America's Community & Urban Gardening

This post is part of a series by Todd Forsgren on his project Post-industrial Edens — photographs or urban and community gardens worldwide, which has been ongoing since 2004.

The popularity of urban and community gardens has seen a rapid rise around the world in the early 21st century. Gardeners cite a wide variety of reasons for this, from the practical and economic, to the political and philosophical. Globalization, and our increased awareness of abstract global issues, does indeed seem to be linked to an increasing number of people seeking this tangible and intimate connection to the landscape. 

A renewed interest in self-sufficiency and local/organically grown food is apparent in the developed world. Increasing food prices and shortages have encouraged those in the developing world to grow their own produce. As populations continue to rise and the climate changes, it seems inevitable that such gardening projects will become even more vital and these needs more pressing. 

While community-based agriculture has long been part of American culture, the allotment gardens reached their height during the Victory Garden program of World War II. During the war, gardens were planted according to a systematic plan for maximizing productivity from a small space. It is estimated that this popular program produced a full forty percent of vegetables consumed in the United States during the war, allowing more surplus food and resources to be sent overseas to support the troops.

Today, community gardening is seeing a large resurgence. These tiny plots of land can still be incredibly prolific: a carefully managed 20ft x 20ft garden can potentially grow $2000 worth of produce annually. The diversity of gardening practices currently seen in these spaces also suggests that community gardens possess other values to those who cultivate them.

 Despite this long-standing tradition, community gardens still exist in a manner quite novel to American land-use philosophy. Notably, our concept of land ownership, often thought of in terms of a public/private dichotomy, becomes much murkier within these gardens. The gardens run the gamut from individuals cultivating their own plot to land worked in a truly communal manner. Gardens are often created on abandoned lots or publicly owned land, where individuals can rent space for a nominal fee. Yet individual land ownership is often quite tenuous.

Perhaps due to this uncertainty and the initiative needed to start a garden, an especially strong sense of community often develops among the gardeners. These gardens often become central hubs of social integration. Conversely, the removal of this space from the ‘‘home”’ and ‘‘yard,” as well as the small financial obligation entailed, seem to lessen some of the sense of personal responsibility to maintain the garden. Meticulously managed plots are often next to plots that have been forgotten. In several instances, a particularly successful garden has even been blamed as a catalyst for gentrification of a neighborhood.

While some gardeners adopt the classic Victory Garden model, others employ more innovative and experimental gardening choices. Also, ideas from many other gardening traditions coexist in current community gardens, from English flower gardens to Japanese stone gardens. The modest scale of these spaces allows gardeners to personally re-connect to the land in their own way, but complete escape from the surrounding urban environment is impossible. The individual visions of community gardeners embrace everything from the pastoral ideal of the American landscape to a more realistic synthesis of this vernacular landscape.

Slosh Cyphers at Arlington Arts Center

Billy Friebele created a body of work focusing on urban waterways entitled Slosh Cyphers, which is a part of the Applied Forces group exhibition currently installed at the Arlington Arts Center. Due to the spread of COVID-19 the gallery is shuttered. This blog post is a way to continue sharing this work. 

When I am oversaturated with the mediated experience of staring at screens, I instinctively lunge out of the door – zombie-like – to the nearest body of water, which happens to be the Northeast Branch of the Anacostia River. Near the border between Washington, DC and Maryland, this waterway is inextricably linked to a sprawling web of roads, train tracks, bridges, and infrastructure. 

Growing up not too far from where I live now, my friends and I sought out these in-between spaces because they were uncontrolled. We enjoyed watching vines wrap around rusting train tracks and rivers pushed up against dirty concrete. The entanglement of human construction and natural flow revealed itself in layers of time. These formative experiences led me to investigate similar forgotten territories in my art practice.

Anacostia River - Photo credit: Chris Furnkranz

The Northeast Branch is a 3.2 mile stretch of stream that winds through Prince Georges County. Tributaries with slanted concrete channels at times guarded by chain-link fences lead from areas of pavement near my house to this waterway. 

There is a site that I repeatedly visit with my dog off the paved trail – a thorny slope leads to a small rocky shore. Here, I am drawn to a drainage pipe where water pours down a cement slab into the stream. Someone spray painted a pair of eyes above the gaping tunnel mouth. It reminds me of high school. As I walk around this site, I find the most unusual debris. Baby shoes, plastic jewelry, a weight set, an oversized container of protein supplements, bags of clothes are spread across the ground like a spatial poem. I return to this site through changing seasons and witness the landscape wrapping itself around these deserted artifacts, vines using them for structure, heavy rains washing them into the river and downstream. Plastic bottles bobbing up and down like abandoned ghost ships, are a frequent sight. 

One study conducted in 2019, just downstream in Bladensburg, MD, found 441.73 microplastics per liter (MPP/L) in water samples. This number only increases as multiple streams and tributaries join the Anacostia River. Near the Nationals Park, just before the Anacostia joins the Potomac River, 696.05 MPP/L were found. 

Watching clear plastic water bottles floating downstream, responding to the changing forces of the water, bumping against rocks, makes me think of the journey these macroplastics take through local waterways, shedding tiny particles with every encounter. I decide to use this movement as a catalyst for drawing. 

Gathering objects from the site and combining them with a modular kit of parts, like a boom mic pole, drawing compass, and paint roller, I build a makeshift drawing machine that records the rhythm of the bottle. Dots appear when ripples occur in the water and lines depict smoother passages. In the attempt to capture fluctuations of the river as a two-dimensional record, losses in translation occur, reflecting our inability to fully understand the essence of water.

Similarly, in controlling and containing water for our personal use, we perpetually discard plastic containers. While useful to our immediate human needs, these containers take an average of 450 years to biodegrade. The effects and imprints of our tools echo into the future, marking the landscape far beyond our timeline of comprehension.

450-year curse – Julio Fine Art Gallery, Loyola University Maryland

In an age of the attention economy, algorithms are tuned to catch our glimpses and hold them. I find myself in a constant state of distraction yet always looking for signs of fleeting progress. Perhaps this is what drives me to visit these aqueous landscapes. There is no progress. Barriers melt and time is spongy. As I sit staring into the gurgling rush of water, herons, turtles, beavers, herring, hawks, foxes and deer go about their business. Mating dragonflies land on my drawing. Natural rhythms unfold in slow rippling time. 

Detail from Drawing Record from Northeast Branch, Anacostia River - Riverdale, MD (4 Layers from 4 Different Days)

Jenny Odell writes about the Calabazas Creek in her book, How to Do Nothing, “[s]naking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away – all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.” Perhaps this project has been an excuse to step out of time, to leave the productivity grid and explore the hidden in-between spaces. In these gaps, under bridges, behind buildings, water still flows as it always has and nature absorbs the rotting, discarded, traces of our quenchless quest for progress. 

European Allotment Gardens

This post is part of a series by Todd Forsgren on his project Post-industrial Edens — photographs of urban and community gardens worldwide. His project has been ongoing since 2004.

In the UK and Ireland they’re called “allotment gardens.” The Czechs call them “zahrádkářské kolonie.”  It’s “schrebergärten” in the German speaking world, and in France they’re known as “jardins-familiaux.” The Italians call them “orti urbani,” and in Spain they are known as “hort comunitari.” 

Though traditions and practices of urban and community gardening vary from country to country, city to city, and even garden to garden, there are also some similarities. For example, these gardens are often found on the margins of cities, where a group of people have come together and pooled resources to cultivate the land. The land is normally not owned by the gardeners themselves but leased at a discounted rate by municipalities or utility companies (in marginal places such as those next to railroad tracks), which make these spaces affordable to diverse social classes. In other instances, the gardeners are squatters on unused or undevelopable parcels of land.

The gardens are popular among retirees, where many grow heirloom varieties of produce that they remember from childhood, but which are difficult to find in chain grocery stores. Local flower and fruit tree varieties mix with seeds from more widely cultivated and homogenized plants. In other gardens the idea of recreation is more important than production; gardeners have built small cottages, some simple and others with elaborate architecture, to visit on the weekends, spending more time sipping coffee, tea, wine, or beer than they spend gardening.

Often, the popularity of these gardening cultures has been punctuated by geopolitical trends. For example, gardens became quite popular in many regions during the communist era. During this period the gardens offered urban residents an opportunity to escape from the vast concrete housing projects. The little garden plots offered relatively free reign over a small piece of land and often also provided a substantial supplement of fresh produce, a scarce commodity in some nations during Communism.

Today, the gardens are also becoming more popular amongst environmentalists, younger generations of Europeans, and the “Slow Food” movement, which is a response to mass-produced farming and fast food.

These gardens are places to experiment with the balance between growing traditional produce and environmental concerns relating to overpopulation and consumption. They are also spaces where I look for unusual and unexpected ways that the urban and rural come together.

Ceramic Music / Керамическая музыка

Evgeny Masloboev / Евгений Маслобоев

Of all the languages that exist on the planet Earth, the language of musical improvisation is the closest to the language of the Garden of Eden. 

     -- Evgeny Masloboev

Cinema news: The virus is rampant in the streets, in people’s souls and minds. Meanwhile, in Irkutsk, Russia, the process of creating a feature musical film "Star Alphabet" begins. Four film shorts, "Adam", "Light", "Water", and "String Theorem" are united by the idea of the process of searching for the alphabet of a forgotten language – the language with which all living beings previously communicated, including plants, animals, angels, God, and man in the Garden of Eden. The authors of this movie epic suggest that such a proto-language could be the language of the universal vibrational field. And music is now our only memory of this language, its pale shadow.

The first film short was born out of my desire to play music on a ceramic tile… And then the wheel of associations was spinning: tile...clay...Adam. In the basement of the store of ceramic tiles and finishing materials, "Red Line," courtesy of Arkady Olgin, a wonderful sample of ceramic music was created – the first composition of the film "Alphabet". The second musical piece was born in the depths of the ceramic workshop "Les,” thanks to the outstanding assistance of Andrey Zhuravlev.

The filmmakers include: Evgeny Masloboev, Ivan Milov, Stepan Turik, Olga Kurlykina, Izolda Ferlikh, Lila Kananykhina, Polina Turik, Irina Lipovitskaya, Albert Faskhutdinov and Dmitry, Svetlana, and Ksenia of the Milov family.

(Evgeny will continue to provide updates on this project as more progress is made.)

Евгений Маслобоев: «Из всех языков, существующих на планете Земля, язык музыкальной импровизации – самый близкий к языку Эдемского Сада…»

Новости кинематографа. На улицах, в душах и умах свирепствует вирус. А тем временем в Иркутске начинается процесс создания художественного музыкального фильма «Алфавит» (рабочее название «Звёздная Азбука»). Четыре киноновеллы: «Адам», «Свет», «Вода», «Теорема струн» объединены идеей процесса поиска алфавита забытого языка – языка, с помощью которого общались все живые существа: растения, ангелы, животные, Бог и Человек в Эдеме – райском саду. Авторы этой кино-эпопеи предполагают, что подобным праязыком мог быть язык всеобщего вибрационного поля. И музыка – постфактум – это лишь наше воспоминание об этом языке, его бледная тень.

Новелла «Адам». Евгений Маслобоев рассказывает: «Идея новеллы «Адам» родилась из моего желания поиграть музыку на керамической плитке… А дальше – завертелось колесо ассоциативного ряда: плитка – глина – Адам…». В подвале магазина керамической плитки и отделочных материалов «Красная Линия», любезно предоставленного Аркадием Ольгиным, был создан замечательный образчик керамической музыки – первая композиция фильма «Алфавит». Вторая музыкальная пьеса была рождена в недрах керамической мастерской «Les», благодаря огромному содействию Андрея Журавлёва.

Творческая группа создателей фильма: Евгений Маслобоев, Иван Милов, Stepan Turik, Ольга Курлыкина, Izolda Ferlikh, Лиля Кананыхина, Полина Турик, Ирина Липовицкая, Альберт Фасхутдинов и Дмитрий, Светлана, Ксения – семья Миловых.

Japan's 市民農園 (Shimin Noen)

This post is part of a series by Todd Forsgren on his project Post-industrial Edens — photographs of urban and community gardens worldwide, which has been ongoing since 2004.

Ten thousand years ago the stability created by the gardening and agriculture of the Neolithic Revolution allowed for the first cities to be built. Since then, subsistence agriculture has been practiced by most every culture and in extremely diverse climates, from the tropics to the arctic. The methodology used and the produce cultivated vary widely depending on the culture and climate; this ties these spaces to the landscape they are found in and the people that cultivate them. This connection between land used for growing and people and places is what defines a garden.

My interest in Japanese gardens goes back to high school when I began growing bonsai trees; this interest in bonsai led to an interest in Japanese gardens, particular those in Kyoto. During a short visit to Japan in 2008, I started to photograph urban gardens. This has been greatly expanded over the past seven years since my wife’s family lives in Japan.

Japan has a long and rich tradition of urban gardening. For example, the esoteric gardens created in Kyoto’s Buddhist temples, dating back to the eighth century, make exceptional use of the small spaces on temple grounds, seemingly expanding them to vast landscape vistas. More functional and colloquial urban gardens all but disappeared throughout much of Japan’s rapid postwar urbanization. Recent years have seen a resurgence of urban gardening (shimin noen, 市民農園, or kumin noen,区民農園, in Japanese) across the country. The people of this densely-populated island nation are especially aware of limited available land and have faced unique landscape disasters, such as the tsunami and nuclear disaster of 3/11.

During the 1980s, changes in legislation created a legal framework that promoted the use of urban and suburban margins and abandoned lots for vegetable gardening. The response was remarkable, and these gardens have become extremely popular, especially considering that Japan has one of the highest rates of urbanization on the planet with over 90% of its citizens living in cities.

The benefits of this gardening movement have gone beyond the individual satisfaction and improved nutrition that urbanites gain from the gardens. Inhabitants of the depopulated rural areas of Japan have seen revitalization of many villages and found help in maintaining Japanese farmland. Rural farmers can increase income and improve their land by renting small parcels, often complete with villas, to urban eco-tourists seeking to reconnect with their agrarian heritage. In this way, the gardening movement of Japan has simultaneously improved health in the country’s cities and helped to maintain Japan’s traditional countryside lifestyle.

The pressures created by Japan’s rapid urbanization and limited space are by no means entirely unique, but they are particularly intense due to the country’s high population density and island geography. The solutions adopted in Japan will serve as a model for many countries as the entire world begins to feel the pressures of globalization, urbanization, and development more acutely.

Music and Erotica of Iron Stairs

Evgeny Masloboev

“Music and Erotica of Iron Stairs,” is part of the project “Architecture of Sound, As a Kiss of Meaning.” It was recorded March 19, 2020 using iron stairs at the Orbit Palace of Culture and at other facilities under construction in Irkutsk, Russia.

To create this piece, Masloboev used innovative sound production and the Japanese technique of erotic binding known as “shibari.” The stairs were entangled and connected with strings and ropes. The sound was extracted with a violin bow and with chopsticks and clappers for percussion.

According to Masloboev, “This action focuses the attention of consumers of culture on the details of everyday life in terms of aesthetic experience.”

Tombolo: The Thin Strip that Binds Us Together

Gabriela Bulisova & Mark Isaac

Until a few days ago, we were exiled in Montenegro. It’s a place where astonishing, mountainous cliffs tumble into the sea, interrupted by a string of pink, pebbly beaches that face Italy across the Adriatic Sea. The sunsets kept on giving.

We ended up there because Mark’s bid for a longer-term stay in Slovakia is wrapped up in bureaucratic delays that forced us to leave the Schengen area for 90 days. Montenegro beckoned, with its lower prices and relatively warm winter, a sharp contrast to last year in Siberia. And all of a sudden we were again distant from our friends in Central and Eastern Europe, in the U.S., in Siberia, and elsewhere. Getting work done but feeling alone.

And it got us thinking about staying connected. The last few years have taken us in so many unexpected directions. We sold our house in the U.S. and lived one year each in Ukraine and Siberia. We spent significant time in Slovakia and Central Europe, and now we’re unexpectedly experiencing Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our work also took turns in new directions, including more writing, more abstraction, more video, and original music from scientific data. It was simultaneously stimulating and intriguing, but also disruptive and lonely.

And now comes a new twist: we are compelled to distance ourselves from others because of the serious health threat that is sweeping across the world.

Of course it’s not as hard as in the past to stay connected, given the ability to work online and video chats. But connecting that way is not only second best, it somehow becomes more difficult as distance increases. And I need not go in depth here on the flaws in our maddeningly frustrating, exploitative and immoral social media platforms. 

In our opening blog post for our new website, we used the metaphor of wolves howling in the night as a way of thinking about the urgency of the moment and the need for people to join and react vocally. Of course howling is not enough. The howling of wolves is an incitement to group action. And that’s what we need – stronger communities that join together in a movement for change and revitalization.

There are many examples of people who are entrepreneurially leading the way, with meaningful projects and outstanding outcomes – people who deserve our support and encouragement. But even if we’re committing ourselves to socially beneficial outcomes at this time of oversized threats to democracy, the environment, and human dignity, it often feels like we’re each marooned on our own islands without a true connection to others at a time when we desperately need one. 

That’s when we saw it. Along the Montenegrin coast, rocky formations alternate with serene beaches and innumerable small islands. But there’s one exception – Sveti Stefan, a tiny “tied island” connected to the mainland. We recently learned (or re-learned, I’m not sure) the meaning of the word “tombolo,” which is a sand bar connecting an island to the mainland or to another island. Sveti Stefan is connected to the world by a tombolo.

We hope our new website will go well beyond a simple presentation of what we’ve created so others can “enjoy” it. Through the Tombolo Blog, with its ability to create dialogue and reach out to others directly, we’re hoping to initiate an authentic conversation – and build ties between people that will help us bridge through an increasingly bleak period of U.S. and world history. 

On some level, we recently realized, our newest projects are all about loss or the threat of loss, whether it’s the environment, our loved ones, or of memory itself (see Featured Projects). And those are the threats that all of us are facing at this moment in time: loss of life, of love, of truth, of the belief in a better future. 

So fundamentally, this is a time when we need meaningful connections with others, even if it is just a thin strip of sand. It is a time when the voices of artists and their allies, speaking the truth, need to be joined together into something larger. It’s a time when the individual ego needs to be kept in check so that the good of the community will take priority.

Even in this exceptionally strange moment of “social distancing,” let’s build a bridge to each other. Let’s build something larger than ourselves. Let’s build a tombolo.

Mongolia's 'Tsetserlegs'

This post is part of a series by Todd Forsgren on his project Post-industrial Edens — photographs or urban and community gardens worldwide, which has been ongoing since 2004.

Around the world, the gardens I have chosen to photograph show horticulture at an intimate scale. Found along the margins of human settlement, these patches of earth are normally separated from the surrounding landscape (and the observer) by little more than a flimsy fence. Land ownership is often tenuous, between our ideas of “public space” and “private land.” I aim to weave together these plots of land around the world as I portray the many stark contrasts I have found in these sites. Through these photographs, I strive to relate the spaces of these gardens to the world beyond the garden’s fence and my photograph’s framing. I hope to depict a world where the natural and the civilized are not thought of as mutually exclusive dichotomies, but as ideas and places that can sustainably coexist.

Part of the reason I went to Mongolia in 2008 to photograph gardens is because of the many unique aspects of their gardening traditions. The traditions and history of landscape and gardening in Mongolia differed so much from the gardens I’d been photographing in the United States, as well as Cuba. Lately I’ve been itching to go back and see how the gardens have changed and grown over the past twelve years (and because I miss all my great friends there, plus my Mongolian riding boots are wearing out, so I need a new pair). Mongolia is one of the hardest places in the world to grow vegetables, with its extreme continental climate. There’s a reason that Mongolians eat more meat per capita than any other country. It’s also the most sparsely populated country on earth, with vast rolling grasslands in the east and rugged mountains in the west. 

A combination of harsh climate, tradition, and government restrictions prevented most Mongolians from gardening until their peaceful revolution of the mid-90s. Since independence, imported produce has been scarce, as remote Mongolia has had difficulty finding reliable trading partners. In addition, recent years have brought Mongolia exceptionally severe winters, known as dzuds, resulting in extensive loss of livestock, their traditional agricultural mainstay.

In response, small-scale horticultural projects have been encouraged by the government as well as international NGOs, with the hope of providing a more adequate and balanced diet. This careful and intensive management of small plots maximizes the use of Mongolia’s limited arable land (which is less than 1% of the country’s total area). The gardens cost little, requiring neither the heavy machinery nor the massive fertilization that were essential to the mechanized farms of the Soviet era.

In contrast, these communal gardens become quite self-sufficient following an educational initiative. Surplus produce provides significant economic incentive, and the gardens provide employment and empowerment to many who have been marginalized by recent hardships. These varied benefits, which go well beyond providing the only fresh produce many communities see all year, have gained these programs widespread grassroots popularity.

 As Mongolian horticultural traditions are quite limited, diverse approaches are being tried by many individuals and organizations. Gardens are often stripped down to the essentials, as limited crops can grow in the harsh climate and only a few are popular in Mongolian diets; most gardens are just potatoes, cabbage, onions and carrots. Other gardeners are growing “superfoods” such as sea buckthorn, which have a wide appeal and high enough value to export. Government programs sought to produce a new strain of potato suited for Mongolia’s harsh climate while some NGOs have brought in unique heirloom varietals from far away to try to find new crops that thrive in the challenging climate of Mongolia.

Some religious groups have made gardening a central project to their missions in Mongolia. Mongolians bring an insight from their nomadic lifestyles, with a broad understanding of the landscape, into the intimate spaces of the gardens. The extremely difficult climatic challenges have led to intimate care of the vegetables, where precious seedlings are covered in felt blankets during the springtime and watering must be done with care during the hot dry summers.

I hope my photographs demonstrate the stark visual contrasts between the tender care lavished upon Mongolia’s gardens and the vast surrounding landscape. A landscape that is undergoing desertification and other challenges in the face of globalization. Both local stewardship and global action will be required to continue to grow vegetables in Mongolia as well as to maintain the grasslands and Mongolia’s traditional livestock require.

Cuba's Organopónicos

This post is part of a series by Todd Forsgren on his project Post-industrial Edens — photographs or urban and community gardens worldwide, which has been ongoing since 2004.

This past January, I spent ten days in Cuba working on a project that I haven’t talked about yet in the context of Atlantika… a series I call Post-industrial Edens.  I’ve just finished scanning and editing that film, so for my first blog post of 2020 I’m going to start by telling you a bit about the series in general and the context in which I’m traveling to Cuba to photograph. This will be followed by several more blog posts in the coming weeks that describe other places I’ve photographed for this project.

Post-industrial Edens is an attempt to make a global survey documenting urban and community gardens. I've traveled widely across the USA, Europe, Mongolia, Japan, and Cuba. I have actually been working on this project since 2004, and I have visited Cuba to work on it four times (in 2005, 2006, 2014, and 2020).

In these seemingly humble spaces I find an enticing edge of our culture: gardens are a formal, conceptual, and practical bridge between today’s cities and the wilderness landscapes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Some of these gardens are purely utilitarian, such as the subsistence agriculture tied to maximizing productivity, while others are purely aesthetic, i.e. the urban allotments of the developed world which are often made for leisure. But in these spaces, I have found contexts that seem to redefine expectations in terms of what is urban/rural, public/private, modern/primitive, nature/nurture, and global/local. 

I’ll talk about the project more generally in some future blog posts, but for now I want to talk about Cuba’s particular type of gardening, called organopónicos. And why I decided to travel to a place more associated with the picturesque colonial architecture and classic cars, and instead make pictures of vegetable gardens. (Writing this today, I feel a bit like Bernie Sanders at the recent presidential debate, because I’m suggesting that Cuba does do some things admirably because of their unique geopolitical isolation, and these gardens are something that we can all learn from.)

Cuba’s organopónicos began in the early 1990s. International political changes made it impossible to maintain large-scale mechanized agriculture, as former trade relations could no longer provide the machine parts or fertilizers needed to run the expansive Soviet-style farms. Other challenges, notably the US trade embargo, also greatly restricted new economic development. The era was dubbed “the Special Period” due to the extreme hardships Cubans faced and unique solutions they found to solve these challenges.

In response to food shortages, Cuba developed an expansive top-down system of small-scale agriculture programs with incredible success. One of the most effective programs is the organopónicos. Vacant lots in urban areas have been transformed into intensive organic farms. Using a combination of traditional organic gardening methods and new innovations developed to conquer the challenges of farming in cities, these gardens have flourished across the country and now supply an estimated 60 percent of Cuba’s fresh produce.

Beyond the organopónicos, diverse initiatives touch on many areas of agricultural development. One focuses on providing fresh flowers, with a goal of five dozen per Cuban per year. The popular rice program has allowed Cubans to grow rice in limited areas and with less water than large-scale rice farms. Fruit trees are being planted throughout many cities. Programs involving livestock have also been tremendously successful. Perhaps the popularity is in part because many of the programs provide a rare economic opportunity for everyday Cubans, as the gardeners can sell surplus produce after government quotas have been met.

The Cuban food program is a remarkable experiment in agriculture, showing that sustainable methods can be used effectively on a national scale. It has also demonstrated that these programs provide a wide variety of benefits, from increased food security and urban beautification to the promotion of public health. The entirely organic methods, diverse programs, and community-based approach sometimes gives each a unique and personal touch to these incredible examples of an effective “slow food” movement. 

Embers and Effluents: New Video About Lake Baikal’s Emerging Threats

Gabriela Bulisova & Mark Isaac

During our sojourn in Siberia, one of the most important tools we used to depict Lake Baikal was multi-channel video. The Second Fire, which was screened in Irkutsk’s Bronshteyn Gallery in late Summer, is a three channel video that focuses on the impact of climate change and pollution on the Lake. A Russian student described it as “truly frightening.” If it scares her and her classmates into action, we will take it as a compliment.

The Second Fire is inspired by a native Buryat legend about Lake Baikal. According to this origin myth, there was an enormous earthquake, fire came out of the earth, and native people cried “Bai, Gal!” or “Fire, stop!” in the Buryat language. The fire stopped, and water filled the crevice, creating the Sacred Sea. Now, the Baikal region is one of the areas experiencing the most rapid increases in temperature in the world. The video suggests that the warming of Baikal is a “Second Fire” that threatens the Lake and the people who rely on it.

Now, we’ve produced a sequel...another three-channel video, called Embers and Effluents. This video goes beyond the most obvious challenges that Baikal faces to depict emerging threats that have the capacity to create a “feedback effect,” rapidly accelerating warming and environmental damage. Scientists know that these threats are approaching a tipping point more quickly than current climate modeling anticipates.

Vast territories of previously frozen permafrost are melting, discharging enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and methane. Rampant summer wildfires are causing dramatic loss of forested area. Widespread legal and illegal logging is also contributing to rapid deforestation. And as temperatures increase, the flow of the Lake’s tributaries is dwindling, reducing water quality and releasing additional methane.

We were inspired greatly by the “environmental ethics” of Baikal’s first environmental stewards, native Buryats and Evenks. They lived in harmony with nature, taking only what they needed to survive. These indigenous people lived their lives in deep concert with the natural world long before the environmental movement developed in the West. Now, despite the serious threats that Baikal faces, the Siberian tradition of sustainability offers a reminder that we can restore balance in our relationship to the natural world.  

We witnessed and filmed multiple ceremonies of native Buryat shamans appealing to the gods for harmony and healing in the natural world. The shamans correctly insist that the Sacred Sea is powerful and resilient. But is this enough to turn things around? True hope will only emerge if the world is able to embrace transformational change, avoiding the feedback effect and the worst impacts of climate change and pollution.

Like The Second Fire, our new video features original electronic music composed from scientific data about the impact of climate change on Lake Baikal. In particular, we used studies of the impact of temperature changes on some of Baikal’s smallest and most important organisms: tiny amphipods that inhabit the shallow banks, the deepest crevasses, and everywhere in between. The amphipods are heavily affected by temperature changes, and the film’s music gives them a voice that they wouldn’t otherwise have. As temperature data rises, the notes also rise and become more shrill, as if the amphipods are crying out for help. 

During our year in Siberia, we had almost daily encounters with the power and majesty of Baikal’s crystalline water, the looming white-capped mountain peaks that tower over its banks, and the endless forests that surround it. But we also witnessed endless trucks and trains hauling away the taiga’s precious trees. We breathed in the smoke from raging forest fires and witnessed the charred remnants of past fires. We photographed piles of rotting algae on the beaches, and we documented the shriveled banks of tributary rivers, running dry from the heat.

That is our choice now: reverse course and care for Baikal sustainably -- or resign ourselves to a future of embers and effluents. 

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A few important acknowledgements: The music in Embers and Effluents was composed from data about climate change collected by scientists at Irkutsk State University. The music was enhanced in collaboration with Evgeny Masloboev, a highly innovative Irkutsk-based composer and musician. The video also includes footage of underwater life courtesy of the Baikal Museum’s live web-cams and native bird calls captured by Professor B.N. Veprintsev. 

Surface Tension / Water Samples

Todd R. Forsgren

“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” goes the famed line in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge was inspired by the voyages of discovery that were occurring during the era, such as those of James Cook, Thomas James, and George Shelvocke (and similar to later expeditions like the U.S Exploring Expedition or Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle). It is a poem full of all the twists and turns characteristic of a quintessential epic.

Inspired by that poem, and the breadth of emotional responses that it elicits, I set about to make this series. I aim to create a similar emotional range through the photographic exploration of the surface of water. Water, which so unassumingly covers approximately 71% of the earth’s surface.

I have sought out some of these bodies of water that are unique in their purity and clarity, or for their incredibly high levels of toxins and pollutants. Other images mine the history of photographic technology and the ways that it can alter the appearance of water’s surface. For most of the history of photography, it has been a wet process, and I seek to connect that with these images, as I’ve likely spent as much time staring into darkroom trays as I have spent looking at the sea.

I want to push that connection between photographic material and liquid surfaces. This involves delving into early techniques use to make color photographs as well as obscure photographic materials, such as color infrared film. The results can be sublime as well as grotesque. I seek to show how infinitely varied and monotonous similar this familiar subject matter can be. An easily overlooked material that is as mundane as it is precious and essential.

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Cyberian Dispatch 20: A Swift Departure

Gabriela Bulisova & Mark Isaac

Pacific swifts that spend the summer in Siberia migrated in August to their winter home in Australia and Indonesia.

The swifts lived in the roof above our apartment. They often woke us in a cacophony of sound at about 6:00 a.m. They swooped and cavorted and dive-bombed in the treetops just outside our windows. But the Siberian summer is warm, exquisite, and brief, like a sun-ripened fruit. And its time had already passed. As temperatures also swooped lower, we woke to find that the birds had vanished...already traveling an exceptional distance to winter in Australia or Indonesia. And it was time for us to take flight also, leaving behind a very unexpected and welcoming homeland in the Far East (see Cyberian Dispatch 19). 

As we left, the complications of climate change were at play around the globe. Unprecedented wildfires in Brazil and the Arctic captured headlines around the world and were a topic among heads of state. A major hurricane, rated among the most powerful in the North Atlantic of all time, decimated part of the Bahamas and raked the coastal United States and Canada. Alaska’s sea ice melted completely for the first time in history. Iceland’s Prime Minister officiated at a memorial for a lost glacier.

Unfortunately, Siberia and Lake Baikal are in the vanguard of these changes, with temperatures increasing two times faster than other parts of the globe. In our final weeks, multiple challenges punctuated the news, emphasizing Siberia’s leading role in climate change. Wildfires in Siberia, accelerated by high temperatures and extremely dry conditions, consumed an area larger than the nation of Belgium, sometimes sending thick blankets of smoke into Irkutsk and raising air quality alerts to the urgent level. Also, areas north of Irkutsk -- especially Tulun -- suffered severe floods in which dozens lost their lives, and Greenpeace Russia attributed the catastrophe to climate change. Scientists once again reported that Baikal’s precious small organisms are vulnerable to rising temperatures and will suffer, disrupting the Lake’s entire ecosystem, if water temperatures continue to rise.

Our parting weeks were filled with nostalgia for the mystery, power and enormity of Baikal, not just as a body of water, but as a living being, a space where spirits rule, a territory where the power of the natural world pervades all the human senses. We said goodbyes to the Angara River, Baikal’s only outlet and the site of exquisite encounters with winter “tuman” or fog (see Cyberian Dispatch 9). We traveled again to Olkhon Island, witnessed a very special ritual in which more than 40 shamans prayed for rain to extinguish wildfires, and paused to reflect in one of Baikal’s most sacred sites (see Cyberian Dispatch 3). 

If the spirits of Baikal had the only say, all would be well. Unfortunately, greed, folly, and indifference also hold sway. Our year in Siberia has given us ample understanding of the main threats facing the world’s most important lake: climate change and various forms of pollution that have already damaged shallow areas and now threaten the entire Lake. But the final weeks of our stay also revealed the extent of new, emerging hazards that threaten an exponential increase in harm. These new concerns have unique attributes that reinforce each other and have the potential to rapidly accelerate warming in a “feedback effect.” For example:

• Melting Permafrost: Temperatures in Siberia are increasing twice as rapidly than other parts of the world. As a result, vast territories of previously frozen permafrost are melting, discharging enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and methane -- enough to result in “catastrophic” warming.

• Spreading Forest Fires: According to prominent scientists, the growing number and intensity of forest fires is causing “dramatic loss of forested area,” further accelerating climate change. 

• Excessive Logging: Widespread legal and illegal logging is also contributing to rapid deforestation that accelerates warming; and

• Deteriorating Rivers: As temperatures increase, evaporation intensifies and the flow of the Lake’s tributaries is reduced. Dwindling water levels reduce pressure at the Lake’s bottom, releasing additional methane and harming sensitive species. 

Many of our most memorable moments at Baikal involved sound or music (see Cyberian Dispatch 10). Evgeny Masloboev, an Irkutsk-based experimental composer and musician, can elicit music out of almost anything, including coat hangars, plastic bags, or the leaves of plants. He favors improvisation, and before we left, he very memorably asked us to pull out our phones, hold them near each other, and create music from...a feedback effect. 

Scientists know that these emerging threats can quickly approach a tipping point that accelerates environmental degradation much more quickly than current climate modeling anticipates. Artists like Evgeny Masloboev sense it and intuitively find a way to express it. The natural landscape already signals distress: people choke on smoke from mega-fires and die when their homes are inundated by flash floods. But in Russia and around the world, many people are not fully aware of how serious the problem is, and policymakers are in denial, immobilized or unsure of how to act on a scale large enough to be consequential. 

The swifts departed suddenly one August day, darting into the sky because they knew the environment will soon not be hospitable. Following a small visa snafu, we also took flight to Central Europe on very short notice, uprooting ourselves from our Far Eastern homeland and finding a roost near the Danube River, another threatened body of water. 

Time is precious now. How can we speed the pace of change on ending the use of fossil fuels and embracing clean energy? How can we embrace the use of alternative energy sources -- ones that are in ample supply in Siberia and many other places around the globe? How can we turn the corner on simple changes like ending the use of phosphates in detergents or stopping the endless stream of bottles that clog our waterways? 

Our year long Fulbright experience proves that we can build alliances across cultures and among diverse stakeholders who share common values and goals. It was an exceptionally meaningful, moving and beautiful experience, and we are forever grateful to our warm, welcoming, and kind Russian hosts, who selflessly ensured the project’s success. 

But can those of good faith and good mind work together quickly enough to safeguard Baikal? Can we chart a new course as swiftly as the swifts?

A.R.M.S

Todd R. Forsgren

At first glance, these images might remind you of abstraction expressionist work by the likes of Jackson Pollock. However, these aren’t drips and splashes of paint made by an artist baring the depths of his soul. The patterns, forms, and colors are actually created by marine flora and fauna growing on research plates set out by scientists to monitor the vitality and health of the ocean’s reefs. So instead I think of them in relation to one of Pollock’s most famous quips, rather than his paintings: “I don’t paint nature. I am nature.” 

To the scientific community the data is clear. The world’s oceans are undergoing unprecedented changes in levels, temperatures, and acidity. Coral reefs are especially vulnerable to these impacts of climate change. If this continues, the reefs will all but disappear by the end of this century. This is especially tragic because reefs are among the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet and are vital breeding grounds to many species who range far beyond their boundaries.

A global coalition of scientists are working to understand the impact of climate change on reef ecology and develop management systems that could mitigate the consequences. Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (A.R.M.S.) are one tool being used. Though the term sounds high tech, and many aspects of this research are, the structures themselves are remarkably simple: a stack of 9” x 9” PVC panels that get left in the ocean for months or even years. The structures become covered with corals, sponges, and other marine life. These images are photographs of ARMS plates taken by scientists just before the organisms are removed from the plates for molecular analysis. 

I consider these plates as analogous to photographic film (although the year plus an A.R.M.S. is “exposed” at sea is substantially longer than the typical photographic moment). Like a camera, A.R.M.S. allow us to see the world in a way we cannot directly observe. The new understanding being gained through this technique allows us to see a possible future of the oceans (one without coral reefs if we don’t change course). Reflecting on this, I recall a quote from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Referring to a photograph of a prisoner bound for execution, Barthes wrote, "He is dead and he is going to die..."

Cyberian Dispatch 19: Why We're at Home in Siberia

Gabriela Bulisova & Mark Isaac

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Frigid and forbidding. Remote and desolate. Brutal and punitive. All can traditionally be synonyms for “Siberian.” But after almost a year, we venture to call it “home.”

Why are we at home in Siberia? Well, for one, it contains the most important lake in the world -- the incomparable Baikal, which continues to change and reveal itself every season and every day. And when you find yourself in one of Baikal’s “powerful spots,” where beauty is overwhelming and spirits hold sway, you can understand that it is a sort of home for all of us -- and one that we must respect and protect.

Gabriela was originally drawn to Baikal because her grandfather had traveled here, describing the Trans-Siberian railroad and Baikal’s crystal clear ice, and bringing her presents from the far East. So her inspiration always included a familial link. But it’s time for us to mention the many ways in which Siberia revealed a multitude of connections to our ancestors, making our stay here an authentic -- if very unexpected -- homecoming.

The Czechoslovak Connection

Gabriela was born in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the historical figures in Irkutsk is Yaroslav Hasek (or in Russian, Gashek), a Czech writer who came to Siberia as part of the Czechoslovak Legion that fought on the side of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. In fact, our apartment is on the street that is named after him, and he lived in a building across the street. Hasek managed to switch sides, joining the victorious Red Army, which is why the street is named for him. He stayed in this region for four years, writing extensively and even starting the first Buryat language magazine. 

But Hasek is only part of the astonishing story of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia. At a time before Czechoslovakia became a nation, more than 100,000 fighters came thousands of kilometers from their diminutive homeland to help demonstrate to the allies that they should support Czechoslovak statehood. They fought skillfully, and at one point in the war managed to control most of Siberia, an area larger than the United States and Europe combined. 

It was at Lake Baikal that the Czechoslovak Legion fought the only naval battle in the history of their landlocked soon-to-be nation. And they won. After seizing several warships from the Red Army, on August 15, 1918, the Legion surprised Red forces at the port of Mysovaya in a heavy fog, sinking the gigantic icebreaker “Baikal,” shelling the train station, and destroying Red Army headquarters. 

Czechoslovak soldiers are also alleged by many to have stolen a massive cache of gold that was being protected by Admiral Kolchak, leader of the White Army. When the Red Army captured Russia’s gold reserves from retreating White forces, a significant portion of it was missing. Some believe the gold was smuggled out of Siberia to Czechoslovakia, while others believe it fell from rail cars into Lake Baikal and is still laying in its depths. More than 10 years ago, scientists and historians aboard small submarines carrying none other than Vladimir Putin claim to have located some of the gold deep under the Lake’s surface, but were unable to recover any of it.

In the summer of 1919, the first international soccer matches in the history of Siberia took place in the Baikal region. The matches were contested by the Czechoslovak Legion and representatives of the small cadre of U.S. forces that also fought during the Russian Civil War. During their time in Siberia, the Americans excelled at harassing women and behaving atrociously, while the Czechs and Slovaks put more energy into the games and emerged as victors. 

The Origins of the Hungarian People

Gabriela’s mother, Olga, is Hungarian. And Hungarians migrated long ago from Western Siberia. This is one reason their language, in the Finno-Ugric language group, is so different from neighboring countries and so difficult to master. Today, scholarship is widening the understanding of links between Hungarian and Siberian culture, including common elements in their folklore. But there’s no question that the Hungarian nation was born in Siberia.

The Surprising DNA Test

Just before leaving for Siberia, for somewhat murky reasons, Mark was interested to have a DNA test conducted. The results arrived about a month into our stay in the Baikal region. Generally, they were as expected -- he’s almost entirely of Eastern European Jewish origin, and his family lived in areas of Galicia that are now in Poland and Ukraine. But there was one surprise -- a finding that 0.1 percent of his origins are “Siberian.” And by Siberian, meaning East Asian, not Russian. At first, some family members bristled at this finding or dismissed it as likely erroneous. But shortly afterwards, another relative reported the same result, confirming the existence of a small amount of Siberian blood in his family.

The Paris of the East Reemerges

When the Tsars and the Communists were busy exiling people to Siberia, they placed a heavy emphasis on those who were educated and active. As a result, Irkutsk always had an outsized share of artists and intellectuals -- so much so that it was called “the Paris of the East” for its many talented artists and its diverse cultural offerings. Over time, some of that cultural advantage became institutionalized and ossified, but now Irkutsk is staging a youthful cultural renaissance, with alternative spaces, innovative events, contemporary ethnic art, micro-concerts in intimate settings, and experimental musicians who are willing to try almost everything. This emerging cultural scene also made Irkutsk feel like home -- and inspired us to include original music, composed entirely from data in scientific studies about Lake Baikal, in our project. (For more on this subject, please read Siberian Dispatch 10.)

Our Trusted Russian Friends

And finally, we are compelled to mention the local people who went out of their way to welcome us. They didn’t have to share resources, make connections, encourage us, or help us exhibit our work. But they did, and they played a critical role in the project’s success. These generous friends -- each of whom will be remembered very personally and with utmost appreciation -- emphatically made Irkutsk our home. And this in turn, provides strong validation for the Fulbright Program, built on the idea that war can be overcome by making connections between Americans and cultures all over the world. Our experience in Russia proves emphatically that, one-on-one, Russians and Americans can bond and build a future of trust and cooperation.

Unless we live to be more than 100, each year is more than 1 percent of our lives. So we’ve done something neither of us ever expected -- spent a significant percentage of our lives in Siberia. And when we leave this home, painfully soon, we will ache longingly both for Baikal and the people who love it.