“The shared garden is the archetypal form of democratic and ecological society”

Tribune. Opposite to “Plantation diet industrial agriculture, whose ecocidal and ethnocidal effects are known, there is the shared garden. The latter is universal. Home garden, community, worker, subsistence, mir Russian, Swiss crash, allotment garden English, educational, therapeutic, urban or rural garden, there are some on all scales. These gardens are neither individual nor collective, neither private, nor public. Our usual distinctions hardly apply there. However, as evidenced, for example, by gardening activism in Sao Paulo (Brazil) or, more formerly, in the West Indian “black gardens”, whose emancipatory function was important, they are nevertheless an invigorating image of democracy that is well understood.

Read the portrait: Article reserved for our subscribers Joëlle Zask, pioneer philosopher

What is it about ? In short, arable land which does not belong to anyone in particular but which depends, depending on the case, on the municipality, the State, more formerly of the kingdom or of God, is subdivided into equal plots of which each is conceded, rented, ceded, to an individual, sometimes to a family, which it cannot sell or divide. Unlike a collective garden (for example, the collective farm of which Charles Fourrier dreamed with its “radists”, “choutistes” or “carrottistes”, which the People’s Republic of China has created, causing the death of tens of millions of people, and that the Soviets called “collective farms”), each one organizes itself according to its traditions, its needs, its aesthetic sensibility. His obligation is to cultivate his plot properly. He can only occupy it if he takes care of it. But unlike the private vegetable garden, there are many things in common in the shared gardens: there is a charter or an agreement, land set aside, compost, a nursery, a collection of seeds, places for training and ‘reception, social spaces, etc.

The most “valid” citizen

With the shared garden, the oldest forms of democracy were born, those which derive from self-government, and of which the small independent town was the privileged site. Common or individual, self-government consists of “To govern oneself without a master”, according to Jefferson’s formula; to act independently of any external authority, to take an initiative and take responsibility for its consequences, to learn from and pass it on. The relations of domination, obedience or subjection are here irrelevant. The peasant, in whom the cultivator, who produces the food, and the gardener, who takes care of the land, do not seek to tear this or that from nature, to force the earth and the seeds, to suppress diversity, to calibrate and standardize. On the contrary, it sows biodiversity, it harmonizes plants by considering their complementarities and their respective benefits, it adjusts its activities to the climate, soil, geography, as well as to the culture it has inherited. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson sums it up [1803-1882], he transforms the landscape while being the pupil of nature, to which he knows he cannot command, that he listens to and respects.

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