gardens (like here in Saratoga Springs), farmer's markets, and other groups focused on building local economic resilience and local food security, are crucial.

Ok, next step - building a hoop house to grow some winter greens. More on that after the weekend.