Madeline Rogero for Mayor

Knoxvillians, I want to publicly endorse Madeline Rogero. I have met the women several times and am deeply impressed by her bearing and experience. I believe she would be a tremendous asset to Knoxville and the East Tennessee region. I am especially impressed by her goal to make Knoxville the "greenest city in America." You can read more about her platform at her website: Madeline Rogero for Mayor.

If you care to donate to Ms. Rogero's campaign, this link will take you straight there: Donate to Rogero's Campaign

Hesitate

A neighbor sent me this link about "guerilla gardeners" and other creative activist in Berlin. He knows I like to garden and he knows about the Urban Land Scouts. In fact, he's come home to find us out front making seed bombs for various ULS workshops and events.

Stephen Evans, BBC News, Berlin

I read the article and was immediately struck by the foolishness of Petrus Akkordeon's planting. Not because I disagree with his hope that

"...if you plant one flower, the whole place changes. For several seconds, it's a nice place. People see these flowers and feel better for a moment."

but because I think it is a waste of a complex living thing to plant a flower in the shallow crack of a modern sidewalk. Where will the flower root? What will happen tomorrow when the workers paid to maintain the plaza come and find a clump of dirt and this sad wilted plant? They will sweep it up with the cigarette butts and cellophane wrappers.

It is not enough to plop down plants for a couple of hours and congratulate yourself on fighting the capitalist system...or whatever system you think your flowers are fighting. Cultivation takes time and several inches more soil. If you want to use planting and growing as tools in your activism, learn how to do it right.

These are the things I think every time I introduce seed balls (or seed bombs) to Urban Land Scouts. I consider them more successful for the poetic way in which holding one causes us to look at the landscape with new intention and expectation. They can hover between a purposeless object d'arte and a functional tool. What's more, if they are to work, that is, to grow plants in places where they might otherwise not grow, we've got to get deep into the specifics of what we grow, where it grows, and what happens after that. The examples I gave at Urban Land Scout camp were that we would never make seed balls with kudzu in them, nor would we try to lob seed balls with heat-loving plants into damp and shady areas.

You've got to work with the "genius of place" and if the place is a corporate office plaza in Berlin then you've got a radically different set of circumstances in which to support plants. I would encourage Mr. Akkordeon to start smaller and more insidious: mosses or small ferns planted in the shady cracks at the building's foundation. Then, prepare to tend to your plants every day...if not weekly. In this imagined case, it would be Mr. Akkordeon's presence, rather than that of the plants, that might change the whole place.

values

sketches for jsa poster, originally uploaded by kt.ries.

Images made working on a poster for a conference held by the Justice Studies Association. The conference was called "Reducing Social Harms: Seeking 'Just Living' in Our Communities and Our Selves" and was June 2 - 5 , 2010 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Good Omen

This was one of the first things we saw when we got to Jess Wilson's farmstead home in Monteagle. I took it as a good omen.

Carson Fisk-Vittori

My friend Blaise recently pointed me to the website for Carson Fisk-Vittori. It's beautiful stuff. Go and browse.

Summerset, Carson Fisk-Vittori, 2010
Archival Inkjet Print

Untitled (Tasty Tunnels), Carson Fisk-Vittori, 2011
Ant food gel, plant food get, harvester ants, plexi, shrub

Skulletons in the Garden

The Future is Always Wide Open

There are certain life lessons I have to learn over and over again. In no particular order they are:

Be patient.
Be still.
Be kind.
Do not worry about things you cannot control.
Know where you're aiming before you fire.
Do not talk about important things when you are hungry or tired.
Good shoes and good food are worth the money. 

In particular, I find it hard not to worry about what work I will find in the coming months as my stint at Beardsley Farm winds to a close. While I've enjoyed the radical change of pace and the knowledge I've gained at a demonstration farm, I miss teaching. I also miss making more money. There, I said it. I want to pay off my student loans AND eat well. Can't do that on an AmeriCorps living allowance.

I don't know if you've heard, but this is not a great time to be job searching. (And I'm one of the lucky ones!) With that in mind, I began to imagine what I would like to do if money were no problem. It is this: I would like to establish an Urban Land Scouts program in which we could work with students daily on both the land-craft elements of the scouts and the critical thinking and making that fuels reflection and greater awareness. Since my time at the Outdoor Academy, I've joked about wanting to start things like The Katie Ries Farm School for Young Ladies, but now I find the joking falling away as I consider what it might actually take to realize an established Urban Land Scouts program.

An established program, even an after-school program, is a two to five year goal. What I can do right now is this: Urban Land Scout Camp at CAC Beardsley Community Farm. I'm partnering with Schools of Influence Education Foundation and CAC (the parent organization of Beardsley Farm) to try and pull this camp together for this July! What's more, we're trying to get it funded so that our campers can attend at no cost to their families. We've generous local sponsors (like the Tomato Head, Cruze Dairy Farm, and Community Television of Knoxville, among others) and will be asking individual donors to step up and donate whatever they can. I know that money is tight, but this project won't cost much and it will give a lot to people in our community-- both by supporting Beardsley Farm's work and by increasing educational access for sixty Knox County students. If you would like to read or disseminate our one-page proposal of the project, you can find it here.

So there you are. The Future remains unknown and daunting, but I've got this project in my sights. Please stay tuned for when I come asking you for money to fund the project. Ha.