The NGO Green Carts supplies organic seedlings and plants to the city of San Francisco’s homeless. The organization’s Meghan Lerby and Linda Bart discuss their mission at an event this summer:
Lerby: You never want to give a homeless person money because they’re just going to go blow it on crack.
Bart: Or alcohol.
Lerby: Or alcohol. So, you give them plants or seeds and there’s nothing they’re going to be able to do with those seeds but plant them.
Bart: Right, and unless they’re poppy seeds, I don’t think you can really do anything… you know, these people, they’re wily, they’re creative.
Lerby: I’m hoping that their creativity will inspire them to plant these seeds somewhere that they can return to and cultivate.
Bart: And that returning will kind of form a habit, and some stability for them. Like, oh, there’s a little patch of earth on my corner where I usually sleep and I’m going to water it everyday and see what happens. Or, I’m going to turn my shopping cart into a garden!
Ok, ok, so this is my dream… So, a shopping cart, right? Cardboard boxes in the shopping cart, and it’s all dirt and plants, and instead of all that stuff, they’re pushing their own little victory gardens.
Lerby: Yeah…totally.
Bart: You know? I mean, how beautiful is that? They don’t even have a home, but they have a garden!
While working for an environmental organization in San Francisco, I attended “Green Drinks,” a series of networking happy hours for the Bay Area’s amorphous ‘green’ community. At these events, I represented phony nonprofit organizations, with help from colleagues and friends who during the course of these encounters blossomed into surprisingly talented liars.
The organizations:
NR2020. The earth is in shambles, irreparably so, and it is time to direct innovation elsewhere. NR2020 is a group of ecologically conscious young people building a self-sustaining community in a biodome on a small planet in the Andromeda galaxy. The project is currently in active planning stages thanks to Richard Branson’s intellectual and financial backing.
Deadalive. This project concerns Fern Tree Grove in San Francisco’s cherished Golden Gate Park. We propose to completely enclose Fern Tree Grove in plastic sheeting (à la Christo), and kill everything inside of it. Doing so would eliminate an invasive non-native fern species, while making a statement against plastics – ultimately, we would ship to the plastic sheeting manufacturer a large sample of dead matter from the extermination: plants, birds, rodents, and insects. Daryl Hannah’s on board, and she wants to make a new kind of ‘splash’.
Green Carts. We simply give seeds, seedlings, and plants to homeless people so they can grow their own organic produce, learn responsibility, and cultivate a sense of ‘place’. With Bon Jovi and Scarlett Johansen as celebrity sponsors, we are planning a benefit concert where attendees, instead of giving tickets to a doorman, will give seed packets to homeless people so that, in the words of Green Carts innovator and co-founder Linda Bart, “you’re like, oh my god, homelessness is real.”
These encounters, although planned, were spontaneous and unrecorded, save portions of the Green Carts conversations.
Not once did anyone question our sincerity. Conversations tended towards the painfully earnest.
Those we spoke with about NR2020 were timid at first, then intrigued and excited. The least successful was Green Carts. A member of Green Drinks’ “Connectivity Team” angrily attempted to have us consider the psychological instability of the homeless population, and that we might be sued if a homeless person happened to eat a gifted seed packet and get sick; a green investor strongly suggested we shop the initiative to a larger organization; and a well-dressed initially eager young man attempted to end conversation immediately upon hearing our introduction.
Somehow, most environmentalists see giving plants to homeless people as less viable or acceptable than forsaking earth for a distant planet or killing things.
To his credit, one listener was visibly upset by Deadalive and said he did not understand why we had to kill living creatures to make our point. In another conversation, however, I shared a chummy moment with a gentleman about the ‘agency permitting process’ – the ‘process’ where I would be looking to get permits to suffocate and destroy state park land.
Our Green Drinks audience was largely receptive and supportive. They smiled politely, and gave positive suggestions and benign encouragement. It seemed these people had heard of all of this before. I’m pretty sure they hadn’t.
So, what had they heard?