the growing value of gardens

8/14/2019 The Growing Value of Gardens

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WORLDWATCHWORLDWATCH

O R L D W A T C H

N S T I T U T EWIW 1776 Massachusetts Ave., NWWashington, DC 20036www.worldwatch.org

Cultivating the Butterfly Effectby Erik Assadourian

Working for a Sustainable Future

For more information about Worldwatch

Institute and its programs and publications, please

visit our website at www.worldwatch.org

Excerpted from the January/February 2003 WORLD WATCH magazine 2003 Worldwatch Institute


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WORLDWATCH January/February 200328

Monarchs, anise swal-lowtails, gulf fritillar-ies: these are just 3 ofthe 15 species of but-terflies that nowinhabit the 2nd StreetElementary SchoolGarden. Begun 10 years ago in a fewflowerboxes, thegarden has expanded to the size of two classrooms. Kids

who walk into it find themselves sharing space not only with butterflies, but with sunflowers, ladybugs, and

yellow-rumped warblers. The National Wildlife Fed-eration has even designated this little plot a certified

wilderness area.This would be a commendable achievement for any

garden, but its especially impressive for one that iscontained on all sides by freeways, and is located in aninner-city Los Angeles neighborhood that suffers froma severe degree of gang-violence. The garden hasbecome a refuge of green within the gray smog-filled

junction of Interstate 5, Interstate 10, and Route 60,with chirping birds now defying the rumble of down-shifting trucks that exit the I-5the freeway whose

retaining wall is shared by the school parking lot.

Like countlessother gardens aroundthe world, the 2ndStreet ElementarySchool Garden is hav-ing noticeable effectson its community.

While it cant quite neutralize the smog of the threemajor highways or the aggression of nearby gangs, ithas brought a new vitality to both the school and itsneighborhoodrestoring a piece of the local environ-

ment, fostering a sense of community, and providingthe school with fresh vegetables and a fresh approachto education.

Brandyn Scully, the teacher who started the gardenin 1992, says the project has become the studentsreason to learn, and is consistently voted their favoritepart of school. It helps me teach, she says. For exam-ple, it provides a creative way to discuss the intricaciesof math and science, as when the kids investigate thelifecycle offlies that grow in marigold seed pods. Forstudents who are just beginning to learn English, thatkind of hands-on setting also helps to reduce the dif-

ficulties of learning only in a classroom setting. It has

Cultivating

the Butterfly Effect

Gulffritillarycaterpillarvisitsthe2ndStreetElementarySchool

by Erik Assadourian

Chaos theorists suggest that the waving wings of even a single butterfly affect the weather around the world. All life affects

all life. And so, in a vastly larger way, does the growth of even the smallest home or neighborhood garden. The millions of

gardens growing around the globe are having a powerful cumulative effect on people, communities, and the environment.

Courtesy

Brandyn

Scully


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January/February 2003 WORLDWATCH 29

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fostered a newfoundrespect for the envi-ronment, as teachersand students becomepartners in restoring a

natural system that bal-ances the needs of theenvironmentlike milkweed for the monarchswiththe needs of humans.

The 2nd Street Elementary School is one of about3,000 California schools that have maintained gardens

with the encouragement, materials, and funding of astate Department of Education program, A Gardenin Every School. A primary mission of the program,

which began in 1995, is to provide an opportunity forchildren to learn about nutrition, healthy eating, andbasic food preparation. According to the programs

coordinator, Deborah Tamannaie, the program is work-ing. Instead of eating junk food, the children are eat-ing what they grow, she says.

One indication of the programs success comes froma recent study of 97 children, conducted by JenniferMorris and her colleagues at the University of Califor-nia at Davis. Morris found that the 48 children wholearned about nutrition and worked in a garden through-out the school year were significantly more willing totry new vegetables than were those of a control group,

who did not have gardens or nutrition education.Critics might question whether school systems that

are financially stretched can really afford gardens. Butin fact, these gardens address a rather urgent need. Inthe United States, with obesity having reached epi-demic proportions, the health of the school-age pop-ulation is at stake. About 13 percent of American kidsare overweight or obese, and only 1 percent meet thedaily U.S. Food Pyramid Guide recommendations forall five standard food groups. As they grow older, if theireating habits remain poor, their vulnerability to gettingfat is likely to rise dangerously. Already, a record 61 per-cent of the adult population is overweight or obese.

According to a 2001 report by the U.S. Surgeon Gen-

eral, this epidemic contributes to 300,000 deaths per

year just shy of the400,000 deaths asso-ciated with tobacco.

School gardens alsohelp to counter the

damage done by twoother notorious trends

in U.S. schools: cutting back on physical educationclasses, and signing sales contracts with soft-drink com-panies and fast-food restaurants. Gardening may not beas strenuous as soccer or tennis, but it gets the kids out-doors doing something physically active. And the pleas-ure of eating a sun-ripened tomato or fresh carrot mayoffer a refreshing alternative to processed potatoes,

which currently make up about a fifth of the vegeta-bles consumed by Americans.

Along with schools, other institutions are discov-

ering the benefits of gardens. The Metropolitan Remandand Reception Centre, a correctional facility built five

years ago in an industrial zone in Sydney, claims thehonor of being the largest maximum security prison in

Australia, and indeed in all of the southern hemisphere.Yet, in the middle of the forbidding concrete com-pound lies a virtual oasis, complete with a pond, pea-cocks, and even endangered green and gold bellfrogs.For both the staff and the prisoners, entering the gar-den offers an opportunity to forget that you are in a

jail, according to Patty Angre, who supervises theMRRC garden. And given that many prisoners have had

trouble with angry or violent behavior, theres anotherbenefit as well. Angre explains that the therapeutic actof gardening helps to calm the inmates. The gardenimproves peoples spirit, she says, it changes their

whole outlook on life.Angres observation has been corroborated by men-

tal health professionals. Over the past decade, psy-chologists have conducted ample research showing thathuman contact with natureeven with just a few treescorrelates with better mood, recovery from stress, andimproved concentration. In a recent study of 145 urbanpublic housing residents, Frances Kuo and William

Sullivan, co-directors of the Human-Environment

Guard andinmate gardenersinthe MetropolitanRemand and ReceptionCentre

CourtesyPattyAngre


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Research Laboratoryat the University of Illi-nois, even found thatthose with more accessto greenery were sig-

nificantly less likely touse aggressive tacticsor commit violence against their partners.

As a result, urban gardens are being established asspirit-lifting refuges not only for restless school childrenor prison inmates, but for the residents of hospitals,domestic abuse shelters, and nursing homes. In fact, gar-dening is taking root as one of the newest forms of men-tal-health treatments, with horticultural therapyorganizations being established in countries from theUnited Kingdom to Japan. According to Mitchell Hew-son, a horticultural therapist at the Homewood Health

Centre in Ontario and founder of the Canadian Hor-ticultural Therapy Association, horticultural therapyis having a profound effect, helping patients with ail-ments ranging from depression and addiction to post-traumatic stress disorder.

In a way, the mental health benefits of gardens arean added benefit. Their primary purpose, in most places,is to augment the local food supply. On a global scale,according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organi-zation, 840 million people are undernourished. Another1 to 2 billion suffer from a deficiency of necessary vita-mins and minerals. But gardens are helping to combat

these deficiencies. For example, in Dakar, Senegal, localharvestslargely consisting of small family gardenssupply more than 60 percent of the citys vegetables.In Havana, Cuba, over the past decade, gardens havebecome central in creating a secure and healthy foodsupply. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end-ing of Soviet-sponsored industrial agriculture, the U.S.embargo cut off Cubas access to petroleum and agri-cultural chemicals. The country had little choice but todevelop localized, small-scale, organic food produc-tionboth in farms and in home and community gar-dens. According to Catherine Murphy of the Institute

for Food and Development Policy, there are more than

26,000 popular gar-dens in Havana,spreading across 2,400hectares of land and

producing 25,000 tonsof food. In addition to

supplementing family food supplies and incomes, thesegardens provide food donations for local schools andday-care centers.

The contribution of gardens to food security is not just a boon to the developing world. In the UnitedStates, while saving individual families hundreds of dol-lars in food costs per year, gardens also supply food tolocal poverty assistance programs. In Huntsville,

Alabama, more than a thousand volunteers help togrow food at the CASA (Care Assurance System for

Aging and Homebound) community garden. In 2001,volunteers harvested and delivered almost 9 tons of veg-etables to elderly and homebound people in the sur-rounding area. The CASA garden is part of a nationalprogram, Plant a Row for the Hungry, which since1996 has mobilized community gardeners to donate aportion of each years harvest. So far, the program hassupplied over 800 tons of fresh produce to local assis-tance programs.

The potential, of course, is vastly greater than that.During World War II, 20 million community and homegardens across the United States provided more than

40 percent of the fresh vegetables consumed by civil-ians, so that farms could feed the troops. If gardeningcould be done on that scale again, local food securitycould be improved while freeing surpluses to assist inareas suffering from food shortages caused by politicalor environmental instability.

The kind of land-use shift required to grow gardenson that scale could have an ecological and health ben-efit far beyond that of providing fresher, more chemi-cal-free food. At present, the largest crop in theUnited States is lawns, which cover 10 million hectares.By one estimate, the average U.S. lawn (about one-

eighth of a hectare or one-third of an acre) absorbs up

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to 4.5 kilograms of pesticides, 9 kilograms of fertiliz-ers, and 773,000 liters of water annuallyalong withthe countless hours of labor and liters of gasoline con-sumed by mowing. Even converting just 1 percent ofthese lawns into organic gardens would reduce the

toxic pesticide exposure to families and wildlife by upto 3.4 million kilograms per year, while also helping toreduce reliance on energy-intensive commercial foodtransport. Along with reducing nutritional value andcreating vast amounts of packaging waste, shippingfood over long distancesby ship, truck, or planeleadsto increased production of carbon dioxide emissions.In the United Kingdom, agricultural products trav-eled an average of 125 kilometers in 1999, producing4 million tons of carbon dioxide in the process. Yet, 125kilometers is relatively short; in the United States, theaverage food product travels from 2,400 to 4,000 kilo-

meters, more than 20 times as far as in the U.K.Aware that the agribusiness food industry has become

hugely wasteful, the 45,000 residents of H je Taas-trup, a suburb of Copenhagen, are implementing aregional plan to become nearly self-sufficient in food pro-duction by 2005. By increasing the number and efficiencyof gardens and boosting purchases from local farms, thetown is reducing its dependence on imports from unsta-ble areas, on chemical-intensive farms, and on petroleum-driven transportation. In addition to growing vegetables,the plan entails increasing hen production, which ishelping to close the agricultural nutrient cycle. Instead

of importing chickens from industrial agriculture oper-ations, which are fed on imported corn meal and gen-erate overwhelming mountains of chicken waste, manyof the Hje Taastrup residents use food scraps to feedthe hens, then use the manure as fertilizer for their gar-densthus helping to close the nutrient cycle by pre-

venting usable food waste from entering landfills andmanure from entering the rivers.

Conceptually, that closing of the nutrient cyclepoints to a virtue of gardening that may be of partic-ular importance to planners who recognize that citieshave ecological relationships with their environments.

Gardens arent simply added to the landscape like inert

stone walls or benches; they participate dynamically inthe regions life processes. Just as they help absorb

waste carbon dioxide from human activity and convertit into needed oxygen, they also help to dispel wasteheat. Tokyo, like many large cities, suffers from a heat-

island effect, wherein the concentrations of asphalt,cars, and factories render the air several degrees hotterthan in the surrounding area, which in turn increasessmog, asthma, and heat stroke. Responding to thisenvironmental health problem, the Tokyo metropoli-tan government passed a law in 2001 that required newprivate buildings with rooftops larger than 1,000 squaremeters, or public facilities larger than 250 square meters,to cover at least 20 percent of their area with gardens.The Tokyo government recognized that gardens helpcool the city by utilizing solar energyboth in photo-synthesis and in evaporating water from the foliage

and soil. The plants, by absorbing rainwater, also helpto reduce runoff and pressure on municipal sewagetreatment. Plus, installing the gardens on rooftopshelps to more effectively maintain the internal tem-peratures of the buildings, thereby reducing both theenergy needs of buildings and the heat and pollutioncreated in generating that energy.

Urban gardens arent without their problems. Whilethey can improve the local environment, they do takemore time and effort to maintain than empty rooftopsor vacant lots. And in some areas, air, soil, and waterpollution can compromise the safety of the produce. In

southwest Poland and especially in Upper Silesia, a 200-plus year history of concentrated heavy industry, energyproduction, and mining has rendered the soil so toxicin some places that eating locally grown produce canbe a health threat. Yet, many residents depend on pub-lic gardening plots to supplement their food intake andto break the monotony of the densely built environment.In response to these health risks, Silesian environmen-tal organizations have helped gardeners to shift culti-

vation to flowers and other ornamental crops that canbe sold or traded for food from unpolluted areas, or tofoods that absorb toxins at a lower rate (e.g., legumes

and grains instead of green leafy plants). In any case, the


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ability of plants toabsorb toxins actuallyoffers another poten-tial benefit of gar-denstheir use in

helping to clean upcontaminated plotsaprocess known as phytoremediation. In Hartford, Con-necticut, Jack Hale, the executive director of the KnoxParks Foundation, started a garden in order to extractlead from the soil of an abandoned site where a paintstore once stood. With the help of local college students,he planted Indian Mustard, a plant which effectivelyabsorbs lead. After one harvest, the soil readings fell inmany areas to half of the 1,000 parts per million at whichthey started. While the project was discontinued afterone season, it demonstrates the efficacy of gardens in

environmental remediation projects.Finally, there is a benefit of urban gardens that is

too often overlooked by urban planners and govern-ment officials. People often congregate to work, relax,and enjoy communal spaces, and through these inter-actions build community. In a study of communitygardens in upstate New York, Donna Armstrong of theState University of New York at Albany found that in54 of 63 gardens surveyed, people worked to somedegree cooperativelysharing tools, work, or harvest.Having a garden often helped to foster pride in theneighborhood, evidence of which could be seen in

reduced littering rates and improved maintenance ofother properties in the neighborhood. Further, in one-third of the gardens, more expansive communityempowerment initiatives were generated by partici-pantsinitiatives that included the creation of a newpark and the establishment of a neighborhood crime-

watch program.Along with empowering communities, gardens can

also help to integrate themfacilitating interactionsbetween diverse populations. La Plaza Cultural, a gar-den founded in 1974 in New York Citys Lower EastSide, functions as a cultural center and performance

spaceholding regular performances that range from

King Lear to Sufidancing. At the sametime, it providesorganic produce tolocal food shelters and,

like the 2nd Street Ele-mentary School gar-

den, serves as a registered wildlife habitat.Gardens can be venues for community building and

empowerment, either by providing a communal space,cultural activities, orsometimesby providing a com-mon cause when the garden itself is threatened. Often,as gardens transform previously rubble-littered vacantlots into green havens, they attract not just butterfliesbut bulldozers, sent to convert the now pristine land intonew developments. In the United Kingdom, about one-third of the half-million allotment gardens that existed

in the mid-twentieth century have been destroyed.La Plaza Cultural is another of these threatened gar-

dens. For many years, a developer wanted to build asenior citizen housing complex on its city-owned lotin Manhattan. When public housing and open spacecome into conflict, the former is usually regarded as themore urgent of the twoand the garden is lost. In New

York, a city known for both its beautiful gardens as wellas its 18-year-long conflict between the city governmentand gardening community, these two constituenciesreached a major compromise this past autumn, result-ing in an agreement that preserves 391 of the 838 con-

tested gardens. While some (including La Plaza Cultural)are not covered, the settlement dramatizes how muchthe social value of gardens has grown. If these spacescan survive in a city where real estate is some of the mostexpensive in the world, they can thrive anywhere.

Erik Assadourian is a staff researcher at the WorldwatchInstitute.

2ndStreet Elementary Schoolbutterflycollectorspreparedforaction

For further information on the global impacts of gardening,including more on food security, horticultural therapy, and

environmental improvement, see www.worldwatch.org.

Courtesy

Brandyn

Scully

the growing value of gardens

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