This piece by Kera Lovell is the first post in the Emotional Ecologies series edited by Sarah York-Bertram and Jessica DeWitt. In this series, contributors were asked to reflect on what role emotion plays in connecting humans to their environment and more-than-human beings.
When neighbors began descending on a vacant lot at the corner of Haste and Bowditch near UC Berkeley’s campus in April of 1969, they quickly began reimagining the site as the beginning of a new future. Soon known as Berkeley’s People’s Park, this site became the most famous example within the late Vietnam War era People’s Park movement—what I define as a discordant collection of more than four dozen insurgently-created parks across the US. Activists illegally converted vacant lots into parks as protests, often linking environmental degradation, urban renewal, and police brutality with colonialism.1 These park creations became practices of political affect in which park creators used art, architecture, landscape design, and cooking to build emotional connections to one another and to these political issues. With shared experiences, the park projects claimed power through their emotive properties.
These park creations became practices of political affect in which park creators used art, architecture, landscape design, and cooking to build emotional connections to one another and to these political issues.
Park creators imagined the vacant lots produced by urban renewal campaigns in the 1960s as dead wastelands—empty, lifeless, and dangerous. The landscape design they created and the objects they brought to the parks served as “vibrant matter” that enlivened lots and by extension the communities displaced by demolitions. Benches, playgrounds, homemade BBQ pits, a wooden stage, brick-lined walkways, a wildflower garden—various additives were described by park advocates as vital to the park and, therefore, their political message about access to and power to shape urban green space. The objects placed within parks were imbued with their own “thing power” that allowed park goers to imagine their territorial placemaking as procreative and their life force as intimately connected with the plant matter around them.2 For example, when park creator Chuck Herrick died in an automobile accident during the creation of Peace and Freedom Park, supporters hung signs in the newly-planted fruit trees to water them in order to “keep Chuck alive,” which they argued was a better fit for him than his published eulogy. Each added plant, scaffold, and bench became coated with what scholar Sara Ahmed calls “sticky” affect—a marker of positive human experience “preserv[ing] the connection between ideas, values, and objects” that had been fostered during park construction. Within these spaces as shared happenings, the memories of individuals blur; “me” becomes “we,” the empowerment of one the strength of all.
At many People’s Parks, the “thing power” imbued in the shovels, murals, and hand painted signs faded with the seasons as informal parks dissipated into piles of crispy leaves-turned-snow. For many activists of color in which their parks were part of larger political statements about self-determination, the violent surges of police harassment intended to quell their coalition building erased the parks altogether as they fought for survival. However, at some activist-created parks like the Haste/Bowditch People’s Park, a violent standoff led by California State Highway Patrol in May of 1969, transformed this space into sacred ground. When states attempted to reclaim parks, they frequently did so by removing, destroying, or replacing objects, like the free box or people’s stage, with a visual and material culture of defense. To displace park workers, states fenced lots, posting notices warning against trespassing and the abandonment of property before constructing see-through chain-link fences with a barbed wire cornice.
When states attempted to reclaim parks, they frequently did so by removing, destroying, or replacing objects, like the free box or people’s stage, with a visual and material culture of defense.
Peering through the fence, park advocates could see how the items they imbued with political, social, and ecological symbolism could be manipulated, reorganized, and destroyed. At Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969, photographer Stephen Shames captured the police occupiers relaxing on benches and playground equipment, as well as snapping blooms in two.3 In another photograph, park advocates peered into the park through the chain-link holes, watching the giant bulldozer dwarf the knee-high shrubbery.4 They could see the slow death of their thirsty plants and the breakage and movement of playground equipment and art yet could not control their movement or meaning. Compounded with the excessive state violence implemented to seize the park, including the murder of bystander James Rector along with hundreds of wounds and arrest, watching plants wither and playground equipment break felt like losing a family member.
Metaphors of plant birth and life helped park participants process the trauma of the park’s fencing as a form of corporeal violence rather than property destruction. In the aftermath of the park’s fencing, park allies spoke of the park as an extension of their bodies. Poet Julia Vinograd wrote that her heart was buried in the park’s soil.5 As time passed and their stories of celebration and struggle of laboring in the park were erased, Vinograd still felt a bodily connection to the park as the roses grew “blood red,” while the vines remained “tangled with our nerves.” Decades later, Vinograd grew frustrated that new spectators could not envision the park as alive in a way that acknowledged her work as life-giving, remarking lyrically, “When people come to Berkeley/ they always ask to see People’s Park/ and when I show it to them/ they don’t see it./ Next time/ I’m not going to walk them a few blocks,/ watch their faces and try to explain./ Instead I’ll show them my hands./ ‘Here’s People’s Park,’ I’ll say./ ‘Here.’”6 Imagining the park as not only alive but an extension of their bodies legitimized the pain of their loss as well as the sensual joy of their work.
Now looking at recent activist-created parks like Weelaunee People’s Park created in Atlanta as a protest against the construction of a new mega police-training academy, collective mourning over the murder of park advocate Tortuguita has revealed similar patterns of embedding emotions within activist environmental ecologies. A few months after UC Berkeley paid to cut down forty-seven old growth Redwoods within Berkeley’s still extant People’s Park in August of 2022, police in Atlanta shot unarmed Tortuguita fifty-seven times.7 Their family gathered for a memorial in the park, sharing speeches honoring Tort before spreading their ashes on the park’s soil.
Through mourning the destruction of both plants and their defenders, park supporters connect police brutality with environmental degradation now in the same ways that park creators in the 1960s saw those intersecting forces transforming parks into sacred battlefields in ongoing wars.
In Berkeley and in Atlanta, supporters gathered in these activist-created parks to memorialize the loss of life, both in plants and in people. At this point the park transforms into what political ecologist Jane Bennett calls “vital materiality,” blurring borders between life and matter, human and nonhuman, in ways that became a form of embodied consciousness raising about loss.8 Through mourning the destruction of both plants and their defenders, park supporters connect police brutality with environmental degradation now in the same ways that park creators in the 1960s saw those intersecting forces transforming parks into sacred battlefields in ongoing wars. As seen on protest signs marching through Atlanta, through the park, through our collective battle for green space, through our protection of people and the environment, Tortuguita Vive, La Lucha Sigue!
Notes
1 For more information on the People’s Park movement, see Kera Lovell, ““Everyone Gets a Blister” Sexism, Gender Empowerment, and Race in the People’s Park Movement,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 46, no. 3 & 4 (2018): 103-119; and Kera Lovell, “Free Food, Free Space: People’s Stews and the Spatial Identity Politics of People’s Parks,” American Studies 57, no. 3 (2018): 103-119.
2 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).
3 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).
4 Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Duke University Press, 2010): p. 29.
5 Julia Vinograd, “People’s Park, We Will Defend This Place,” PeoplesPark.org: http://www.peoplespark.org/Julia.html.
6 Julia Vinograd, “People’s Park, This is People’s Park,” from Julia Vinograd’s Blues for the Berkeley Inn, reprinted at PeoplesPark.org: http://www.peoplespark.org/Julia.html.
7 Nick Quinlan, “‘Each tree has a story’: Memorial service held for felled People’s Park trees,” The Daily Californian (August 22, 2022): https://dailycal.org/2022/08/22/each-tree-has-a-story-memorial-service-held-for-felled-peoples-park-trees; Nick Valencia, Devon Sayers, and Pamela Kirkland, “Climate activist killed in ‘Cop City’ protest sustained 57 gunshot wounds, official autopsy says, but questions about gunpowder residue remain,” CNN (April 20, 2023): https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/20/us/cop-city-activist-killed-dekalb-county-medical-examiner/index.html.
8 Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
Latest posts by Kera Lovell (see all)
- Let a Thousand Parks Bloom - June 15, 2023