Kate Brown — Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City - with Tom Philpott

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid past and present, archive and experience, showing how down–to–earth gardeners can reap abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement.Kate Brown is Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival, an NBCC Award finalist. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.Brown is in conversation with Tom Philpott, a senior research associate at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University. He worked for nearly 30 years in journalism, most recently as the former food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones (2011-2022). Back in 2006, the environmental magazine Grist became the first national publication to assign a regular staffer to the food politics beat when it hired Tom as a columnist. His work has won numerous awards, including a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His 2020 book Perilous Bounty was named an “editor’s pick” by the New York Times Book Review and shortlisted for a New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. It came out in paperback in June 2022. Perilous Bounty has received in-depth reviews in the New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. Over the decades, Tom has held jobs as a janitor, a dishwasher, a steakhouse grill cook, a teacher of remedial math and writing at a community college, a community gardener, and a farmer—experiences that shape his view of the food system to this day. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324105831?ic_referral=U4rXnxQFV0EcwfwcxuIh_2eaNfJSGB5XaJCPTvgW-dowM3JyM_tPBSG5Ec5CkiRVgrcedcRC7nRTxlIBcXV73tY86dZe6htbU85OdAtCpLRT6jb7JvXhzCjJLfAqM5hUQz8gJdA