Abstract
Gardening is all the rage in the US today. Even the White House has a vegetable garden. Although Michelle Obama’s professed purpose was to fight the obesity epidemic, there may be a bigger picture behind the trend: The need for gardening may be explained by the growing number of severe crises people have been confronted with in recent years—from the attacks on September 11 to the droughts and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes brought about by climate change, to the financial crisis that has devastated entire regions—crises that turn people to search for hopeful alternatives. According to Keith Tidball and Marianne Krasny’s book Greening in the Red Zone, the turn to nature in times of crisis is a very effective step towards building resilience not only for the individual, but also for an entire community. In his foreword, Lance Gunderson calls the book a ‘garden of hope’. This very ambitious volume provides a fountain of insights into the many ways people in communities all over the world become stewards of nature after experiencing natural and human-made disasters, and how these acts of greening engender ‘social–ecological resilience’ and transformative change. The editors collected contributions from a highly interdisciplinary group of experts from biologists to landscape architects and resilience specialists to philosophers, to underscore their hypothesis.
The book is divided into three parts: It begins with an overview of the theoretical foundations, introductions to the terminology and existing scholarly literature (Part I) that is followed by a list of different ‘motives and explanations’ for greening in red zones (Part II) which in turn is followed by a collection of beautifully Illustrated stories and case studies from communities around the world from Johannesburg to Sarajewo, Cyprus to Liberia, New York to Kenya, London to Cameroon, Tokyo to Germany, where people turned to greening after violent conflict, earthquakes, hurricanes and other forms of disaster. The chapters are preceded by tables that provide a brief overview of the content, and each chapter ends with a substantial bibliography. Rather than focusing on politics or ecology, the authors focus on investigating the relationships between humans and their natural environments in ‘red zones’, that is, periods of time and specific spaces that experienced severe trauma. With the broad diversity of examples, the editors aim to provide models that others can emulate in post-crisis contexts to help restore morale, food security and social–ecological balance and establish positive feedback opportunities for the long term.
One might think that the healing power of nature does not need to be explained, that humans have always turned to nature in search of consolation and connection. The poetry and literature of all cultures certainly attest to that. However, this volume makes a very convincing argument that such a turn to nature also helps foster resilience, and that this can be shown to be the case in a wide spectrum of human interactions with nature. Using Holling’s notion of the ‘adaptive cycle’, the authors position their work within the reorganization and regrowth phases—a portion of the cycle hitherto understudied.
The book will certainly be most useful to policymakers and those who study how systems change, how change can be effected and how greening can play a role in building resilient communities. But the findings are also relevant for a whole host of disciplines, from politicians to landscape architects to public health officials to psychologists. And the many concrete examples in the case studies will even be inspirational to lay readers who simply want to learn from and be inspired by successful greening efforts that have helped people overcome traumatic experiences all over the world.
It is reassuring to see that the common sense argument behind the positive emotions that our interactions with nature provide is supported by scientific study. Nature is joyful and peaceful; it empowers us, gives us opportunities to be creative and imaginative and gives us agency and a sense of belonging. But there are also some, perhaps not so obvious, findings. The evidence confirms, for example, that engagement with nature fosters the ability to re-evaluate and help mobilize socially. It brings together people with multiple experiences and knowledge and provides meaningful collective action that inspires government participation. It provides opportunities for memorialization, training, healing and reducing pain. It also improves working memory and enhances concentration—both extremely important for survival in a post-disaster situation. The studies even confirm that nature has beneficial effects on the cognitive functioning of adults and children. There is research to support the correlation between gardening and reduced risk of dementia. The broad range of applicability may likewise surprise the reader: from prison inmates to cancer survivors, from hurricane victims to victims of industrial decline—resilience can be built through greening in very different circumstances.
The book provides overwhelming amounts of evidence for its findings, both in the case studies and the extensive literature reviews. How greening can foster resilience and that it does so is made abundantly clear. Yet, there are only few instances where the authors investigate the why. E.O. Wilson’s notion of biophilia is suggested as a possible explanation. Many authors refer to our general desire to be loved and connected to the wider universe around us. But the question remains: We attribute positive emotions to trees and flowers—why? Is it, as some claim, the fascination with the other, the ‘being away’ that nature allows? Perhaps, these questions can be better answered by our poets and scholars of religion? Robert Frost comes to mind, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The garden Eden has its equivalents in many other religious traditions. The volume is already highly interdisciplinary. The inclusion of humanist ecocritics would have been a logical next step.
Some aspects of the layout in this volume are unfortunate. Though the multi-page tables preceding each chapter provide useful summaries, they are difficult to read, and it is not exactly clear why the authors felt the need to include them, given that the overall purpose of the book is very clear and the many illustrations help provide easy access to the content. The inclusion of abstracts and keywords at the beginning of chapters, and the wide variety of fonts used throughout, though meant to help the reader, actually become a distraction. Indeed the volume could have benefitted from more stringent editing to reduce redundancies.
As climate change will force human communities around the world to confront ever more catastrophic weather events, this book will become an important resource for mitigation and adaptation experts. Even in peaceful times, many people say that gardening has a therapeutic effect on them. The authors in this volume show how nurturing plants becomes especially relevant for people who have collectively experienced a severe crisis. Recognizing nature as a fountain of life and learning to cultivate it makes people resilient in the face of radical change and able to adapt and transform. That this is a model for long-term well-being should inspire everyone to embrace the volume’s findings.