Freerange Vol.2: Gardening and Violence

Direct from our teams of contributors in the diverse locations of Wellington, Baticoloa, Johannesburg, New York, Melbourne, and Oxford, comes 15 fresh, new and freeranging articles.

If this second issue of Freerange was a cake then you would be about to tuck into a feast of many layers, for the interaction between gardening and violence is varied and complex.

From the personal to the global this issue covers everything from backyards to tectonic plates, climate change, vegetable gardening, global food production networks, trauma healing, sustainability, design and non-violent resistance.

Freerange Volume 2 includes the following articles:

  • The Butterfly Peace & Kalabala Bindu Gardens: by Sam Soundy

  • The Leasons: by Ruth Hill (with photographs by Dion Howard)

  • Food, Climate Change and International Development: An Era Of Violence: by Rajarshi Rakesh Sahai (with images by David Drew)

  • War Can Be Buzzy: by Michael Dann

  • A Remembered Project for More Earth: by Byron Kinnaird

  • Bird/Seed Shelter: by Taka Saru And Julia Molloy

  • The Bush, Two Peoples and Power: by Jessie Moss

  • Community Gardens in Wellington: by Tania Sawicki Mead

  • Food for Thought: by Amanda Armstrong

  • Fighting Urban Filth with Flowers: The Guerilla Gardener: by Rozzy Middleton

  • The Wright Backyard: by Celia Goldsmith & Nick Sargent

  • The potato peeler: with illustration by John Baker

  • Sprouting at Home: by Nicola Holden

This is the second small step in Freerange’s mission to gather, develop, and conceptualise contemporary wisdoms, to continue the project of re-discovering meaning and purpose in our multi-faceted time. As much as we may love them, Freerange is not really about chickens and pirates, it is about developing wisdom. It is not widely appreciated how fundamentally radical the time we live in is. The post-WWII world has seen a phenomenal growth in the accessibility of human knowledge. From the depths of a jungled Sri Lanka to the deserts of the Middle East we can now access many of the world great knowledge sources more easily than ever before.

Intellectually, emotionally, culturally and spiritually we cannot be anything but a reflection of the world we exist in. The contemporary exchange of knowledge has changed the world we now live in and it is one that is vastly different to that experienced by our ancestors, as their world was to their ancestors. We need to start plotting a route through the competing truths of today. Our suggestion is that we become pirates not privateers, neutral angels not cowboys, intellectual probes not ideologues, fly-by-nighters, crepuscular raiders, freerange chickens, foxes not hedgehogs. When Lucifer fell out from heaven he was assisted by the seldom-mentioned neutral angels, a group that sits in the space between the absolutes of ideology and anarchy. We have the freewill to act strategically, make moral judgments, change our minds, make mistakes, create ambiguity, culture jam, exist in geographies of subversion, outwit and cunningly create.