cover illustration by Bonnie Behan

"For activist readers who believe activism is a political pursuit, FOOD NOT LAWNS: HOW TO TURN YOUR YARD INTO A GARDEN AND YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD INTO A COMMUNITY offers a different viewpoint, maintaining that growing food where you live is a key method of becoming a food activist in the community. Chapters advocate planting home and community gardens with an eye to drawing important connections between the politics of a home or community garden and the wider politics of usage, consumption, and sustainability. Another rarity: chapters promote small, easy changes in lifestyles to achieve a transition between personal choice and political activism at the community level, providing keys to change any reader can use." - Bookwatch/Midwest Book Review, December 2006

"Certified permaculture designer Flores advocates living an ecologically friendly lifestyle by creating gardens. Following a foreword by Toby Hemenway (Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture), she discusses the identification of garden sites, the water cycle and water conservation, soils and composting, plants, how to save seed, project design, the fostering of community involvement, the inclusion of children in projects, the sharing of information, and activism. Many of Flores's ideas are for the extremely committed. She advocates dumpster digging, composting human feces, and living life without appliances like refrigerators. She also suggests growing food on land, not necessarily with the landowner's permission, and espouses gray-water conservation techniques that may be illegal in some communities. While growing your own food is a worthy goal, Flores doesn't always seem to recognize the hard work involved. She also doesn't expand on all of her ideas, but she does offer an extensive list of resources for further research. Flores has an engaging style and is clearly passionate about her subject, and her debut book provides an alternative viewpoint, but it will probably not interest mainstream audiences. Purchase as required." - Library Journal review by Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove Public Library, November 15, 2006.

Heather Jo Flores, a certified permaculture designer, holds a B.A. in ecology, education, and the arts from Goddard College. She offers environmental landscape design and consultation services. She is an author, artist, musician, community activist and farmer in Oregon. Her website is www.heatherjoflores.com.

For more information about the Food Not Lawns movement, visit www.foodnotlawns.com.

Toby Hemenway was the author of the first major North American book on permaculture, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, as well as The Permaculture City. After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories at Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was associate editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. He taught permaculture and consulted and lectured on ecological design throughout the country, and his writing appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. Toby passed away in 2016.

Visit his web site at www.patternliteracy.com

As I write this, one of America s busiest highways, the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, is being torn up and enlarged. Long traffic delays have led thousands of commuters to leave their cars at home and ride buses or the city s famous El to work. And they hate it. Mass transit takes longer, but that is not the real issue. For too many people, the car commute is the only time they are alone, away from the pressures and demands of family, boss, and coworkers. The fuel-saving and pollution-reducing bus or train, rather than being a relaxing and meditative time to read, listen to music, or simply stare out the window, is felt as a theft of the few moments they have to themselves. Car commuters may complain about the time wasted in traffic jams and the soaring cost of gas, but faced with the prospect of riding among strangers for an hour each day, most would much rather simmer alone indefinitely on a highway-turned-parking-lot.

This dilemma points to some colossal design flaws in our culture. Who would create a system in which so many forces conspire against the ecological act of leaving your car at home and taking public transportation? Why do we need so badly to escape our families, friends, jobs, and those with whom we anonymously share our communities? How do we begin to disconnect from the pressures and ugliness forced into our lives, and to reconnect, by choice, with the people, places, and things that give us joy?

The title of this book may have led you to believe it is simply about trading turf for vegetables. It is far more: it is a roadmap for a personal and cultural transformation that begins on our own lawns and carries us into our neighborhoods, communities, and society. If we follow this path, it will leave us healthier, wiser, and more joyful.

Food Not Lawns is a radical book. I write that with some irony, because the simple suggestions and techniques that Heather Flores offers grow a garden, talk to neighbors, and try to notice the consequences of our actions would have been plain common sense to our forebears of just two or three generations ago. But today, when saving a seed can result in a lawsuit, catching water from your roof risks fines from the health department, and a gardening workshop in Sacramento ends in arrests for terrorism, small acts of self-reliance require not merely courage, but unusual vision and persistence in the face of a deeply apathetic culture.

Although Heather s stance is anti-corporate and anti-polluter, this book is not about stopping anything. It is about starting to create the world we want to see, a remarkably positive vision of a more fulfilling life gained in small, easy steps. Her writing unites science and magic, mechanics and mystery. She offers practical tools for reducing our manufactured dependencies and building our interdependence, and helps us reconnect with ourselves, our land, and our communities.

This is a book about grassroots practice, even though grass is antithetical to what Heather stands for. She helps us see our sterile swards as the embodiments of waste, overconsumption, and emptiness that they are, and shows us ways to rebuild them into sources of physical and spiritual nourishment. Moving from our yards to the global terrain, she outlines the work that we face. But she wisely stays focused on the local and shows us what we can do right here without feeling overwhelmed. She can wade with grace and balance into taboo topics such as using human waste for fertilizer, and I can attest that she writes from not just a theoretical acquaintance with this and many other topics. She has done nearly everything she describes in this book, and done it well.

Read this book. But don t stop there. Help create the paradise gardens and communities that Heather herself is bringing into being. I ll see you there.

Toby Hemenway May 2006