The Martlet

I kicked my shovel into the ground alongside friends and students I didn’t know on Wednesday, March 24. Those in tights and flip-flops dug just as deeply as students in Carharts and boots. A relay of people transported buckets of soil from trucks to the lawn, where others stood ready with plant starts and seeds.

Even when materials ran out, students kept creating. While a motley marching band played pots, cymbals and trombones in the background, students dug with their hands, salvaged wood from construction dumpsters and bordered their spiral gardens with rocks from the water feature beside the library. When there were no more plants or seeds, students dug spiral designs into the lawn — space for future plantings.

Graduate political science student Nick Montgomery was dressed in a suit and top hat to play a mock administrative role. Despite his monotonous pleas for students to go back to class and stop doing evil to the lawn, the student body did not pause. Nor did it pause when the Saanich Police showed up and threatened to arrest anyone who remained digging.

At least a dozen students continued to construct the remaining garden bed.

I linked arms in a chain of students that formed to encircle the gardens and remaining diggers. Despite threat of arrest and bodily harm, students on either side of me grinned and moved their bodies to the beat of the marching band as they awaited police response. Police photographers were busy documenting the faces of those present, but no arrests were made.

The rest of the afternoon was police-free and relaxed. An elementary school class trickled in and I helped a few kids plant bean seeds in a spiral garden bed. They wanted their turn with the megaphone too, and mirrored the ethic of the university gardeners.

“Action,” they called loudly, and, “Time for work.”

In the end, there were 10 separate beds full of pea seeds, kale starts, strawberries and native plants.

A sign reading “Food Not Lawns: Student Autonomous Garden” gave a cursory explanation of what had motivated students to transform a portion of their campus. It was a collective action taken by autonomous students with different allegiances and motivations, yet the sense of community between participants was fierce. All were united in the active renewal of place and the strengthening of student autonomy.

“It was the strongest sense of cooperation and solidarity I’ve ever experienced on campus,” said art and geography major Hilary Todhunter.

Local food production: short story, long history -

In many ways, the growing dependency on imported, industrially-produced food provides a key to understanding the demands for local food production expressed by the action of Food Not Lawns Collective (FNLC).

In the early 20th century, 85 per cent of food consumed on Vancouver Island was produced locally. This total has declined steadily since then. Population growth plays a part here, but the driving factor has been the declining “un-profitability” of running a farm on the Island.

There are a variety of reasons for this downward spiral in profitability, such as the low cost of subsidized industrial food products imported to the Island.

“This crisis is an outcome of globalization and the industrialization of food systems, entrenched over the past 40 to 50 years,” stated a recent report by the Islands Good Food Initiative. “The production cost of local food is much higher than imports coming from countries that are unfairly subsidized, and/or where labor and environmental standards are questionable.”

Another hindrance to local food production has been the dramatic increase in land prices on Vancouver Island, which rose over 150 per cent in the past 10 years, and has led to increased rent and property taxes for existing farms, while making it difficult for young farmers to start operations.

Yet another reason for the decline in locally-produced food is that, in 2007, the provincial government introduced legislation forcing farmers to slaughter meat bound for human consumption in licensed abattoirs. This measure has made production in places such as Salt Spring Island and remote sections of Vancouver Island more costly, due to transport costs and the resulting decline in quality of meat that is slaughtered in a distant industrial setting. These factors have combined to create a situation in which less than 10 per cent of food consumed on the Island is grown here.

“Students have been trying to negotiate for years to get some kind of sustainable food production on campus, and have been frustrated with endless meetings and analyses and reports that never see any action from administration,” said garden participant Clementine O’Farrell.

Let’s talk CJVI lands again -

Over the past 15 years, UVic has seen multiple initiatives aimed to convince the administration of the imperative for institutional innovation surrounding food security and hands-on sustainability education.

Multiple proposals have focused on the Cedar Hill corner lot at UVic (also known as the CJVI Lands) as a crucial area for revitalization. The south-east-facing lot is valued for its size, its history of agricultural use and its potential as an urban agriculture learning site.

As early as 1997, the Camassia Student Collective was advocating for the creation of an alternative agriculture and sustainable living center on the lands, organized around the principles of permaculture — a design-philosophy based on the interdependency of humans and nature.

Camassia argued that, if the university is to provide students with a sustainable, empowering education, there is an acute need for experiential learning programs in areas such as sustainable food systems, energy efficiency, wastewater recycling and natural building.

In 2005, Michael M’Gonigle and Jason Found of the POLIS project (a project on Ecological Governance at UVic) published a report called “UnCommon Ground: Creating Complete Community at UVic.” That report once again vocalized the need for a theoretical and practical learning center for urban and alternative agriculture. It concluded that innovative use of the CJVI Lands would be a crucial way for the university to contribute to food security, social and environmental sustainability, and a strong sense of community on campus.

Then in 2006, Megan Thom followed up with her report “Planting the Seeds: Towards an Urban Agriculture Learning Center at UVic,” which provided multiple suggestions for how to mitigate the barriers to administrative approval such a learning center would see.

The action of FNLC was undertaken partly because administration has not acknowledged the gravity of these proposals.

“UVic envisions an organically-landscaped and managed campus that enhances biodiversity and offers healthy, local and diverse food choices,” reads UVic’s “Sustainable Action Plan: Campus Operations 2009-2014” manual. “UVic views its landscapes as a living laboratory — a place of academic study and community learning.”

“Administration has done nothing to back [UVic’s plan] up, and so we decided to back it up for them,” said garden participant Tyler Sparks. “We created that living laboratory, and that community learning.”

Breaking ground -

Administrative inaction on campus food security issues and on the use of the CJVI lands was a strong theme during Wednesday’s gardening session. Equally strong was the re-evaluation of student agency within the university’s decision-making system.

Before any ground was broken, Serena Kataoka took the microphone to put the day’s action into historical perspective. She told a story of land enclosure — when the Hudson’s Bay Company established its fort on the land that is now Victoria. They erected a fence to both enclose what they professed to own and to exclude the Indigenous peoples whose territory they had privatized. The surprise at the end of the story was this: it was the Indigenous themselves who were made to build the fence and close themselves out.

“As students, we often reinforce the fences that bind our ways of thinking and exclude meaningful participation in our own education,” said graduate student and garden participant Jenny McCartney. “In order to create change on campus and elsewhere, we’ve been taught that we must seek administrative authority and funnel our energies through a whole labyrinth of carefully-laid conduits of bureaucracy, which quickly act to defuse and marginalize radical alternatives — our real stakes, our energy and our joy.”

Ploughing a protected plant -

Mike-Jo Brownlee, education student and activist, explains that action was taken by FNLC because “no one wanted to beg anymore.”

Brownlee and former student Jenna Rudolph spent the night next to the garden. They were awoken between midnight and 1 a.m. by over a dozen people — Saanich police, Campus Security and grounds crew — who proceeded to level the garden with the use of heavy machinery.

Brownlee placed his body in the way of a front-end loading tractor that was about to dig up a bed containing camas lilies, a protected species and gift from a Lekwungen family on whose territory the university is situated.

Brownlee says the tractor pulled right up to his shins before Campus Security approached him to leave. He acknowledged neither Campus Security nor Saanich police, and was then handcuffed and arrested for “assault by trespass.”

“A coercive body of people called me an assaulter for standing on my own two feet where I wanted to stand, in front of a gift from Indigenous peoples, on unceded Indigenous land,” Brownlee said.

The university did not pursue charges.

Rudolph sat on a remaining garden bed and decided to allow police to escort her off the premise, rather than be arrested.

“I felt it was cowardly of them to remove it when no one was around,” she said. “It was painful to watch camas being ripped up, thrown away, and replaced with some useless, impermeable surface.”

Brownlee says the response by both students and administration to the FNLC demonstration exposed two themes.

“One, the pure power of direct, non-sanctioned actions against corporate and colonial institutions. And two, the emergence of a different kind of authority that undermines that of those institutions,” he said.

McCartney maintains that the actions of FNLC were not purely a stunt to garner administrative attention, but also a “radical reconfiguration of the way students think about legitimacy.”

“On Wednesday, students found legitimacy and authority within themselves — not through the university hierarchy,” she said. “The garden was not meant to impose anything on others, but to open everyone’s eyes to the possibility of reclaiming the places that we live and actively creating what we want to see.”