Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys."

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I live in South Central.

This is South Central.

Liquor stores,

fast food,

vacant lots.

So the city planners, they get together

and they figure they've got to change the name

of South Central to make it represent something else.

So they change it to South Los Angeles,

like this is going to change what's really going wrong in the city.

This is South Los Angeles.

(Laughter)

Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots.

Just like 26.5 million other Americans

I live in a food desert:

South Central, Los Angeles.

Home of the drive-thru

and the drive-by.

The funny thing is the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.

People are dying from curable diseases

in South Central, Los Angeles.

For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood

is like 5 times higher than, say, Beverly Hills,

which is like, probably 8, 10 miles away.

I got tired of seeing this happening.

I wonder, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food?

If every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects

that the present food system have on your neighborhood?

I see wheel chairs bought and sold like used cars.

I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks.

And I figured this has to stop.

So I figured that the problem is the solution.

Food is the problem and food is the solution.

Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round-trip

to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides.

So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house.

It was on a strip of land there, we call it a parkway.

It's like 150 ft by like 10 ft.

The thing is, it's owned by the city,

but you have to maintain it.

So I went like: Cool, I'll do whatever the hell I want.

Since it's my responsibility and I've got to maintain it,

so this is how I decided to maintain it.

So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds,

we got together and we started to plant my food forest.

Fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, with vegetables.

What we do here, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group,

where it's composed of, like, gardeners from all walks of life from all over the city.

And it's completely volunteer and everything we do is free.

And the gardening was beautiful, and then somebody complained.

The city came down on me

and they basically gave me a citation

saying that I had to remove my garden.

And this citation turned into a warrant,

and I'm like, Come on, really? A warrant for planting food

on a piece of land that you couldn't care less about?

(Laughter)

And I was like, "Cool, bring it."

Because this time it wasn't coming up.

So L.A. Times got hold of it, Steve Lopez did a story on it,

and talked to the council man and one of the Green Ground members

they put up a petition on change.org

and with 900 signatures we were a success. We had a victory on our hands.

My council man even called me and said how they endorsed and loved what we were doing.

I mean, com on, why woudn't they?

L.A. leads the United States in the vacant lots that the city actually owns.

They own 26 square miles of vacant lots.

That's 20 Central Parks.

That's enogh space to plant 725 million tomato plants.

Why the hell would they not OK this?

Growing one plant will give you a thousand, ten thousand seeds.

With one dollar's worth of green beans will give you, like, $75's worth of produce.

It's my gospel, I'm telling people, grow your own food.

Growing your own food is like printing your own money.

(Laghter)

(Applause)

Thank you.

I have a legacy in South Central.

I grew up there, I raised my sons there,

and I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality

that was manufactured for me by some other people and I'm manufacturing my own reality.

You see, I'm an artist.

Gardening is my grafitti, I grow my art.

Just like a grafitti artist, when they beautify walls, me?

I beautify lawns, parkways.

I use the gardens, so that's like a piece of cloth

and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth.

You'd be surprised what a soil can do if you let it be your canvas.

You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is,

and how it affects people.

So what happened, I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education.

A tool for the transformation of my neighborhood.

To change the community you have to change the composition of the soil.

We are the soil.

You'd be surprised how kids are affected by this.

Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do,

especially in the inner city.

Plus you get strawberries.

(Laughter)

I remember this time, there was this mother and her daughter came,

it was like 10:30 at night, they were in my yard,

and I came out and they looked so ashamed.

Man, it made me feel bad that they were there,

and I told them, you don't have to do it like this.

This is on the street for a reason.

It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry.

This only reinforced why I do this.

And people were asking: "Finley aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food?"

And I am like, "Hell, no, I ain't afraid they're going to steal it. That's why it's on the street.

That's the whole idea. I want them to take it, but at the same time

I want them to take back their health."

There was another time when I put a garden in this homeless shelter

in downtown Los Angeles.

And the guys, they helped me unload the truck.

It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them,

and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother.

And it was just cool see how this changed them,

if it was only for that one moment.

So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe, like, 20 gardens.

In fact, like 50 people come to our dig ins and participate.

And it's all volunteers.

If kids grow kale, kids eat kale.

(Laughter and applause)

If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes.

But when none of this is presented to them,

if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body,

they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them.

I see young people and they want to work,

but they're in this thing where they're caught up,

I see kids that are colored, and they just are in this track that's designed for them,

that leads them to nowhere, so with gardening

I see an opportunity where we can train these kids

to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life.

And when we do this, who knows, we might produce the next George Washington Carver.

But if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this.

This is one of my plans. This is what I want to do.

I want to plant a whole block of gardens, where people can share in the food

in the same block. I want to take in shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes.

Now don't get me wrong.

I'm not talking about no free shit,

because free is not sustainable.

The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it.

(Laughter)

What I'm talking about is putting people to work and getting kids off the street.

And let them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food.

Open your Farmer's Market.

So what I want to do here, we've got to make this sexy.

So I want us all to become eco-lutionary, renegades, gangsters, gangsta gardeners.

We've got to flip the script. I want a gangsta here.

If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta.

Be gangsta with your shovel, OK?

And let that be your weapon of choice.

(Applause)

So, basically, if want to meet with me,

you know, if you want to meet, don't call me

if you want to sit around in cushy chairs

and have meetings when you talk about doing some shit,

where you talk about doing some shit.

If you want to meet with me come to the garden with your shovel,

so we can plant some shit.

Peace!

Thank you, thank you.

(Applause)