Gangsta Gardening—Can You Dig It, Mr. Trump? By Shane Ralston, Ph.D.* Op-Ed Keywords:  inner cities; urban renewal; agriculture; activism; environmentalism; incarceration Summary: In urban communities around the country (and the world), more and more people are becoming self-sufficient and healthier by growing their own food in personal and community gardens. Urban gardening addresses the inner-city problems that President Donald Trump promised to solve in his campaign but has neglected during his presidency. Urban gardening tackles issues of poverty, underemployment, lack of education and violence in a more socially inclusive, racially sensitive and environmentally sustainable manner than Trump could have ever imagined.  FB Summary: Urban gardening addresses the inner-city problems that President Donald Trump promised to solve in his campaign but has entirely neglected during his presidency. Urban gardening tackles issues of poverty, underemployment, lack of education and violence in a more socially inclusive, racially sensitive and environmentally sustainable manner than Trump could have ever imagined.  In the 2016 presidential debates, Donald Trump declared (http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/politics/donald-trump-african-americans-election-2016/index.html),   “Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever. You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.” As president, Trump’s campaign promise to revitalize inner-city communities remains unfulfilled. We might have a better solution: urban gardening   (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_agriculture). Urban gardening addresses the inner-city problem that President Donald Trump said he would solve in his campaign but has never followed through with during his presidency. Urban gardening addresses the problem in a more socially inclusive, racially sensitive and environmentally sustainable manner than Trump could have ever imagined.  Gardening in the Urban Environment In urban communities around the country (and the world), more and more people are becoming self-sufficient and healthier by growing their own food in personal and community gardens. The activity can improve the lives of urban dwellers without the need for large-scale development or gentrification projects.   In my book Pragmatic Environmentalism (http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=1966), I noted the importance of urban gardening for enriching the city-dweller’s everyday experience of nature:   [BLOCKQUOTE] Underappreciated nature in urban areas—including the roadside verge, abandoned city lot, and unused space beneath a bridge or overpass—become more relevant to discussions of environmental value, whether for humans or unto itself. Since these neglected natural/urban spaces increase in value when reclaimed or beautified (through the application of human labor), they factor more strongly into our everyday experience than wilderness. [/BLOCKQUOTE] As mixed nature/culture spaces, urban gardens have the potential to drastically improve community life. They also reintroduce nature into the lives of young  people who might suffer from what Richard Louv called, in his book Last Child in the Woods (http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/), “nature deficit disorder.” Gardening Activism Urban gardening can also be a political act. On February 15, 2000, environmental and urban gardening activists engaged in a campaign to save a New York City community garden, El Jardin de la Esperanza (or The Garden of Hope), which then-Mayor Rudolf Giuliani was threatening to bulldoze in order to sell the land to housing developers. In the essay “Elegy for a Garden” (http://www.terrain.org/essays/13/light.htm), Environmental ethicist Andrew Light relates this story of gardening-activism-in-action:   BLOCKQUOTE] Esperanza, in its final stages, was a site to behold. Environmentalists, especially the group “More Gardens!,” along with community activists, had constructed a giant coqui over the front entrance of the garden six months before, looking out over the front wall of the garden and protecting it from bulldozers. The coqui is a thumb-sized frog important in Puerto Rican mythology as the symbolic defender of the forest—in one story its loud croak scares off a demon threatening to destroy a rain forest. In this guise it became both a symbol for community pride and a focal point for environmentalist and pro-garden organizers in the city. [/BLOCKQUOTE] Invoking the mythopoetic narrative of the protective coqui, the activists fought to protect Esperanza—literally, the garden by that name and, figuratively, the hope of many New Yorkers to build stronger local communities through urban gardening. Although El Jardin de la Esperanza was eventually bulldozed, the episode continues to inspire community gardening activists in their ongoing struggle with developers. Can You Dig It? The documentary Can You Dig This (http://canyoudigthisfilm.com/) reveals how gardening took hold in the rough-and-tumble world of South Los Angeles’s inner city neighborhoods. The documentary maker and narrator, Delila Vallot (http://www.indiewire.com/2015/06/laff-2015-women-directors-meet-delila-vallot-can-you-dig-this-203459/), opens the film with shots of downtown Los Angeles. She relates her story of growing up in Hollywood, the better part of L.A. County, while visiting her father in the violent streets of South L.A. The central figure of the film is Ron Finley (http://ronfinley.com/), the renowned gangsta gardener of South L.A. He started a movement to cultivate vegetables in the side lots, parkways and backyards where only brown grass and weeds usually grow. Finley admits to being a reluctant activist. He began growing vegetables to hide the marijuana he cultivated in the same plots. Finley gained his notoriety when he challenged the City of Los Angeles (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-wasson/learning-los-angeles-ron-_b_6043370.html), fighting an ordinance that banned the growing of vegetables in the city parkways. With the help of Steve Lopez, a journalist at the New York Times, he petitioned the city to change the law. They won. In the film, prison life and garden life are treated as antipodes. Many of the gardeners in South L.A. are former inmates. Finley explains how having a living plant in prison becomes a source of pride and hope for a convict. When the incarcerated finally leave prison, they often start a garden in order to get on the “straight and narrow,” avoiding the mistakes that originally landed them in prison. Growing food in urban gardens beautifies the concrete jungle and eradicates so-called  food deserts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) or urban areas which lack grocery stores and fresh produce but have an abundance of convenience stores. Access to healthy food options disappears in a food desert. One gangsta gardener corrects the experts: “Some people call these places food deserts. I call them food prisons.” Eating more vegetables removes the dietary causes of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Urban gardening also offers economic and entrepreneurial opportunities to the residents of predominantly poor African American inner-city communities. Many gardeners sell the produce they grow at local vegetable stands. After most of her harvest is sold, one young girl in the film exclaims, “I made me some money!” Urban, Guerrilla and Gangsta Gardening Gangsta gardening is a form of urban gardening activism. It is sometimes called guerrilla gardening (http://guerrillagardening.org/). It’s subversive, even revolutionary. Some might object that gardening is anything but radical. Urban agriculture borders on the mundane. However, planting a rooftop garden or organizing a communal garden is anything but ordinary. They can leverage educational opportunities, economic development and community building in the face of neoliberal projects to gentrify, segregate and destroy communities through private development. In these ways, urban gardening constitutes radical political action. For Ron Finley, gangsta gardening is guerrilla gardening and more. In Can You Dig This, he declares, “It’s our culture and we have to change it. Giving life is gangsta. Growing your own food is like making your own money. You a gangsta with a shovel.” So, can Mr. Trump dig it? ###   *Shane Ralston, Ph.D., is Teaching Faculty and Academic Advisor at Jude Milhon College, Woolf University. He is the author of John Dewey’s Great Debates—Reconstructed   (http://www.infoagepub.com/products/John-Deweys-Great-Debates-Reconstructed) and Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco- Justice (http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=1966), as well as the editor of Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations: Essays for a Bold New World (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739168257).