It Could Happen Here - Earthbound Almanac

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

We talk to two members of Lobelia Commons about their new Earthbound Farmers Almanac and the politics of farming, land, and food production.https://www.gofundme.com/f/total-autonomy-for-altheas-house?member=13734265&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And today it is just me, Christopher. But with me is Hadley and Mike from Lobelia Commons, who are here to talk about many things, one of which is the first edition of their Earthbound Farmers Almanac. Hey! Hey! How are you two doing today? I heard there's maybe a thunderstorm rolling in. Yeah, we're doing pretty good. Gonna be glad for the rain, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, it'll be good. We're going to talk a little bit first about Lobelia Commons. So how did that project start? I know it was something from the beginning of the pandemic, but had y'all been working on this kind of stuff before? And yeah, just let us do a little bit of that. Yeah, so it kind of started um last year during the pandemic basically um basically at the beginning of the pandemic we had um

just like a surge of interest in these like kind of mutual aid groups um and the largest of which that formed in new orleans specifically which some of us helped form, was called New Orleans Mutual Aid Group, which was doing like food distribution. It kind of stemmed out of a project that was already running like a food share, basically getting excess produce that was coming into the port and distributing it for free in front of like one of the gentrifying grocery stores. front of like one of the gentrifying grocery stores. But within like, I want to say like a couple of weeks, there was such a surge of interest in doing that type of like volunteer whatever work that there was like a ton of labor to make it happen. And that basically meant buying tons of produce eventually because the ports eventually shut down and there wasn't any produce coming from anywhere at the beginning of the pandemic and that meant basically buying tons of produce from like costco and that labor meant like waiting in lines for you know wrapping

around entire like massive like multi-city block warehouse stores um yeah and so that was basically doing like food distribution so we took the opportunity to since there was so much labor happening that we could go and start to address the question of like um food production specifically and try and do that in interesting ways um so we felt like it was pretty important to start like experimenting in different forms of food production and like like ways of relating to food production. So, I mean, this this first started with like a we're basically just starting tons of seeds and delivering them all over the city, just driving around from we had like one centralized nursery that was run out of a warehouse and that was a ton of labor it was really time consuming it was super centralized and so we moved from that into a number of other projects shortly thereafter we put together like a like a collaborative mushroom

production group where we were getting people who had been growing mushrooms and teaching folks and like doing skill shares to produce oyster mushrooms out of buckets we started doing some like woodlot production of shiitakes Which is like since expanded pretty dramatically and yeah, just like kind of like things that draw people's interest like that and and think about like How you can grow food in an urban or peri-urban? scenario

fairly interestingly and like with joy Also You know after this we we were reached out to by folks that were like well i want to grow herbs and rather than specifically getting like a lot and covering it in different um herbal medicines we uh reached out, had already had folks reaching out to us. So someone came up with the idea of well, let's just all grow in like our backyards tons of herbs and let's find herbs that already grow abundantly around us to kind of collectively share the experience of harvesting and and turning those into

medicines. And so now there's like this herb commons group that the labor is distributed, it's distributed geographically, but there's these like meetups where their bulk herbs are given up, yeah, given out just like in a communal space. And yeah, like there's skill shares happening there.

And so there's kind of some community being built around that, that happens in a very decentralized manner. Yeah, it's definitely very decentralized. There are working groups that are part of Lobelia Commons that I'm like not entirely sure what they're doing on any given day or what's going on. I'm involved in like a couple particular projects within it. And I think that it's really flexible for folks who are trying to get involved.

They can kind of be involved at whatever level they want. Like if somebody doesn't want to go to a bunch of garden work days or a bunch of meetings or something, which, you know, have been a great way for us to like see each other and see our friends during the pandemic and stuff is to get together for these work days outdoors or whatnot. But if somebody wants to just like do nothing but sprout plants at their own house and then somebody will come pick up those seedlings and, you know, bring them to one of our decentralized nursery spots, that's great. That's one of the other kind of projects we have we call the decentralized nursery and that's kind of like just something that people already do at a certain

time of year you know gardeners will regularly start more plants than they need and then just kind of give them away to friends and neighbors and stuff and we tried to just make it a little bit more of an intentional thing um and this was also kind of growing out of like at the very beginning of the pandemic and we were actually doing seedling deliveries to people which made sense at that time but it was like very labor intensive um so we kind of moved to this model of having just like free stands in front of houses on street corners in different places um you know there's already like a bunch of free fridges around New Orleans and things like that.

And so this is kind of like a free plant version of that. And it's really easy for somebody to just set one up. And then that kind of also allows us to like work on this other aspect of decentralizing food production, because like that's definitely one of our goals, right, is to like not have a tiny percentage of the population be the only ones who know how to grow food and doing it under the control of a tiny number of corporations that own all the land and you know obviously we're trying to get away from that food system and so one of the ways we can think about doing that is finding ways to really decentralize some of the skills that are necessary. So, for example, like if somebody is growing avocados for our nurseries,

the thing about growing an avocado from a pit, actually, is that that tree probably won't produce fruit. It actually needs to be grafted. So we can have people starting pits and then we're also, you know, sharing the knowledge of how to graft these things because we kind of like see a future in which a lot more people will need to be involved in food production but also like mike was saying like we want this to be not like a job that it feels like people have but this joyous kind of thing that's just a part of everyday life yeah one of the other things that i was i was interested in is you know so so part

part of what i think the the beginning of thebound Farmer's Almanac is about is talking about how, I guess, people have this tendency to sort of focus on climate change as just like the only sort of climate thing that's happening. And, you know, I mean, there's obviously, yeah, there's a bunch of sort of stuff that is climate change, but isn't the weather that are sort of, you things like the phosphorus cycle things like the nitrogen cycle that are breaking but simultaneously i think it's it's also true that you know that that that kind of stuff and this is also something that's talked about in there is is going to have a large impact both on sort of like even just what what kind of biomes exist in a very short term. And another product of that is the sort of increasing rate of storms. And I was wondering if y'all could talk a bit about what happened after Ida

and how both just sort of in the short term and long term the increase of just hurricanes and I hesitate to call them natural disasters because there's a whole thing about how these disasters are sort of manufactured in a lot of ways but how that's been affecting how y'all i think are sort of thinking about and working with these kind of mutual aid projects and food production yeah so i think with ida it's kind of complicated because um you could almost look at almost look at it as like two different storms.

Because what happened in New Orleans versus what happened in, say, like Houma or the River Parishes, these areas that are, you know, generally south and west of New Orleans are kind of like two different animals in some ways. Like, what happened in New Orleans specifically relates to infrastructure. So, like, what you're saying, like, the kind of quote-unquote natural disasters thing, that's, you know, that's a pretty commonplace way of looking. I mean, it's not a very radical conception that, like, these aren't natural disasters, wherever the disaster is created as soon as there was the attempt to create a colonial New Orleans in the first place. So this became honestly part of national discourse as a result of Katrina, most famously because

of the Army Corps of Engineers failure in 2005. So what happened this year was with Hurricane Ida was one of the main transmission towers for the Entergy Corporation in New Orleans. It's called Entergy, for those that are outside of the Gulf South and aren't familiar with. So the Entergy Tower fell into the Mississippi River. You had that happening at the same time that thousands of power lines fell down. The power lines are on poles and very prone to getting knocked down, even just during any day of the week. And so there wasn't actually really much flooding that was happening.

It was primarily wind damage. So the tower falls into the river, power lines down. You had something like, I believe, 55 barges in the port of South Louisiana falling off their moorings and floating around. Just crashing into things. Just crashing. And there's several ferries that connect the east and west banks of the city. Those fell off their moorings. So, like, the physical infrastructure of the place and how that relates to beyond New Orleans is New Orleans is located at the very southern reach of the Mississippi River's port of southern Louisiana, which is, like, a 55-mile port.

I believe a 52-mile port that processes like 60% of all US grain going to export. So it's like a massive, really, really important piece of American capitalist infrastructure. So that when those boats fall off their moorings, it's not like, oh, there's like whatever uh quaint like uh bayou problem it's a very serious uh imperial problem um but so for the average person living in new orleans um this looked like uh i think i think it ended up being for most people around a week and a half without power which if anyone's lived even with air conditioning in new orleans for summer, it's extremely difficult to live here during the summer. It's obviously not impossible when you have modern amenities, but when you're without those, when you're without the refrigerator, when you're without your freezer, air conditioning, it's really, really, really hot.

So that's what was happening in new orleans there was some some damage to people's roofs there was um some you know fairly fairly substantial damage to the structures but what happened to the west in cities like laplace um which um is about 25, 30 miles west of New Orleans, that's where you started to see very severe flooding, very severe damage to structures, places like Houma, Lafitte, Port-au-Chien, all these places that are closer to the coast. That's where you saw the real heavy destruction.

So a lot of people have been framing what's happened down the bayou and in the river parishes, as we would say, as like those places Katrina, because the destruction was so total in that way. So the way that you relate to that type of, again, quote-unquote disaster is much different. Whereas what happened in New Orleans is more of a continuation of what could be called a series of apocalypses that have been happening since colonization. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, you get your podcast. dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories

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New episodes every Thursday. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators,

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because I think that that's another part of this whole food system question that is important on a scale that i don't think people understand like you know it's just for a bit of background for listeners so when when all of the sort of giant uh like free trade agreements went into effect um you know so the free trade agreements are like okay you're not supposed to be able to like have government subsidies of agricultural products. And there's a couple of carve-outs that were put into this. Now, almost all of them, there are exceptions for it. There's a couple of weird manufacturing stuff in Italy and Germany that have carve-outs. government's allowed to just do enormous levels of agricultural subsidies that no one else like really in the world is allowed to like match or do i mean do it like you know you know if you try

to have grain subsidies right it's like you you know the imf will come after you like you you know you're not allowed to do it but then you know simultaneously you have the u.s producing all of this like this i mean it's it's not it's not really cheap right but it's it's you know this enormously subsidized grain that nobody can actually really compete with and i think that's that's like an interesting i was wondering what like how how do you guys think about that in terms of you know trying to do decentralized i guess agriculture in a place that's to a large extent this sort of like conduit of grain to the rest of the world but in a place that's to a large extent this sort of like conduit of grain to the rest of the world

but in a way that like also inhibits those places from actually you know having their own kind of like decentralized agriculture I mean I can speak a little bit about like what that kind of does to our context of like making

it like especially when I see people in the kind of does to our context of like making it like, especially when I see people in the kind of organic gardening, farming world, trying to go on this model of like, Oh, we're going to make, you know, regenerative agriculture profitable and we're going to make it somehow

compete with conventional agriculture. And I guess I just don't really think that that is feasible in that terrain. Like, you know, if we're trying to compete on that same terrain and we're competing with these absurd subsidies, it definitely is just the same problem that you see around the world where people aren't able to afford to grow their own thing because there's no way they can they can sell it as cheaply as as u.s grain um so i think it's more important to sort of

like look at like there's there's a piece in the almanac actually that sort of gets into this this issue of like well are we really growing enough food in in this regenerative way like you know we don't even hardly grow that many grains or that many high calorie things a lot of things are just focused on vegetables and things like that and like i think that's a really important critique and also i think that the way out of it isn't just going to be us trying harder or something or um like the the future i envision for us like really changing the food system kind of involves like really large-scale expropriation of that land where the grain is being produced and of those huge machineries those huge like satellite powered or satellite directed you know plows and and

tractors and whatnot that are that are doing this stuff um and so like when i'm trying to think about like the impact that a food project is having or like a food justice project i don't try to think like we're trying to replace uh agro business on its own terms i think like we're trying to be an ally or an aid to any kind of antagonistic social movement that actually is going to create the conditions where we can all get together and start to actually address these problems without being hindered by things like private property. so i guess that that that's a good point to to jump into the almanac from i think yeah do you want to just introduce the project a little bit and then we can talk about some of the the stuff in it that i thought was really interesting yeah so the almanac kind of came out of like a little bit of a like partially as like a joke you know where like everyone gets the almanac and kind of, you know, it doesn't really relate too much to like most of us what we would be growing. So we had posited something like different, you know, something that does kind of grapple with some of the questions of, you know, growing food and kind of the conditions we live in.

Maybe you can speak on it more. Yeah, I can even just I'll actually just read the back of it because i think it speaks to it pretty well this is a farmer's almanac for the end of the world growing food used to be a lot more straightforward when you'd plant your okra the same time every year like your grandpa did now we've got to be ready for anything late springzes, freak heat waves that bring plants out of dormancy too early, fire season longer every year, the polar vortex. And if that wasn't enough, we've also got to contend with the fallout from breakages in the global supply chain, when millions of gallons of milk get poured down the drain and mountains of potatoes are left to rot. It's a

world that calls for a new kind of farmer's almanac. Today's crisis has roots in the earliest moments of land theft against Native peoples, a process that has continued alongside hundreds of years of slavery and colonization. The way forward out of this mess will mean grappling with the crimes of the past, as well as charting a new course guided by black and indigenous knowledge, creative experimentation in food production, and paying attention across generational and species divides. So I mean, one like very concrete example of like how this Farmer's Almanac is different than what you might see just from the standard almanac is,

you know, we don't have like, it's it's may it's time to plant corn or whatever because i mean first of all that that was never that useful as for a publication that's meant to be used across this vast continent you know it's going to be different everywhere um where you're going to plant things at which time um but also like those standard resources that we would go to like for here for the southeast for example or wherever like if you're looking at something that was made a few decades ago it's not going to actually be accurate or it's going to give you undue certainty about where the seasons line up and things like that so you know instead of telling people exactly when to plant their

seeds we have a chart that has the actual germination temperatures of like all the major annual vegetables that people would want to grow um and then we also have like the uh monthly notes from this local farm in new orleans so you know located in this area you can you can also get a really precise view of like, oh, they were planting this then, they were harvesting this then. Yeah, I think that we hope to make something that was, you know, our original focus was something that was specific to New Orleans and the region, you know, in the Gulf South and the Southeast generally. because we are so aware of the, you know, the differences or what have you between growing food here and growing food in Ohio or something or whatever. And we all get these same seeds, you know, out of Walmart or Lowe's or whatever and try and grow the exact same plants all over the place. hone in on some of that local perspective with me in terms of like getting some like folk tradition getting some you know anecdotal evidence about you know things that worked or things that people are trying and I think that that was that was fairly successful I think I think a side that we weren't really expecting as much

was just the amount of national and even international kind of grasp that it had. I think a lot of people could use something like this in their area. And it's fostered some really interesting connections for people that are experimenting in New York, for people that are growing things or thinking about maybe food systems and how they relate to prisons in California,

or even as far away as Brazil, it's kind of began to foster a connection between Lobelia Commons and a group called Teatro dos Povos, which translates roughly to like the web of peoples in Brazil, so-called Brazil, where it's a kind of like experimental agroecology project that's very specific, specifically focused on, you know, sovereignty, um land stewardship kind of following a little bit in the tradition of um the landless workers movement if anyone's familiar with mst um it's kind of following in that tradition a bit um but is heavily stewarded by uh black and indigenous

knowledges yeah so that was uh something i think of a like think of a pleasant surprise out of it. Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting way of looking at it because I feel like there's this tendency in the US to when we talk about our relationship to the

land, which is something that comes up a lot in the essays that are in the Almanac, is about there's a piece that I related to a lot, which is something that comes up a lot in in the sort of essays that are in the almanac is about you know like there's a piece that i related to a lot which is about someone from guam trying to sort of deal with like i mean particularly like legacies of sort of japanese imperialism and being driven from their home and it was like oh hey look like this is yeah you know this is someone who experienced when japan went west and it's like oh yeah my family had this basically very similar thing when they went east and you know but but there's there's i think yeah and i i think it's very smartly you get you get to a point very

quickly where you're trying to grapple with you know how do you build connections to land but then also how how does that work in a context does that work in a context that's basically defined by settler colonialism and defined by this occupation? what you guys were talking about in brazil there was a huge movement like this that was indigenous land reclamation sort of agroecology in in colombia for example too in the 90s and they they run into this problem of you know there's a civil war going on in colombia and they a lot of them get murdered by sort of state paramilitaries in the army but i i think it's it's a it's a really interesting way of of of looking at what what is what does land back actually look like and how you deal with interacting with land and also yeah the land workers in particular they use a lot of methods but you know they they actually

do just take a like an enormous amount of land like back from the state and sort of back from corporate things so i i'm interested in how y we all started talking to a lot of these, a lot of the Brazilian groups and how that sort of like that, that perspective has shaped the way that like this, this, this whole sort of project turned out. So we were specifically to the, some previous connections that some of us had in Brazil had when talking about what we were doing and just kind of keeping up an exchange of, you know,

just like kind of updates from the Gulf and they would send updates from things going on down there. They kind of drew the connection for us and and put us towards them and i reached out um to tell this purpose and was like hey you know we're doing this thing and i you know i'm inspired by what you're doing personally and and um you know i i'd be curious to see what what um I'd be curious to see what kind of relationship, whatever we can foster. And they took it, you know, also with some inspiration, seeing that there's very clear connection in terms of relationship with land historically, dispossession historically between the two continents across the Caribbean, dispossession historically between the two continents across the Caribbean, the implementation on a wide scale of plantation monoculture that was fueled entirely by slavery and genocide.

And I think having that kind of shared common history, I think gives us a good bedrock to like exchange notes about where we are now, kind of multiplied by the fact that the way that so-called emancipation happened here versus in Brazil, radically different. For instance, the existence of PT or the Workers' Party in Brazil being such a force after the dictatorship and having that strong populist movement that was rooted in a very traditional left that fueled MST. Well, you don't have anything like that here you know that that happens

at the same time that here actually the workers movement in the u.s was kind of getting defeated i mean um up in the 70s um so with respect to like um land back specifically um you know i don't know if you i don't know if you will see it in the same forms. I doubt, at least. I obviously would totally be there cheering it on and happy to see it. But I think it looks a lot more like during the uprising last year you saw in Chicago, for instance, when the trains were being expropriated as they were moving, taking goods out of these box cars and just expropriating tons of goods, taking, you know, taking goods that would normally be going, you know, just commodities normally going to say small scale, but focus more on like infrastructural choke points rather than necessarily like having thousands of people swarming, you know, a massive industrial agriculture set up in Kansas or something. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's great to imagine that.

I think I really love sharing the history of MST with people in America who've never heard it before because I think it's a great way to kind of expand the imaginary of, like, what is possible, like what kind of actions are actually at our disposal. And it truly is not going to look exactly like that. And I think it's also really important for us to, like, not forget a lot of the similar histories here. Like, part of the inspiration for the almanac,

or what kind of drove us to make it, was some of us were doing a reading group of this book called Freedom Farmers that's about kind of like various black projects in the South for food autonomy after slavery. And a lot of it is about Fannie Lou Hamer and Freedom Farms. And we were definitely inspired

for some of the Lobelia things by Fannie Lou Hamer's Pig Bank, which was a really cool thing where they just started with a bunch of pigs. And if you're in the community, you get your pigs from, you get a couple piglets from the pig bank, and then

the interest on that is a couple years later, you've got to give them a couple pigs because you're producing your own pigs and so the pig bank is like self-sustaining um and another thing from that book that was inspiring to us was um reading about uh george washington carver's public education projects out of tuskegee university uh that were um just really inspiring in terms of like he was doing all of his own kind of independent research about soils and pests and all these different crops and everything and creating these farm bulletins that were then being distributed to black farmers

throughout the region to kind of you know share practices. And a lot of the stuff was like agroecology before people had that word. Like he was very far ahead of his time in terms of understanding soil dynamics and pests and things like that. So, yeah, we definitely try to lift up all that history as much as possible. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by I heart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series,

Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their

words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry

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I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Yeah, I guess the other thing I thought was very interesting that you alluded to briefly in this was, yeah, because there's a section of this that's talking about food in prisons.

And I wonder if you could talk about that part a little bit more, because that's a connection that I really don't think gets drawn very often. Oh, here, let me flip to the piece right here. I mean, one of the things that it's kind of hard to describe, I do love the visual that we have for this piece. But yeah, I mean, it's just like, it's a striking image, you know, it's got like in the center there's a picture of a really high

density chicken operation, and there's somebody wearing sort of like a full Tyvek suit and just walking through this like massive herd of chickens, and then that's superimposed over this just like really nasty looking close-up photo of a prison food tray and just like the canned veggies and the everything and like i mean i don't i've been to jail a number of times and the food is always terrible it's always one of the things you talk about or you can

bond over or whatever it's just how bad the food is but i think people who have an experience that don't really think about just how much systematic like starvation is going on and malnutrition is going on where it's like the only way you can possibly survive in these places is spending a bunch of extra money on commissary to get stuff that also isn't healthy, but at least you can get more calories and stuff. Um, and like, I think that, that there's like a lot of parallels between kind of the structure of prisons

and the structure of our, of our food system. Um, I mean, one example that I used to talk about this is like the banana plantation, um, where like the you know, we have an entire variety of banana that's like basically extinct or it's it can't be grown commercially anymore because the banana industry, you know, functions by putting by warehousing these bananas together and these like super tight plantation formations you know which really only makes sense if you're just trying to maximize your profits and get as much out of a small space as possible but what it does is is the exact same thing that happens in prisons

during covid or with any kind of uh you know pathogen like tuberculosis or whatever um you know it it's like the the trees are so close together that uh the fungus spreads so rapidly and then they're also like pumping all these things in to to fight that and they're actually breeding super funguses all the time and at some point the banana that we eat now is going to also stop existing because of this um and i guess i i don't know if I can draw anything deeper out of those similarities other than the fact that there's this overriding logic of capitalism that has no respect for these beings, whether it is a person or a banana tree.

It's all just commodities and things to be warehoused um yeah i i uh i think um to add on that i mean this this the piece in there which is called uh the struggle for good food across walls um i think it does a nice job of of talking about how like um you know if we're talking about quote unquote food food justice or what have you, like, like, how can we talk about that on the outside while forgetting about just the most deplorable food conditions on the entire continent? And I think that that it's really good at that. I think I would really like to see in the next year all the ways that the imaginaries of inmates kind of go and attack the logic of prison food being completely deplorable. You have all these forms of creativity of making tortillas and stuff and doing wild things with stuff that's in the commissary, contraband ways of making life a little bit

more livable in there. And if anyone has spent time in jail or prison or kept up a relationship with someone on the inside or what have you, everyone has a story about a way of making food more interesting and joyful. And there becomes whole cultures around them. One of the things that we're starting to do in one of the farm spaces we work with outside of the city is through pre-existing relationships with inmates in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, which for those that don't know, was a plantation. Civil War happens. Two years after the Civil War, it becomes a Louisiana State Penitentiary. It's still a plantation. It's, you know, many times descendants of the same enslaved folks who were on that plantation prior. And, you know, it's a guard on a horseback riding around while there's folks pulling cotton. And so through some of these relationships with some of these inmates who are like kind

of clandestine organizers, we're starting to come up with ways to like grow food collaboratively with folks that are behind walls and find ways to get food to either their family or maybe sell and get that into their commissary. Kind of just like trying to spitball ideas about like different ways of producing food despite people's incarceration. incarceration yeah that that seems that seems like a really i guess the only word you can really say is necessary way for for this sort of food politics to go if it's going to actually deal with sort of both the the land conditions and the conditions of just you know the fact that we have an enormous that there's still just an enormous slave population in the u.s and i think that kind of resistance and creativity i think is how yeah y'all are you're on the right track with with pushing it that way yeah that this is this is sort of a bleak note to end on i think but i don't know

i think it yeah it's it's a it's a hopeful one too and where can people find but basically all of y'all's work and then also you talked a little bit about trying to get submissions for everything. So can you talk a little bit about how that's going to work? Yeah. So it's kind of been on hold a little bit because we've been very active after Ida. Yeah. And trying to make sure our people are all good and supporting in various places and kind of doing like different workshops and stuff and our focus isn't just on food production it's also like neighborhood survival or whatever so we've been

working with an old neighbor of one of ours who you know she's already been kind of doing this mutual aid stuff, you know, by any other name for decades, you know, letting people stay in her house, feeding people. She's like kind of like a block mama and she's really one of the last black homeowners in her neighborhood. So we're really trying to like help her achieve some autonomy. One way that we've been putting it is when all the airbnbs like lose their power because they're still reliant on the colonial world well miss althea could still have her lights on because she's going to be

totally autonomous from the system so um i think that that link is on our instagram page if you click on the like um the link or whatever there's a gofundme that um is uh where we've been putting a lot of our effort and really working with her on um and then also like growing growing a garden like adjacent to her so that there um people in that community are are food as as food autonomous as um as we can get we can put that in the show notes too. Yeah. And the, the handle for both Twitter and Instagram is at Lobelia Commons. And the almanac, you can find links to the almanac PDF on through either of those.

If you want to just read it for free. And then there's also copies for sale on emergentgoods.com. And for submissions, I mean, yeah, like I said, we've been really behind on this just because of all this stuff. But for submissions, we're really looking for folks to contribute, throw us a pitch. I think if you've seen the first one or listened to this, you probably get something of an idea of what we're looking for. And we're happy to talk to people about different ideas. Bear with us if we're a little slow to respond because we're still way steep right now. But the submission for deadlines is the end of October.

Submission for deadlines is the end of October, and you can email ideas or pitches or whatever to lobeliacommons at protonmail.com. propagate as many fruit trees as cheaply as possible things that are really easy for us to grow from cuttings like figs mulberries things that are easy to grow from seed like papaya moringa pecan and we basically just have some nice flyers that we put up and we advertise a bit on social media and also just kind of go door to door in neighborhoods where we already have gardens or connections and offer to give free fruit trees out to people. And we're also happy to plant them for people and then kind of offer a consultation on how to take care of it or whatever. And also if folks want to hear some of the pieces from the 2021 Earthbound Farmers Almanac read by some of the authors and then some interviews with those

authors, you can check out this podcast called partisan gardens that did a really good episode. That's kind of like an audio exploration of the almanac. Cool. Yeah. People, people definitely, definitely go read the almanac. It is, it's, it's, it's a, it's a really good, it's a really good piece of work. Yeah, thank you two so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having us.

Robert Evans here, and I wanted to ask for your help. There is a Portland-area woman, Ruba Tamimi. She's an Arabic interpreter and a Palestinian liberation activist, and she is trying to save her home at the moment. She's got a GoFundMe. If you go to SaveRuba'sHouse, R-U-B-A on GoFundMe, you'll find it, SaveRuba'sHouse on GoFundMe. If you've got a few bucks, she could really use it. Again, SaveRuba'sHouse, R-U-B-A at GoFundMe. Thanks. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Broth. Thanks for listening. by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,

five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

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