Linda Brazill & Mark Golbach, people I admire tremendously for many reasons, run the excellent blog:Each Little World. The topics they cover are pretty wide-ranging and include art, gardens, books, food, home-decoration, history,and their relationship around these. For the past week, they have been doing a fascinating, necessary and thoughtful job of covering the protests in Madison, WI: their home town. Many people who have never before commented have been doing so. One person wrote them and said she turns to their blog "for enjoyment and to get away from the conflict and stress bombarding me daily from television and radio these days. Please get back to home and garden topics."
This reminded me of an often-encountered fallacy I recognize in the landscape world. It is the idea that the garden is a stress-free place, free of politics. Well, I beg to differ. Our landscapes encompass everything about nature (not stress-free the last time I watched a National Geographic Special on Predators) and about how we humans relate to nature. I need not drone on about chemicals, class, race, water, health, food, property & labor rights and immigration to make my point.
My comment on Linda's & Mark's blog included a reference to Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, with its recently renovated landscape by the great O. C. Simonds who began to work there in 1883. I said I'd take them there to visit the grave of one of the Illinois Governors whom I admire as a hero (as opposed to Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker, partially funded by the Koch brothers and the reason for all the Madison protests). Altgeld was a champion of child-labor and workplace safety laws. If you haven't made a pilgrimage to John Peter Altgeld's grave in Graceland: Spring is around the corner!
The photo above shows the Guatemalan city of Quetzaltenango during my trip in July. My non-profit work in that country is reason enough never to doubt the connection between land and politics. They do call it "the political landscape," after all...
3 comments:
Thank you, Julie, for your rant. I so agree with you; nothing in our lives is devoid of social meaning; politics is everywhere.
Thanks for the comments and the shout out. I noticed that it did not take me long to move from the English gardening school to interest in environmental issues. I don't think you can garden without become aware of the world around you and who is making decisions that affect us all. Have a good trip and we will meet in Milwaukee to look at art when you return.
Altoon and Linda:
Thank you both for being such articulate readers and writers. You both inspire me to look beneath the surface.
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