[laughs] Tell us about the role and the importance of horse shit in Paris.

[laughs] Well, I mean, I mean, here's the amazing thing, right? Just as cities started to get really big, you know, Paris, Berlin, London, New York, working people came into the cities from the countryside.

Everybody had been rural before the mid-19th century, and they had a sense of what to do with wastes.

They had a sense of, um, that land should be used and, and they had a sense of commons and common rights, and common rights were the rights to food, fuel, and shelter.

So, you know, people came, uh, these, you know, people came l- in the Marais district of Paris, which is now a really posh neighborhood.

At the time was a poor, um, working class Jewish neighborhood, and it was pretty swampy.

Um, and people started to use the city infrastructure to grow food because that's something that migrants to cities do.

The allotments.

[laughs] Tell us about the role and the importance of horse shit in Paris.

[laughs] Well, I mean, I mean, here's the amazing thing, right? Just as cities started to get really big, you know, Paris, Berlin, London, New York, working people came into the cities from the countryside.

Everybody had been rural before the mid-19th century, and they had a sense of what to do with wastes, they had a sense of, um, that land should be used, and, and they had a sense of commons and common rights.

And common rights were the rights to food, fuel, and shelter.

So, you know, people came, uh, these, you know, people came in, in the Marais district of Paris, which is now a really posh neighborhood.

At the time was a poor, um, working-class Jewish neighborhood, and it was pretty swampy.

Um, and people started to use the city infrastructure to grow food, because that's something that migrants to cities do.

The allotments.

Can you talk a little bit more about that history for folks that are not familiar with that?

Yeah.

So I used-- We're in England for this turn, and I use English enclosure because there's so much written about it.

And I read and I read, and I was trying to figure out, okay, we know about enclosure.

We know that landlords said, "Oh, the peasants don't know how to farm.

It's really small and inefficient.

They're using commons, and so they're not caring for the land properly." And the landlords take over and close and start farming supposedly more efficiently on bigger plots of land.

What's, um, what's, what are some of the politics that are, that are involved in this practice?

Can you talk a little bit more about that history for, for folks that are not familiar with that?

Yeah.

So I used, uh...

I, I...

We're in England for this turn, and I, I use Eng- um, English enclosure because it's-- there's so much written about it.

Um, and I read and I read, and I was trying to figure out, okay, we, we know about enclosure.

We know that, you know, landlords said, "Oh, the peasants don't know how to farm.

What's, um, what's, what are some of the politics that are, that are involved in this practice?

So they say,

hey, you know, just after they've enclosed six million acres from common land, taken it from the peasants, they'll say, we'll give these people these small allotment gardens and we'll calculate to make them small enough so that they cannot feed themselves.

Because if they work for themselves, they won't work for us.

And so they make these, you know, like one parish would have enclosed 2,000 acres of common land.

They give the common earth 20 acres together back.

It's like poor compensation.

for common land.

What are some of the politics that are involved in this practice?

Yeah.

And, um, and so there I were in these, you know, like in the Chernobyl zone.

And I remember one summer, all these people, mostly women and children, were coming out of the swampy forest where the Chernobyl zone is with baskets of blueberries, and they were selling them to buyers who had vans, and they were parked on the, on the roads.

And they were, you know...

It was an industrial scale operation.

They were, um...

I asked the, the van, you know, the people at the vans, the buyers, and they said, "Yeah, I buy about two tons a day." And there were just dozens of vans.

Mm-hmm.

[laughs]

Um, what, what can I say? Uh, well, probably not a funny story, but I can just say we've gone through a lot of sheets over our time.

Okay.

The, the guys love to dive on the turf, and we go through about five sets of sheets per winter season.

She writes of women handling the radioactive wool of sheep grazing in contaminated lands, of their unexplained nosebleeds, then later their anemia and tumors, of instructions to meat packers on how much radioactive flesh to stuff into sausages, of the litany of health problems seemingly attributable to chronic low-dose radiation across the affected areas, which were largely unreported or minimized by official studies.

I think, Daniel, you point out that there's two problems here.

One is that there was a concerted effort to try to minimize the health effects, both by the Soviet government and then later by international organizations that came in and took over managing the disaster after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But at the same time, there are all kinds of people on the ground.

Soviets had socialized medicine and it worked in a way that they were constantly doing epidemiology.

They were constantly, as part of the job, collecting information.

How many kids do we have in this county? How many kids have chronic diseases of one kind or the other? How many kids can we qualify as healthy? They're doing this before the accident.

Mm.

It's wild, yeah.

And that's, you know, most of that was fruits and vegetables.

Now we consider that specialty crops.

We have 2% of our crops are in fruits and vegetables.

So one of the reasons people don't eat fruits and vegetables is they're expensive, and they're expensive because we don't grow much of it.

And so as you point out, Jacques, once you start growing your own food, people's diets change, and they're like, "This is really good.

I want more fruits and vegetables." We know that's really healthy for people.

But [laughs] it's not like it was necessary.

What do these spaces mean to you?

Well, you know, ever since I've been an adult-- Well, even, I grew up in Chicago, and my mother always had a garden.

And, and ever since I've been off on my own, I've found community gardens because I lived in an apartment or something.

And I, and I realized long time ago that on a space about the size of a large dining room table, I can grow enough food, you know, fresh greens and vegetables, to keep my household going for eight to nine months out of the year.

And the rest of the year, I can have stocks of, you know, sauerkraut and kimchi and root vegetables and winter squash that keep us going too.

And I guess that was the insight I had, that it doesn't take much space to produce an awful lot of food.

In my tiny garden here in Cambridge, probably about three or four households feed off of it because healthy soils produce this abundance that we can't even eat on our own.

But how do we get more people involved in this? 'Cause, uh, what you're describing has such a potential for change in our cities.

Mm.

Now, I think everybody's who's looked at Soviet history, um, realizes that once they decided to take every, all the peasants and put them into these big, huge collective farms, that Soviet farming started to, to fail.

And there was a big famine.

About five mil- five million people died in nineteen thirty-two to nineteen thirty-three caused by these collectivizations of the farms.

And that year, nineteen thirty-three, Stalin gave Soviet citizens the right to garden.

And what does that mean to have the right to garden? It meant that, that, that people could apply and get public land, again, in, in communities and garden associations to p- to public land to, to privately self-provision.

And this public land was usually in these green belts surrounding every Soviet city, and you could get there by, by bus or by tr- by s- metro or, or tram.

Huh.

[chuckles]

As the title suggests, right? And so, you know, what was happening is that we've missed this story because this is very much a working-class movement.

People were coming, they were pushed off of their, out of their villages through various acts of enclosure, and, and these enclosures continue to this day.

If you went to Brazil, you'd be finding people who've been enclosed from their land.

And they were rural people.

They were people who were used to sharing property in common.

Um, and they, so they had common forests that they used, common pastures.

And Kate, what about that, uh, creative way of sharing space?