In East Oakland’s Fruitvale District, the Coalition for Healthy Communities and Environmental Justice joined with PUEBLO, the Center for Environmental Health, and Greenaction, and triumphed in 2001 after a four-year battle to shut down the Integrated Environmental Systems medical waste incinerator which had been polluting since the early 1980s . While the movement against these industries was sometimes fractious due to disagreements over potential job loss, the coalitions were ultimately strong Unlike the Black Panther Party’s Food Program, nothing about the EJ movement spoke directly to the issue of food access. What the EJ movement did provide, however, was training in the trenches for a generation of activists. It mobilized community members to act; victories cultivated a sense of empowerment and reclaimed a political voice that had been silenced by decades of flatlands devaluation, while failures underscored the importance of ongoing resistance. The EJ movement also drew attention to the flatlands and to the injustices that have produced them as a social and ecological space. Importantly, the movement fostered and galvanized alliances between policy and research intermediaries and community-based organizations and neighborhood residents. Alliances such as these would be central to the success of the urban agriculture and food justice movement that was slowly beginning to coalesce in the flatlands at the same time. A pivotal moment connecting EJ to what would become the food justice movement occurred around the same time and involved a theoretical shift in the way that struggles over race, poverty, and environment were framed.
A new “spatial justice” framework helped to highlight the interrelations between racial and economic segregation, built environment, square black flower bucket and access to entitlements such as healthy food, clean air and water, and open space. This new theoretical framing was forged in large part through the efforts of Carl Anthony and Karl Linn. By the early 1990s Anthony had become a prominent voice in the Bay Area EJ movement. Like other EJ activists, he attempted to shift the attention of the mainstream environmental movement towards urban areas, and fought to overcome what he termed the “apartheid of consciousness”—the belief that social and environmental issues were somehow distinct—keeping inner-city people of color and white suburban environmentalists from joining forces to tackle environmental issues. Studying architecture at Columbia University in the 1960s while working as a civil rights activist on the side, Anthony began to think about the relationships between social justice and the built environment. He later became involved in the “community design” and “advocacy planning” movements, both of which emphasized moving the process of urban planning and design out of the hands of technocrats and into those of lowincome communities . In the late 1980s, Carl Anthony reconnected with Karl Linn, a landscape architect who had led a long and productive life as a farmer, psychologist, landscape architect, and educator on three continent. The two were old friends, having met in North Philadelphia in the early 1960s when Linn was teaching landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Through his “community design-and-build service education program” Linn and his students worked with community members in ramshackle neighborhoods and vacant lots throughout the city. He was later instrumental in the community gardening movement of the 1970s and was a founding member of the American Community Gardening Association . Anthony credits Linn with giving him “some sense that you could actually put together a social agenda and an environmental design agenda” . When Linn moved to Berkeley in 1986 upon his retirement, the two joined forces to expand awareness within the white environmental world of the issues of social, racial, and economic justice that were at the forefront of concern for people of color.
The underlying structural conditions of the flatlands—the demarcated devaluation I described in the previous chapter—proved fertile ground in which a productive synthesis of the theories and activism of the two men could take root. Until this point, environmental groups, many of them located in the Bay Area, focused primarily on struggles to conserve wilderness areas at all costs, often conflating subsistence resource use by indigenous peoples with large-scale capitalist resource extraction. Linn urged Anthony to connect with David Brower and other white environmentalists, some of whom were supporting social justice struggles in the Global South. On Linn’s urging Anthony joined the board of Brower’s Earth Island Institute, provided that that he “could create a program that would really address the environmental issues from the perspective of social justice” . In a 2003 oral history, Anthony remembers, “What we found was that every environmental issue was also a social justice issue. As we began to get into it, we could see the connections … We had to have more of a sense that these issues have to be together” . In 1989 Urban Habitat was born. Most of the justice-oriented urban agriculture efforts cropping up at the time were concentrated in flatlands of southwest Berkeley just across the city limits from Oakland. The majority of these projects pushed the boundaries of conventional community gardening by emphasizing youth employment and food security. These efforts, which predominantly employed young African Americans, helped to increase the involvement of people of color in urban agriculture. Shyaam Shabaka, a PCGN member and co-founder of EBUG, and Melody Ermachild Chavis, a white neighborhood activist, founded Strong Roots in 1994. Shabaka had spent time working on a horticulture project in Mali and hoped to reconnect African Americans with “the lost agricultural heritage that’s rightfully ours” . The Strong Roots motto was “Gardening for Survival” and employed fourteen youth at six gardens throughout Berkeley, including at a vacant lot at the corner of Sacramento Ave. and Woolsey St. that was home to drug deals and drive-by shootings. Funding came in part from the federal Summer Youth Employment and Training Program before it was axed by the 1995 budget under Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America. Other funding came from a federal substance abuse prevention program . A host of similar programs cropped up at the same time, focusing on youth employment and training.
Berkeley Youth Alternatives Director Niculia Williams and UC Berkeley Landscape Architecture student Laura Lawson started the BYA Garden Patch as an alternative to the fast food breakfasts that most of the children attending BYA’s programs were eating. In 1994 the garden was established with the labor of community members, AmeriCorps and East Bay Conservation Corps volunteers, and UC Berkeley students. Through the ‘90s it grew to include community garden plots and a Youth Market Garden that provides youth with employment and on-the-job training and the organization with revenue. By 1998 the Youth Market Garden had earned more than $10,000 in sales. Cut flower sales added to revenue, as did a twenty-five member sliding scale CSA . In 1993, the same year as the BYA Garden Patch was planned, Spiral Gardens was created “by a handful of individuals dedicated to urban greening, innovative organic farming methods, food security, and environmental justice issues” on Sacramento Avenue in South Berkeley, across the street from the Strong Roots garden . A project of the Agape Foundation for Nonviolent Social Change, the organization grew vegetables, herbs, and native plants for sale, in addition to offering community gardening plots and horticulture workshops. One of the founders, Daniel Miller, also ran the Urban Gardening Institute, a garden based job training and microenterprise program for people enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program and transitioning from homelessness. The program was run through Building Opportunities through Self-Sufficiency at several homeless shelters, residential hotels, and community gardens. The two programs merged in 1997 and in 2004 became a 501 nonprofit called the Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project . Berkeley’s justice-oriented urban agriculture activists also gained inspiration and material support from a growing national movement that brought together anti-hunger, square black flower bucket wholesale sustainable agriculture, farm labor, environmental, and health and nutrition activists . In the summer of 1994, the Community Food Security Coalition formed and drafted their equity-based vision for integration into the Farm Bill. While most of their recommendations failed under a Republican-controlled Congress, the 1996 Farm Bill included a provision to provide annual funding for projects that would “meet the needs of low-income people, increase the self-reliance of communities in providing for their own needs; and promote comprehensive responses to local food, farm, and nutrition issues” . These Community Food Project Grants would play a role in the East Bay over the next decade, some destined for school gardens, others to developing local community food security gardens. Alliances with CFSC activists also helped to galvanize the fledgling justice oriented urban agriculture movement by linking activists in the East Bay to a larger national network that shared ideas, information, and other resources through newsletters, conferences, working papers, small grants, and email list-serves, once again opening up new spaces of engagement to defend spaces of dependence, first in Berkeley’s flatlands and later in Oakland. Berkeley essentially served as a hub of urban agriculture innovation, attracting activists and organizations that were, in turn, able to marshal public and private funding necessary to sustain the equity-oriented urban agriculture activity.
Indeed, the food security and youth employment projects in South Berkeley were mere blocks from the boundary of North Oakland. Many of the young activists involved in urban agriculture at the time actually lived in Oakland where rent was cheaper. One former activist working in one of the South Berkeley gardens blames changes in rent control in Berkeley for his move to West Oakland in the mid ‘90s; in 1995 the passage of a state law, AB 1164, allowed landlords in Berkeley to raise rents when units became vacant and many young activists were simply priced out of Berkeley.By the early 1990s several school gardens had sprouted up. A few of these were in Oakland, but like the community gardens, the nexus of school gardening activity in the Bay Area was in Berkeley. Ground was broken at Willard Middle and LeConte and Malcolm X Elementary Schools. These new gardens were by no means the first in Berkeley’s history. A 1918 history of Berkeley’s public schools dedicates a short chapter to the school gardens that were used to “provid[e] vital contact with the facts and forces of nature” and “to teach children order, industry, respect for labor, and thrift, besides a love and sympathy for the wonderful and beautiful” . 82 While the emphasis three-quarters of a century later was perhaps less about industry, labor, and thrift, fostering a love for nature was surely still on the agenda. Perhaps new to the garden-based curriculum was an emphasis on nutrition. In March 1997, another CUESA conference helped to galvanize the importance of urban gardens in the East Bay as well as draw national attention—and funding—to the area’s fledgling school garden initiatives. Like the previous conference that helped bring an emphasis on social justice into the urban agriculture discourse, this event helped to emphasize the linkages between urban agriculture and nutrition. Held at MLK Middle School, “A Garden in Every School: Cultivating a Sense of Season and Place” was intended to cultivate a vision of fresh and nutritious food for all school children, and brought school system officials, teachers, planners, and gardeners under the same roof. CUESA Director Sibella Kraus recalls, “The thinking was that a high end farmers market in San Francisco is making a difference to some people, but not to others…. We thought we’d maybe get thirty people or fifty, but we got 900 people! It completely sold out. People were just really ready for it to happen” . The event coincided with the establishment of the Edible Schoolyard at the school. Founded by Chez Panisse’s owner Alice Waters, the Edible Schoolyard incorporates garden- and cooking-based education, connecting fresh food to healthy lunches. The program has been widely lauded and replicated nationally, and has become a model for revamping the school food system. The parents of school children were also central to the expansion of school gardens, and urban agriculture more broadly. Beebo Turman, a pre-school teacher, parent, and backyard gardener met with Alice Waters and “six or eight other parents” at a Parent-Teacher Association meeting at King Middle School in 1993 and began organizing, writing grants, and fundraising to get the Edible Schoolyard up and running.