Earth Fest: Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City
Monday, April 20th, 5pm @ Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140, 800 University Ave, Madison, WI
Register for a chance to receive a free copy of Tiny Gardens Everywhere!
Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City
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, Kate 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.
Join us to learn more from Kate Brown, Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about this fascinating environmental history!
About Kate Brown
Kate Brown grew up in Elgin, Illinois, a rustbelt community near Chicago. She attributes her attraction to modernist wastelands to a childhood in Elgin ghosting through empty buildings wondering who was the last to turn out the lights. Read more here.
Brown has an undergraduate degree from UW/Madison and a PhD from the University of Washington/Seattle. She started her career at UMBC in Baltimore. She is currently the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brown’s work is distinguished by its combination of archival research, oral history, sensory observation, reflective autobiography, and innovative literary form in the writing of history.
Brown is the founding editor of History Unclassified, a section of the American Historical Review. History Unclassified encourages authors to cross boundaries, undermine binaries, and encourage experimentation in the AHR, the flagship journal of the historical profession. The idea of History Unclassified is to create a space for thinking differently about what forms history can take.
Hosted by the Nelson Institute Center for Culture, History, and Environment; Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems; Center for the Humanities; Department of Community and Environmental Sociology; Department of Geography; Department of History; Food Studies Network; IRIS-NRC; Kemper Knapp Bequest Fund; and University Lectures Committee.