Guerrilla as Peaceful Action
In Lethbridge, a group called Lethbridge Guerilla Gardeners has organized around Loralee Sand Edwards’ guerrilla gardening project last summer. I’ve been thinking a lot about her initiative this summer to include more of the community in the project. The response from people here has been really great– talk about taking over the boulevards, planting vegetables that anyone can harvest, uniting people who live near each other in a common goal. It’s direct-action. Such a short and straightforward path to both solving the problem of, and citing resistance to, the global food crisis, economic downturns, troubling multi-nationalism affecting local environmental ecosystems, and the effects of our dependence on oil.
So, I’ve done a bit more reading and have found two sites that I will be following more closely over the months to come as we begin our gardening season and Rod and I start to restructure our lives to be more closely in alignment with what we really want them to be.
The first is Heavy Petal, a Vancouver gardener. What a great name, and a fun read.
The second is called Elements in Time, another Pacific Northwest blog about a couple who moved from LA in search of a more sustainable lifestyle. I had a lightbulb moment with her post here, about Redefining Normal. The spark was not necessarily with the things on the list she gave, which I’m pretty comfortable with, but with the idea of redefining normal, and looking carefully at personal behaviours that perhaps may have been justified in the past. It’s about making adjustments to the norm in a personal and holistic and non-violent way. I’m pretty excited about the idea and am just waiting for the moment to hash it out with Rod.
