People’s Park: A Brief History of Activism, Outreach, and Organic Farming

This was my section in a publication called A Fresh Look.

A Fresh Look: Observations on Artistic and Social Practices in Urban Farming. A book and website project by the second year MA students at The San Francisco Art Institute. One collaborative interview and one article, plus photography, 2010.

If you have any questions about farming, read anything by Vandana Shiva, especially: Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Southend Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

Also you might try: Novella Carpenter: Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, Penquin Press HC, 2009, or The Essential Urban Farmer, with Willow Rosenthal, Penquin, 2011.

In People’s Park, located in Berkeley, California, privately cultivated organic fruits and vegetables are grown along with freedom of thought, freedom of speech, equality, and grassroots radicalism. Since its founding in 1969, People’s Park has represented civic and civil rights freedoms that have been threatened since the beginning of modern global expansion.1 At one time the heartbeat of resistance, the park, along with the circumstances revolving around it, has always defied the conventions of racism, sexism, poor urban planning, and murderous political foreign policy. You will also find in our park a community gardening farm, of slightly less than one acre, that so far has completely survived Reaganomics and might possibly survive post-modern transnationalism also. In this essay, I will give a brief history of the park and its garden and how they relate to the community of Berkeley.

In 1969, The University of California, Berkeley (UCB) began planning a community park for residents and students at the current People’s Park location. Ultimately, in the spirit of the times, community members decided to start early, beginning construction on April 20, 1969.2 The lack of comprehension by the UCB administration and a few unpopular choices by activists, community members, and city officials made a fairly popular community building project into an unholy quagmire, as protests regarding the park’s closure turned to riot. These and other incidents led to what is known as “Bloody Thursday.” On May 15, 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan sent two hundred-fifty Highway Patrol and Berkeley Police officers to shut down People’s Park. Student protesters were met with violence, and the newly planted park and garden were left in shambles.3

Students and the people of Berkeley worked hard over the following decades to restore the park. After a five-year stalemate, during which a fence that had been erected around the park in 1969 was torn down, David Axelrod and Cal students started an organic farming course at People’s Park. In the spring of 1974, this group, led by Axelrod, became the People’s Park Project/Native Plant Forum and affiliated itself with the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC).4 Some of the efforts of this group are still noticeable to longtime park attendees.5 On November 15, 1979, community volunteers tore out the parking lot that had been installed that fall and planted a vegetable garden, using chunks of pavement as landscaping berms.6 Now the garden beds dot the landscape of the west side of the park. At least a dozen fruit trees and many bushes and flowers fill bed plots and adjoin the landscape. Flowers, trees, fruits, vegetables, a variety of urban feral animals, open-mindedness, equality, pacifism, and human beings are all grown there.
As a community facet, the People’s Park garden has operated the same way as many other community gardens of this nature—if you plant it, you get to keep it. Volunteers, activists, and concerned community members have grown, cultivated, and distributed produce from the garden for over thirty years. Community members such as Terri Compost, Arthur Fonseca, and Charles Gary delegate the use of the park. They also help to protect the park by being outspoken with authority figures—including the UCB administration and police department—by protesting, and by attending community meetings.7 This group, known by authority figures as “the user-development group,” believes that the park belongs to the people, and that all changes should subsequently be subject to the approval of “the people.”8 Mostly, however, the community runs the park.

Food Not Bombs began in 1988 in San Francisco, and is now organized internationally.9 The goal of Food Not Bombs is to help feed anyone in need. The organization considers itself a radical anti-capitalist group, and others, including The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, agree.10 Produce from the park has been known to be grown exclusively for the nonprofit, volunteer-run Food Not Bombs, which on February 6, 1991 began to feed the homeless in People’s Park.11 Food Not Bombs had a garden bed in People’s Park around the year 2000, but it has more often relied on the donation of food from the other beds in the park and from outside donors. In addition to occasional produce from the People’s Park garden and specific private plots, this organization has also been known to dumpster dive for food. Food Not Bombs also relies on greener chain stores such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s who donate their excess and soon to be expired goods, and on churches that donate their kitchen spaces. For five days a week almost every week for the last nineteen years, Food Not Bombs has served healthy vegan food in People’s Park.12

One of the most influential forces behind the People’s Park garden is Terri Compost, a naturalist who has been studying plants and nature locally for over fifteen years.13 In her early forties, she is an Oakland resident and works as a naturalist with the American Youth Hostel’s Adventure Program. She’s also an organic gardener and the curator of the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) at the Ecology Center, and for a time she was a docent at the Oakland Museum of California.14 She’s worked closely with Food Not Bombs for over a decade, and she has tended the garden and offered organic farming education to children and adults in People’s Park since the mid 1990s.15 Terri eventually started her own program to educate people about the preservation of the planet, often teaching courses in wildlife, flora, fauna, permaculture, and organic farming in the watersheds of the Berkeley area and in People’s Park.16 She is an educator who has deep knowledge of native, edible, and medicinal plants and wildlife and how they relate to native cultures and to a larger sense of the metaphysical.17 She believes that the key to permaculture and organic farming or gardening is harmony and synthesis, not mass corporate domination over the elements. Caring for the garden has not always been easy. Over the years, Terri has encountered complications with police, homeless persons, and anti-urban farm antagonists.18 Her fifteen-year devotion to the park has inspired volunteerism and ensured the success of the garden as long as she tends it. However, so that she may pursue other ambitions, Terri is planning to retire from being a full-time gardener and caretaker of the People’s Park garden. She is currently encouraging fellow activists and gardeners like Nathan Pitts to take the reins. “It’s a free garden…anyone can come in and plant something.”19

Berkeley is a fairly sizeable city, and in my opinion, the community at large could definitely benefit more from the People’s Park garden. My observations over the last decade lead me to suggest using the entire southern fifth or sixth of the existing lawn area as an organic farm to be put to use for the Alameda County Food Bank, or perhaps for the exclusive use of Food Not Bombs. The garden could be tended by students and perhaps be linked to a class about urban agriculture at UCB. However, due to the nature of the persistent and ongoing conflicts between the UCB administration and students, community members, and activists, this suggestion may prove difficult to instigate.

In summation, teaching a naturalist and resourceful viewpoint is vital to helping us realize the importance of wildlife, nature, herbology, permaculture, organic gardening, and Native American natural preservationism, and to helping us realize the danger of losing it all to agri-corporations and bio-engineering. For the community, People’s Park will always symbolize the importance of civil rights and the need for public assembly, free speech, and community gardening. The garden survives in light of these poignant difficulties, difficulties that few urban farms have been known to survive or fight against. The garden, like the park, is in bloom.