Guerrilla Gardening: Illicit Cultivation for Urban Empowerment

1. By: Lisa Morrison Guerrilla Gardening: Illicit Cultivation for Urban Empowerment

2. Purpose • Study and conclude if Guerrilla Gardening is a food justice, community empowerment or EJ movement. • Study community empowerment and food justice through an environmental justice lens. • Contribute to the literature on Environmental Justice and Food Justice.

3. Guerrilla Gardening-The cultivation of land that is not yours. Before After

4. Guerrilla Gardening

5. Guerrilla Gardening- Who is LA Guerrilla Gardening? • Passionate group of gardeners • Urban beautification activists • Community builders • They have their own language: digs, missions, aliases, • Fun!

6. Guerrilla Gardening- Seed Bombs Before after

7. Food Justice- What is it? • The right to have access to, produce, buy and sell fresh healthy food free of chemicals that was produced in a humane and sustainable way. • I suggest FJ is a growing movement • Search yielded little scholarly work • Search details:

8. Food Justice Literature Method • Method • Amazon search of: • ’food justice’ • ‘food movements’ • Yielded 139 and 264 respectively • Tallied first 60 publications by 1 year and 5 years increments

9. Food Justice-Publication Search

10. Food Justice- Emerging Movement?

11. Literature Review-What literature was used? • Scholarly texts and articles • Internet searches • These resources will be used to better understand Guerrilla Gardening in relation to: • Environmental Justice • Community empowerment • Food Justice

12. Environmental Justice • Approximately 16 principles • This study will focus on two: • Community based social movement building • Citizens right to have clean air, land, water, and food

13. Community Empowerment • Citizens being directly involved in the identification of social and environmental issues and the implementation of possible solutions. • An environmental incident is not a social and environmental problem or conflict until the community acknowledges it . • GG has pinpointed an issue of land abandonment and misuse.

14. Polluter Industrial Complex • Sectors of business supported by many groups that profit from the exploitation of the environment and weakened environmental regulation

15. Global Circle of Poison • Also known as the ‘boomerang effect’

16. Green Revolution • Introduced new “green” technology to the global South • Why? • Successful?

17. Climate Change • Carbon dioxide traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere • Creates warmer and wetter/dryer weather such as , drought, flooding, hurricanes with increased: • Frequency • Intensity • Duration • Which de-stabilizes food production and security.

18. Literature/Findings Critique • Texts did not include Food Justice or the Food Justice Movement. • Research is preliminary • Need additional research on both FJ and GG to further validate findings

19. Findings/Conclusion • LAGG- Community Empowerment Movement • LAGG- Urban Beautification Movement, Not Food Justice Movement • Food Justice as well as Guerrilla Gardening should be included in Environmental Justice discourse

20. Guerrilla Gardening

21. Guerrilla Gardening

22. Guerrilla Gardening- Thank you!