People’s Park: Urban Oasis of Gardens and Open Community
People’s Park, a favorite spot in the concrete jungle, a place to rejuvenate, reflect, cultivate gardens of life-sustaining vegetables, connect with others sharing their treasures of clothes, food, thoughts, knowledge, music, and more.
Join the People's Park Community
Gardening: Vegetables, Fruit and Berries
Beautification: Flowers, Native and Ornamental Plants, Music and Art Events
Health: Relaxation, Social Gatherings, Sports, Free Box
Kids: Playground, Murals, Lawn, Gardens
Education: Gardening, Social Services, Sharing
Be the change you want to see in the Park. Meet your neighbors. Everybody get's a blister. Get involved in your community.
Join the discussion group or just read the postings: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/peoplesparkcommunity/
The Urban Wilds book is an introduction to urban gardening, and the community it builds, including a number of do-it-yourself articles on gardening, roof-top gardens, water use, and more.
Start with a guided meditation, paint the feelings, talk about the meanings.
After seeing the recent film End of Suburbia, one is simply spurred on to develop the local mechanisms of local sustainability. BASIL (Bay Area Seed Interchange Library), based at the Ecology Center is a great example of the kind of organization that needs to propagate to help people re-localize their food supply and other patterns of living. The depletion of oil and the subsequent changes of our lifestyle are the biggest challenges of our lifetime. What is of value once the incredible and unrenewable energy from fossil fuel is depleted? Everyone needs to eat and have shelter. Food supply lines are too long for a post-oil economy, so local small farming will rapidly grow to fill the needs of communities. Relocalization plays a big part in the internet and independent media, as it is the most dynamic and diverse medium for information exchange and evolution. The Festival of the Small will change the way we think about our living places, and cozyness will overcome the obsession with space. As we notice how containers seem to multiply the objects collected, we might consider decreasing the collection of containers. Empty the cup.
We might find ourselves in a hunter/gatherer mode for a while, recovering from the shock of our oil-fueled nipple of imported, packaged food taken from our mouths.
Where do we go next? Appreciate the magic of existence, strive for simplicity. The book, Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes and Cultural Diversity by Gary Paul Nabhan (available through Island Press), tells of our generally ignored and unknown connections to foods because of our evolutionary gastronomy, influenced by our history in preglobalized bio-regions.
Playing music in public spaces provides a wonderful way to access community, creating opportunities for dialog and free exchange of ideas. The model of one performer and a huge passive audience can never have the richness and sustainability of everyday public discourse, a neural net of a society, filtering and prioritizing the activities of the day, or a serious jazz jam session with a lot of meaningful ground to cover, the urgency of the current cause. What is the value system that drives us? Is it defined by the structure of our existence as determined by urban planning policies created before our current state of global awareness?