Courtesy of MIT
The 61st Annual Arthur L. Throckmorton Lecture took place on Monday, Feb. 17. The event was hosted by Lewis & Clark’s Department of History, who selected MIT’s Kate Brown as this year’s speaker. Her title, Professor in History of Science, offers a glimpse into her interdisciplinary field of study; the historical relationship between human beings and our environment.
Brown is an acclaimed environmental historian whose research interests traditionally focused on population politics, linguistic mapping, modern historiography and the health and environmental consequences of nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. However, she has recently pivoted to researching urban gardening communities, both historical and contemporary. She is currently authoring a manuscript entitled “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The History of the Self-Provisioning City.” It is this work and research focus that she brought to her lecture at LC.
Though the lecture was originally intended to be given in-person, Brown had to video call in from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts due to illness. In Miller 105, she was broadcast through Zoom onto a large screen in front of the audience.
Associate Professor of History and Department Chair Reiko Hillyer opened the lecture, thanking the department’s Administrative Coordinator Amy Baskin for her work in planning the event. Then, Professor of History Andrew Bernstein delivered an introduction to Brown and her work.
“I should say at the outset that Dr. Brown is the recipient of numerous honors, including the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. She’s also produced an enviable list of award-winning books,” Bernstein said.
Bernstein also spoke about her 2013 book “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” which he recently read with his 400-level seminar on environmental history. The book has earned myriad awards for its significance to political, Western, environmental and American historical studies, demonstrating the multifaceted nature of Brown’s work.
“She not only engages in multiple eras of history, but I should say also engages with several scientific disciplines to create histories that illustrate the complex interactions among humans and nonhumans alike,” Bernstein said. “She also, as a historian, of course, spends a lot of time in the archives, but she also shows the dogged determination of the investigative journalist in interviewing people to get beyond the official story of disasters like the nuclear accident of Chernobyl and reveal how they’re understood and experienced by those most immediately and tragically affected. Finally, her research crosses national boundaries to bring to light often unexpected connections between different parts of the world.”
After a round of applause, Brown began her presentation.
“So I normally, as you just heard, write about modernist wasteland and technological disasters. But for the past five years I’ve been interested in how plants, in their steady labor of photosynthesis, build infrastructure and nurture communities,” she said. “So, following my curiosity, I went into archives, as historians normally do, but I also started projects to plant urban food landscapes and I joined ongoing projects wherever I happened to be, and that was in Washington, D.C. and Mansfield, Ohio, and then I spent a year in Amsterdam.”
Brown’s research sprouted an interest in gardeners and the infrastructure that they have built throughout history and today.
“As I worked, I learned that gardeners had many qualities of the plants and microbes with which they worked closely — they combined, they shared, they exchanged. They came together in mutual aid societies. They formed cooperatives, they wasted nothing, recycling energy and nutrients to build soils and create animal landscapes and technical infrastructure,” Brown said.
Brown explained how European colonization damaged agriculture globally by pushing the use of cash crops and fertilizers, ultimately leading to soil degradation and famine. This history is relatively well-documented and evidenced.
“So that’s the story we know, but here is the one we don’t know. At the turn of the 19th century in Paris, 5,000 urban farmers grew fruits and vegetables for the city. This produce fed not only two million Parisians, but the surplus was shipped to London. Now, these Parisian farmers were not remnants of a past agriculture tradition. Instead, they used new technologies, adapted to the emerging megapolis and you can see some of their technologies,” Brown said, referring to her slides on screen.
Brown showed photos of some of these technologies. One example were fruit walls, 300 kilometers of south-facing walls that stored solar heat, creating a microclimate that allowed the farmers to produce fruit earlier in the year than those in the Mediterranean could, sustaining the local market.
In another example, the Parisians used horse manure to create hotbeds, heated by the manure’s decomposition and covered in glass frames. Much like a modern greenhouse, this allowed the farmers to grow spring crops in the winter and summer crops in the spring. Their soil was so rich, in fact, that they sold much more food than farmers outside of Paris whose soil had degraded in quality from excessive tillage and industrial crop farming.
Brown cited Russian geographer and revolutionary Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin’s work in writing about Paris’s urban farming community.
“Kropotkin was an interesting guy. He saw these French market gardens as a way to close what Karl Marx, at the end of his life, called ‘the metabolic rift” that was nutrients being harvested from fields, being brought to cities, and, you know, the excess of it, the refuse from it was just being thrown away as waste, not returned to the fields in which they came. And this rift in the metabolic cycle was causing both big piles of garbage in cities, but also exhausted earth down in the countryside,” Brown said.
She then connected this thinking to Kropotnik’s theories of mutual aid societies.
“Kropotnik also said, you know, ‘Karl Marx had it wrong. It’s not overpopulation, but the paucity of life that distinguished Eurasia.’ And he reasons that humans and non-humans had many pragmatic reasons not to kill each other, as Darwin highlighted, but to cooperate in mutual aid to benefit everyone’s survival,” Brown said.
Brown discussed other examples of urban farming that built substantial infrastructure. She spoke of factory workers who moved from 19th-century Berlin — a city plagued with disease — and into wild gardens outside the city. These individuals collectively built thriving farms and what Brown calls “radically-egalitarian garden subsistence settlements” using soil technology and polycrop gardens.
“From 1870 to 1970, over 150,000 Berliners found shelter and sustenance in a spreading girdle of garden columns surrounding the city. By self-provisioning, they supplemented hunger, wages and weathered emergencies, war and depressions. In many ways, they made industrialism possible with their garden labor, but they also created what Murray Bookchin would call ‘an ecology of freedom in which people consciously moved in and out of self-provisioning and wage labor to meet their needs,” she said. “This flexibility brought some independence from landlords, factory bosses and authoritarian leaders. In other words, working-class gardeners stepped outside of the narrative we tell of capitalist development and competition and emerging consumer societies. They consciously sought something different: community, mutual aid, security, companionship, music and festivals, fairness and equity.”
Brown then spoke of Washington, D.C. in the early 20th century. The territory used racial covenants to push Black residents out of central neighborhoods and into areas deprived of sanitation and infrastructure. She said that many Black residents moved to newly incorporated parts of D.C. east of the Anacostia River. There, people built small farms around their homes, fostering pigs, chickens, fruit trees, kitchen gardens and berry bushes.
“The 1940 Agricultural Census for D.C. records over 1,000 hogs and tens of thousands of chickens, even though city ordinances banned both animals. Animals were a part of cooperative arrangements. In spring, churches handed out piglets, who fed on garbage throughout the year. In the fall, the parish held a picnic and slaughtered the hogs, giving out the meat. With no garbage pickup or sewer system, animals and microbes recycled waste into food — meat and eggs — and fertilizer, which made for very productive gardens,” Brown said.
She said that similar urban farming patterns occurred in Black and immigrant communities throughout the United States, including in Detroit and Gary, Indiana.
The final example that Brown drew from was the Soviet Union.
“One reason for the collapse in the Soviet Union was this chronic problem of not being able to feed citizens. Now, here is the story we know less about. As food security weakened in 1933 just after they collectivized farms and there was a great famine, Soviets won the right from the state to garden. Stalin, then Brezhnev and later Gorbachev gave away state land to citizens and encouraged them to grow their own food,” she said. “By the late 1980s, a full third of Soviet agricultural produce came from small plots on public land. 48 million Soviet households had a garden plot. There were more people in garden associations than in the communist party.”
She said that family gardens became integral to the Soviet agricultural economy.
“By 1996, families grew 91% of Russia’s potatoes, a staple in the country, and that is a staggering fact given that the gardeners occupied 1.5% of the country’s arable land.”
She then discussed the magnitude of what these cases of urban gardeners achieved.
“They introduced local, diverse food, on marginal land with short market chains and few post-harvest losses, and in production cycles that resulted in affordable, fresh and nutritious food. They did not expend fossil fuels in plowing, harvesting, packaging and shipping. They recycled local nutrients which disrupted the metabolic rift that polluted locally and impoverished soils and fueled exploitation elsewhere,” Brown said. “They accomplished these feats without complex bureaucracies. They organized themselves. These urban gardeners came together to rebuild commons, asserting their rights not through abstractions, such as liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness — who can eat that? — but through common law rights to food, fuel and shelter, which they had lost after the great enclosures of the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Brown questioned why these stories continue to be underrecognized, before explaining how these little-known narratives do not fit within traditional, ideologically-driven narratives.
“Why do we know only the bare bones of these stories?” Brown asked the audience. “Putting garden-variety plants into the frame shows that the effort to de-aggregate urban or rural spaces is part of a larger process of dispossession of the control of labor and the meetings of racial and class distinctions.”
She returned to the example of the United States, where, after the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, communities across the country began implementing ordinances requiring homeowners to grow turf grass on their yards as a way to retaliate against the integration of neighborhoods.
“Plants appeared to be apolitical, and turf grass worked as a sentinel pointing to affluence and whiteness. The law codes were vague and rarely enforced, but we found that when enforced, people of color in white neighborhoods were most often charged with violations. And the violations can be severe, like $600 a day, a lien placed on your house. Quickly people have to leave those neighborhoods. And now lawns are not gardens, they are dead spaces ecologically. The loss of food and nutrients indeed would have an impact on health and wellbeing,” Brown said.
She said that the stories of self-provisioners are difficult to examine through a historical lens.
“Over time and across space, most self-provisioners were people who cannot count on regular wage labor. They were minorities, migrants, colonized, unemployed, women, elderly and children. Their activity is hard to track because their lives were of little interest,” Brown said.
Brown said that plants are the key to an equitable future.
“To recognize garden-variety plants would be also to focus on communities of self-sufficient flexible gardeners that are independent; violently misaligned with the perception of dangerous, dependent urban working classes, ruled by a generous and guiding welfare state. It would mean to view the corpulent spread of roads and concrete city plazas as a manifestation of a nervous relationship to plants, soil, and to working classes and people of color as they were configured of as weeds, blight and dirt. To recognize plants growing prodigiously in small spaces, using the copious microbial and menial resources that cities serve up, we begin to accept that the expansion into new territories, the plowing under of forest and grasslands to provision the nation is not an agricultural imperative,” she said.
Brown discussed some of the ways these lessons from history could be incorporated into a plan for the future, drawing from her work on her upcoming book.
“So I wrote this book ‘Tiny Gardens Everywhere’ to think about cities of the future. We have lots of common space still in our cities. Most of the space is devoted to moving and parking cars. One third of most American cities are dedicated to cars. We won’t need those spaces as we shift from big combustion engine cars to little electric people-movers,” she said. “And so thinking ahead, we could ask that our commons be transformed — not into high rises that developers put in, but instead street-side parking could become curbside gardens. That parking lots could be turned into allotments, that major arteries could become roving bands of edible forests, that rooftops could start photosynthesizing. Now that would be a little bit of change, and that would be something I will look forward to.”
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