Neighborhood Planting Project 2025
Washington St. Garden, Saturday, April 12 at 09:00 AM CDT
Save the date for our Annual neighborhood Planting Project! Each year we offer a variety of native fruit and nut bearing trees for distribution to the community, as well as other select plant starts and cuttings. Again, we would like to encourage those who are able to to donate $1 per tree you take home with you. This helps to cover the cost of the project, ensuring we can continue to provide this awesome opportunity every spring. NOTAFLOF
This year we would like to redirect attention to the world of carceral capitalism and how it displays itself in our everyday. Most systems we engage with daily is in part built and sustained by prison labor; from the food and products we buy to the communications and other infrastructure we access regularly, the unpaid or EXTREMELY low wage labor of incarcerated individuals provides the outside world with excess, even while their own conditions remain inhumane and basic needs go unmet.
Many state nurseries (such as where our trees are sourced) are no stranger to using prison labor directly from state department of corrections. As we recenter this project around abolitionist principles, we felt that a first step was to bring some awareness and context for our local project. In the new world, we will have our lives dedicated to each other and the environment rather than to the economy; where new forms of relating to one another flourish, helping to transform our systems of punishment to systems of accountability.
The goals to our local NPP are many: to advance the mission of Food Autonomy by providing neighbors with low/ no cost food producing trees; to contribute to local reforestation, biological diversity, and ecological rejuvenation; to offer alternative modes for community members to connect with each other outside of the traditional economic market; and, finally, to dismantle the systems of oppression that continue to exist through the prison industrial complex.
In what ways do you see the issues of climate change and abolition overlapping? What might your role be in building autonomous food systems while working toward the freedom of all people? We are excited to continue these conversations with you in person when you pick up your trees next month. See you there!
https://www.carbondale.info/event/neighborhood-planting-project-2025
