“Our greatness, our talent has never been the question. It’s been a matter of grappling for control over what we do.”—Spike Lee
Spike Lee is considered a pioneer of what has become known as guerrilla filmmaking, a do-it-yourself ethos that goes against and outside the system. Guerrilla filmmakers work with miniscule budgets and often without permits, under the radar of authorities or the mainstream media. While many lament the cooptation of “independent” filmmaking by Hollywood, guerrilla filmmakers are motivated by passion, and the movies that they make speak to community interests and needs on the most grassroots level.
While the guerrilla filmmaker’s most powerful weapon is a camera, there is another group of street-level activists who use a different arsenal—dirt, seeds, and trowels. Guerrilla gardeners see the urban environment as space that needs to be reclaimed and transformed through the planting of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. While many community-minded green thumbs nurture local parks and gardens and work within the system to campaign for greener streets, their guerrilla cousins take direct action by planting in vacant lots and sidewalks, without permission and often in secrecy.
As long as there has been “property” there have been guerrilla gardeners planting in the cracks. The 17th century English movement known as the Diggers went so far as to create anarchist agrarian communities on common land in an attempt to rise above the conditions imposed on them by the ruling classes. And in the early 1800s, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman brought apples to the American frontier, by planting seeds on public lands and leaving the orchards in the hands of locals.
In more recent years, guerrilla gardening has exploded in cities like Chicago and New York where waves of development have too often ignored the need for green space. In neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification, like where I live in Bushwick, Brooklyn, it is very common to walk down a block and see three or four empty, fenced-in lots that have been bought by developers, but which are just sitting there, collecting trash. For this scenario, guerrilla gardeners have come up with the perfect weapon—the seed bomb.
As the D.I.Y. gardening blog funtimehappygardenexplosion explains, “A seed bomb is a little capsule with everything you need to grow a plant all bundled up.” Specifically—clay, seeds, dirt, and if you’re really serious, worm castings. You can make seed bombs in the comfort of your kitchen, put them in a tote bag, and throw them over fences into vacant lots on your walk to the subway.
