Partisan Gardens

On Partisan Gardens, we know climate catastrophe is here, and it’s our food system’s dead end. Here we see sustainable fine dining and ecological destruction, hunger and obesity, extreme wealth and immense poverty. We can’t wait any longer — for a tech breakthrough, climate apocalypse, the revolution, or a reform of the USDA loan system. We must be frank about reality, to reckon with our options. We must choose sides, and become partisans of a new way to live and grow food.

Tracks

October 2022: The State Monopoly on Hunger with Hannah Kass This month on Partisan Gardens, we interviewed Hannah Kass, a food systems researcher and graduate student at University of Wisconsin – Madison. Kass recently published an article in the Journal of Peasant Studies that aimed to extend radical critiques of contemporary food systems and efforts to reform them. The article, “Food anarchy and the State...	58:59	11/7/22
August 2022 \| A Foot in Both Worlds For this episode, we share a candid and generative conversation between Kay and Sarah, shortly after World’s End, Sarah’s farm, hosted a week long group retreat. They share reflections on that experience, and the role of farms in hosting urban visitors. They touch on the strange idea of owning the land, reflecting on the concept...	59:00	9/1/22
July 2022 \| Learning From Bioregionalism, Part Two For this episode, we finish sharing an ambitious two-part interview with Doug, a life-long deserter, commune-dweller, and bioregionalist organizer currently living in western Canada. Doug is interviewed by his nephew, a contributor to a militant network of communes in the region. Doug continues to share invaluable recollections on the experience of living underground and in...	55:10	7/27/22
June 2022 \| Learning From Bioregionalism This month, we begin sharing an ambitious two-part interview with Doug, a life-long deserter, commune-dweller, and bioregionalist organizer currently living in western Canada. Doug is interviewed by his nephew, a contributor to a militant network of communes in the region. Doug shares invaluable recollections on the experience of living underground and in exile in Canada...	59:00	6/30/22
May 2022 \| The Neighborhood Planting Project Earlier this spring, people across the eastern half of the US organized neighborhood planting projects in order to widely distribute and plant food-bearing trees. Their motivations are diverse, and we’ll hear from a range of them in this episode, but these tree-planters are often hoping to build a more verdant, autonomous, resilient, common life in...	59:00	5/26/22
April 2022 \| The 2022 Earthbound Farmers Almanac This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2022 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go...	59:00	4/29/22
March 2022 \| The Grain Problem — Russian Agriculture and the Impact of War This month, we spoke to Susanne Wengle, a professor at Notre Dame who researches post-Soviet political and economic transformation in Russia. Her second book is Black Earth, White Bread; a Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food. We were eager to hear her perspective on the history of agriculture in Russia and Ukraine and the current war’s ripple effects...	57:13	3/30/22
February 2022 \| RetroSuburbia with David Holmgren This month, we’re excited to share our conversation with David Holmgren, author of the recent RetroSuburbia and co-author of the landmark 1978 book, Permaculture One, with Bill Mollison, which launched the international permaculture movement. Drawing on permaculture principles of recognizing existing patterns and incorporating them into design, Holmgren is calling for a bold and improvisational approach to the...	59:00	2/24/22
January 2022 \| The Farmworker Caravan For this episode of Partisan Gardens, we learn about the conditions facing migrant farm workers in California. We share a two conversations: one between Partisan Gardens and Nikola Garcia, author of a recent article in Inhabit: Territories called “The Farmworker Caravan: Mutual Aid in California’s Migrant Worker Communities.” The other is a conversation between Nikola and Darlene...	58:59	1/28/22
December 2021 \| Beyond the Banana Plantation This month, Partisan Gardens is all about the banana. Second only to the tomato as the most consumed fruit in the world, the banana has thus far only been made available in temperate regions through a violent extraction process led by multinational corporations. Attacks against this colonial system likely began at least as early as...	59:00	12/30/21