The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Watt Childress's picture

    Nashville's song for our country (land and nation)

    By Watt Childress on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 12:19pm |

    Last month I received a phone call from a friend in Nashville who I worked with when I lived there in 1991. His name is Sizwe Herring.

    Sizwe -- which means "land and nation" in Zulu --  is the visionary director of the George W. Carver Food Park. For two decades, the park has served as a community demonstration site for composting and gardening in Nashville’s inner-city neighborhoods. The park is located on state-managed public land adjacent to an interstate that runs through the city.

    A Nashville TV station recorded a great story on the park last spring. It is definitely worth watching, if you can open the link. I was especially moved by the gentle words of Mr. John W. Ewing, a 94-year-young volunteer at the park who credits that work with his longevity.

    It’s sobering to watch the same news channel’s story on the park this year. Several weeks before Earth Day, the new state administration ordered that structures at the park be destroyed based on complaints from some adjacent property owners. The act of brute force was a shock to Sizwe and his co-workers, who had been working to bring the site up to code and understood they had a timeline of several weeks.

    After twenty years of operation, Sizwe received a written notice from the state that all gardening-related buildings (including a greenhouse and toolbank) and compost material be immediately removed from the premises. A letter from Sizwe’s attorney requested two weeks extension of that government notice so that its impact on the garden’s operations could be fully understood. The subsequent destruction showed this attempt to communicate was either dismissed or ignored.

    Many people who read this post probably won’t have much interest in news about a community garden in Nashville. Yet for me, as someone involved at the garden's beginning, the issue offers a microcosm of what is happening in our country. We’ve become so quick to discount public endeavors at the urging of private interests. So quick to bulldoze public discourse under the heavy machinery of political partisanship and culture wars.

    God help us fertilize common ground with words. I was compelled to weigh in with a column, which was published in The Tennessean. Hopefully this post will provide some context for other observers.

    More information on George W. Carver Food Park can be found at earthmattersnetworks.com.

    Cross-posted at FireDogLake.com. 

     

    Comments

    Nice idea, sad the idiots felt a need to shut it down. If it had had a concessions stand they might have felt obliged to keep it open....


    by Desider on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 12:58pm

    What a kick in the teeth to all those gardeners!  Think of the food that won't be grown and shared.  And the spirits and well...community that will be broken.  Oddly, the garden I built (well, ressurrected, really) in the local town park was bulldozed to change the design of the park.  No notice to me, either.  I would have dug up the perennials and given them away or brought them home.  I never even asked what happened to all the moss rocks i had gotten in the mountains to face the aspen berm I'd built.  It was dislocating and really frustrating, but at leastt it was only flowers, not food.

    Will it survive without the greenhouse and sheds, Watt?

    We keep talking about one of the baby steps that will help lead us to some solutions for what we're now facing is community-building.  Hard to hear about community-dozing. 


    by we are stardust on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 5:50pm

    Goodness gracious. Your parallel experience with the local town park offers a very sad statement about the status of community. So sorry. Bless you for describing it here a little. Surely there are many in the town who remember your efforts, even if others didn't show respect for them.

    Carver Park was mostly educational, as I understand it, and the raised beds are still there. Tools and mulch are gone, and the jury is out on who is going to oversee the operations. But Sizwe is a remarkable man, and I hope there will be a place in Nashville to resurrect his efforts.

    "Community-dozing" is a very good expression. Thank you, master wordsmith.


    by Watt Childress on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 8:41pm

    We-e-e-llll; I'll say most people appreciated it, I think, though few knew I worked it.  There were plenty of times it was sabotaged.  I used to waster time trying to figure it out, which is goofy as all giddy-up, really.  Thought a few times of walking away from it, but I do have this stubborn streak, and never did know when to get in outta the rain.   ;o)

    Not to sound like a bigot, but I wish I had a Zulu friend.  And a Masai friend.


    by we are stardust on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 10:15pm

    Lame.


    by kgb999 on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 8:09pm

    We have a small garden plot in a nearby park.

    Flowers of all kinds are seriously tended to.

    People have a lot joy working with these plants.

    Some look 70-80 years of age.

    A Communal plot with vegetables and such would be better.

    You know pets keep people healthy. So do plants.

    the end


    by Richard Day on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 8:11pm

    Plants do indeed keep people healthy. I suspect few people understood the depth of that truth more than Dr. George Washington Carver.


    by Watt Childress on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 8:42pm

    This is a particularly damning statement on those politicians. The only rays of hope I see are (a) that there is blowback, and (b) that it results in the garden facilities being restored.


    by Verified Atheist on Wed, 05/11/2011 - 7:28am