Sir Joseph Banksy

This is the best summary I could come up with:

And in so doing, she says, they are not just brightening up the concrete vistas of urban cityscapes, but beginning the essential adaptations industrialised societies need to make to preserve biodiversity and become more resilient to global heating – and all the while challenging the liberal capitalist state.

“Guerrilla gardening is the practice of planting in public spaces in your neighbourhood” she says on a humid summer afternoon, walking between outlaw flower beds in Hackney, east London.

By her own account clueless about where to begin with gardening, Miles turned to the community, posting on the local Covid mutual aid WhatsApp group, the Facebook page for Hackney’s chapter of Extinction Rebellion, and even on Nextdoor.

Plants can help to reduce air pollution, Miles points out; they can mitigate the urban heat island effect, which is contributing to lethal heatwaves; and they provide habitats and food for the insects, birds and animals that we are realising form crucial links in the web of life.

Most of all, Miles points out, guerrilla gardening is a way that people can take back not only their present, but also their future – even as it seems under dire threat from an economic and social system apparently hellbent on human self-eradication.

“Guerrilla gardening, even if it is just sowing something in a tree bed, it might not change the world – you might help some bees, you might bring joy to someone walking down the street – but you’re also reminding people, or awakening something that is like ‘Maybe this is how it should be.’

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