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July 7, 2008
Green Zone visit web site
Green Zone: A garden installation by Sarah Zurier
In Baghdad, the Green Zone is a fortified government district that contains the villas, palaces, and monuments of Iraq�s former regime and now serves as headquarters for the US occupation authority. Its parklike environment is surrounded by concrete blast walls, chain-link fences, earth berms, barbed wire, and armed checkpoints.
Gardens are Green Zones. They are defined spaces of green refuge within larger, different, and potentially inhospitable settings, whether environmental (like brownfields, deserts, or vacant lots) or temporal (like wartime or winter).
America has a long tradition that links cultivating gardens on the homefront to wartime conservation. Posters and other propaganda from World Wars I and II show Uncle Sam urging Americans to grow their own food in Victory Gardens. On the other hand, in the aftermath of September 11 and throughout six years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Uncle Sam says: �Go shopping.� The message persists in 2008, via stimulus checks from the IRS, despite worldwide food shortages and record-high food prices.
Green Zone at Firehouse 13 is an organic vegetable, herb, and flower garden planted in the detritus of wartime consumption: old tires, shopping bags, shoes, and other repurposed containers. The plants are mostly leafy (herbs, kale, beet greens, lettuce) or develop their fruit underground (radishes). Most of the tires were pulled out of the Woonasquatucket River during the Earth Day cleanup in April 2008.
Green Zone grows all summer long. Firehouse 13 residents will share its produce. Stop by anytime this summer, and look out for Provflux V, August 7-11. Special thanks to Southside Community Land Trust for starting many of the plants from seed.
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