By Susan Van Haitsma
Do war tax resistance and gardening often go together? In my observation, yes! Many of the people I’ve met through NWTRCC over the years have cultivated not only peace and justice with their life work—they have cultivated the soil, too. Longtime war tax resister, Clare Hanrahan, is one such “avant-gardener,” as she puts it, and she has just published a timely book, An Urban Uprising, describing the Elder & Sage Community Gardens project in Asheville, North Carolina, that she co-founded and has co-managed over the last ten years.
I got to know Clare in the early 1990s when we co-wrote the first version of NWTRCC’s Practical WTR series pamphlet, “Simple Living as War Tax Resistance.” In addition to other journalism work, Clare wrote and published “Jailed for Justice” in 2002 about her 6-month sentence in the Alderson, West Virginia federal women’s prison camp after crossing the line at the School of the Americas, and her family-based memoir, The Half Life of a Free Radical in 2016.
Clare worked in the prison greenhouse while she was at Alderson, earning a certificate in horticulture. And, as she explains in her new book’s preface, “I learned so much more than horticulture in prison. I found common ground living and working among people with varied levels of education, emotional maturity, mental health, and physical ability, as well as ethnic, racial and cultural diversity. It is much like the work of tending to a garden with all its complex biodiversity and competitive adaptations for survival in an ecosystem long out of balance.”
As a war tax resister living in a popular tourist city like Asheville, Clare has worked to find affordable living situations, often exchanging labor for rent. In 2011, she moved into a downtown apartment building for low-income elders and persons with disabilities. The building, a stately former hotel, adjoined a vacant gravel lot, and that is where Clare and other apartment dwellers saw possibility. They began by planting seeds here and there in cracks and crevices along the streets in their urban core. Then, they envisioned a block-sized community garden in the gravel lot that, due to city regulation, would have to be entirely container-grown. Step by step, they gathered community support, worked through city permitting processes and created an organizational structure of completely volunteer management. On June 1, 2017, Elder & Sage Community Gardens was officially inaugurated, and over the years since, it has flourished, becoming a colorful, welcoming space that is now a tourist destination in itself.
Clare Hanrahan at Elder and Sage Community Gardens.
With wisdom, warmth and humor, too, Clare documented the joys and challenges that arose as the gardens took shape. Gardeners dealt with issues related to security, maintenance, financing, tools, weather, water, aesthetics, garden “pests” (including, once, a bear!) and balancing one another’s sometimes strong gardening opinions. As a community gardener myself in central Austin, Texas, I could relate to each story on every page and the problem-solving that needed to be done. Well—except for the bear.
I especially like how Clare names throughout her book the many volunteers with whom she has worked and the tasks they have done. She also lists, using both common and Latin names, the many kinds of flowers, vegetables and herbs that gardeners have planted over the years, further illustrating how the beautiful variety in the gardens reflect the beautiful variety of people who’ve created Elder & Sage and who visit it.
The power of Clare’s book, to me, is that Elder & Sage provides an example for us all. If an ever-evolving, volunteer group of elders can, together, create a healthy green oasis out of a downtown gravel lot starting with almost nothing, there is really no end to what human beings can do to enliven our urban spaces.
As war tax resisters, we stand against destructive forces in our world. We also put our efforts into growing the alternative: the community garden that, as a human family on this bountiful earth, we all essentially are.
An Urban Uprising can be ordered through Celtic Wordcraft Books at www.celticwordcraftavl.wordpress.com