Pictures: Tuesday's Rally At the Community Garden

Please give more information! Is this in Portland? Sacramento? What Garden? HELP!!

But it would be nice if people posted more details about this rally.

These pictures were taken by Lokai at the scene of the community garden in Sacramento. This beautiful place has been a community garden for nearly thirty years. However, it has recently been taken over by a corporation that intends to turn it into condos. Just what the world needs -- more condos.

A metal fence was erected around the garden, a sturdy gate locked tight, and the gardeners declared illegal. In the course of the action in Sacramento, many attempts were made to reclaim this place for the community. The gates were torn down and gardeners poured in, tilling, planting and watering tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and other plants. Some of them locked down around a fruit tree -- one of many beautiful fruit trees in the oasis.

The police, in their frenzied mission to "serve and protect" the people of Sacramento, swarmed in with tasers, pepper spray, guns and ammo. At least one protestor was cut out of the tree in which s/he sat. Several people were arrested, probably for "tresspassing." Police officers tromped across newly planted seedlings, asserting their questionable authority with a vengeance.

Again and again, protesters returned to this area to reclaim it for the community. At last word, the police were continuing to hold the perimeter for corporate America.

Some people felt that the action in the garden was distracting from the main event -- which was, of course, to protest the agricultural ministerial meeting going on at the convention center a few blocks away. I do not share this view, though. I couldn't think of a better way to demonstrate a commitment to public and diverse agriculture than to take back a garden. Few things are more radical than gardening. There is power in taking back your own food supply, in being able to feed yourself and others from the earth, in building a strong community with those around you. There is also a profound sense of the spiritual to be found in working with the earth to bring forth new life in a garden. This spiritual awakening can sustain one even in the midst of such worldly turmoil as was experienced all around us in Sacramento. While people were being tased, stunned, beaten and arrested for violations as serious as possession of bandanas in public, it would have been easy to forget that underneath it all, rebirth and the miracle of creation abounds. Viva la jardin.