This is a book everyone should read. Dungy makes that argument right from the start, explaining that “whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn’t easy” (p. 10). The distinction between being “politically engaged” being for people who vote only once every four years (and possibly only for one office at that!) and being “politically engaged” being for everyone who has a “vested interest in the direction people on this planet take in relationship to others” is a clarifying and instructive one. It’s sentiments like these that immediately hook me into a book and make it part of my living and breathing for however long it takes to finish reading it—and then for some time afterward. Thankfully, there are plenty more thoughtful ideas throughout the text.
You can tell from the subtitle that this book is more than a how-to book about cultivating flowers and plants in a yard or community garden. As a result, one of the themes that appears throughout the text is the strangeness of the white, male gaze in nature writing that has existed for centuries (e.g., Muir, Thoreau). These writers, Dungy contends, see themselves as “set apart from” nature instead of being “a part of the natural world” (p. 86, emphasis in original). As with many types of writing from the past, the views of these men are seen as supposedly neutral or correct because their positionality is left uncritiqued. It’s simply assumed they saw the world accurately and were right to see nature as separate from humanity.
Dungy critiques this idea not just through counterargument but through her lived counterexample as a Black mother raising a garden and cultivating a family during the anti-Blackness of her fellow Fort Collins, Colorado, residents during the Trump presidency and the uprising for Black Lives in the summer of 2020. In relating the conversations she had with her child and husband during this time, as well as caring for the garden and explaining how each plant has its place in the yard, she relates an embodied version of nature writing that Muir and Thoreau could only dream of. She also reveals how the knowledge of nature that she wields is not borne from her mere observations alone. The emphasis on community knowledge and distributed cognition is evident through the group chats, personal conversations, and other insights she gleans from everyone she discusses gardening with.
A further difference in Dungy’s approach and that of those men is that Dungy is not merely observing nature but is, as I’ve indicated already, growing a garden. Anyone who has planted or weeded or mowed or trimmed knows that certain plants grow more easily in certain areas. You may even be aware that there are invasive species to your area. Dungy’s reflection on USDA Hardiness Zones (p. 135) demonstrates that she has to have a deeper knowledge of how nature actually works than could have been available to Muir and Thoreau. We all know the USDA’s zones didn’t exist back then, so they couldn’t have used it to inform their writing. That’s not my point. My point is that these men didn’t have to grow anything except old and they had a lot of help doing even that, which Dungy ponders as she regularly switches gears from being a university professor to being a gardener to being the parent of an elementary school child during COVID’s pre-vaccine months. The invisibility of the care work that Muir, Thoreau, et al. received is the point here. They couldn’t have done their work alone, yet they are seen as solitary geniuses.
To bring it back even farther, Dungy discusses The Great Chain of Being by Diego de Valadés, a sixteenth-century artist. This engraving was designed to help European missionaries explain how the world works to indigenous people in the Americas how the world is structured. It is heavy on structure and hierarchy. Dungy herself comments that it “sums up much of the thinking that still drives so many interactions in the world” (p. 162). That is, that if there is a hierarchy, then the people at the top are holy or otherwise deserving of their place at the top, and if you challenge the structure, you are going to have a bad time. If nothing else, Dungy’s text is meant to argue against such a brutal regime.
Dungy’s analysis of religious hierarchy reaches a pivotal point when she confronts the white, male pastor in her church who has used Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words in a sermon on the Sunday after the 2016 election to emphasize the importance of turning the other cheek (pp. 191-195). If reading that sentence made your eyes roll back in your head, then you can see where this conversation is going. Dungy relates how the pastor’s sermon caused harm to people in the audience hearing it, most of whom were white and half of whom where women. The pastor thanks her for her words and then puts the onus on her to let him know if he causes offense in the future… It’s galling beyond belief. If nothing else, I will ask my fellow well-meaning white people to please learn that there are other Black radicals from the ‘60s besides King and he gave speeches other than “I Have a Dream” and “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Lest you think racial justice and environmental issues are disconnected, Dungy reminds us later, through words of her father, that “For us… there is no separation between the environment and social justice” (pp. 211-212). If I had to pick just one of the many quotes I’d already used in this text to sum it up somehow, it might be this one. Pairing it with the quotation from the first paragraph about political engagement tells you quite a bit about what you can do to empower yourself and others socially and racially in this world. Think of how you can challenge the hierarchy of The Great Chain of Being and act accordingly. After all, worrying alone never added an hour to anyone’s life.
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