00:05:37.180That's the soil that needs to be tended to.
00:05:40.220That's the garden that needs to be raised, is that space between your ears.
00:05:43.340Because what we are living right now is something that is not really designed for us.
00:05:48.700designed for us to be minions for corporations. Is it ever? And thinking about Los Angeles where
00:05:56.280your project started, I believe, you know, in LA is such a giant metropolis and it's this nexus of
00:06:04.660money and privilege with the entertainment industry, but it's also heavily dependent on
00:06:09.500resources from elsewhere. And not only are these manicured lawns and consumptive lifestyles
00:06:15.580sucking the watersheds of California dry, but the city also owns 26 square miles of vacant lots,
00:06:22.720which is actually equivalent to 20 central parks. So to think that in this fear, the city
00:06:29.460reprimanded you for utilizing open space to grow food for and beautify your community is absurd.
00:06:37.060So I'd love to hear the story of how your projects persevered through the many hurdles imposed by
00:06:42.440an equitable bureaucracy from the beginning of your gardens and the Bureau of Street Services
00:06:48.760citation to then the recent crowdfunding campaign that led you to the purchasing of your own land
00:06:54.480and property? It basically started because what I do is not necessarily, it's not about food.
00:07:02.480Food is a very small component to what I do. First and foremost, what I do is about people.
00:07:07.980And that's what people, they take that for granted. Everything I do is about people. When you do things like this, what I've, the undertaking that I have, it's not about you. It's way, way, way bigger than anything you do.
00:07:26.140They weren't just going to reprimand me. I was going to get arrested.
00:07:31.240You a lot of times you have to step out of your comfort zone to to show people the difference.
00:07:37.580And that's what happened with the city. I mean, I kind of embarrassed my city to like, well, you have these areas with the only land these people have is this land that's supposedly owned by you in front of their house.
00:07:49.840Why can't they grow food instead of putting grass there, instead of people leaving trash on your parkway?
00:07:55.780You know, and that's the thing with me.
00:07:56.980I didn't get a citation because people would leave toilets and dressers and couches on my street.1.00
00:08:02.580But as soon as I put some agapanthas and some onions and carrots out there, all of a sudden I'm a criminal and I get a warrant for my arrest.0.94
00:08:09.160So what this has led me to is, like I said, speaking all over the world on this.
00:08:16.540There's only one garden I maintain, and it's mine.
00:08:18.960You should maintain your own garden, because if you don't, you are still in the slavery system. And that's all of us. I'm not just talking about black people. All of us are enslaved by big ag, period. You know, you ask the child, where does apples come from? And they raise their hand and say from the store, not from my front yard, not from my backyard. And this is all around the world. It's not just the United States.
00:08:39.500When I spoke to Malik Yakini a few weeks ago, he said something along the lines of, quote, local food tastes great, but it won't end white supremacy, end quote.
00:08:51.420And I thought about this when I read about your visions for the Ron Finley Project and how your projects for a growing food into freedom.
00:09:03.800But like you were saying, it's more than that and severing the lines of dependence and encouraging local autonomy and communal reciprocity.
00:09:12.100So could you tell us more about the goals and visions of the Ron Finley project? And then how is this initiative and your upcoming event to function, invigorating revitalization within your community, but like you were saying, the global community?
00:09:28.100What we're trying to do is have people understand that the environment that you live in is by design and it's not designed for you.
00:09:37.380The fact that we all are designers and we are capable of designing the life we want to live and not the one that's been designed for us.
00:09:45.320So my whole thing is if we just get together and start communicating for one, but then if we grow together, we grow together, period.
00:09:55.960And that's what I want people to realize, that if we get together and start growing our own food, so now you have neighbors growing food, so now you can trade food with each other.
00:10:06.500You don't have to grow all the food that you're going to eat.
00:10:16.520Freedom from just that food apartheid, food racism, food injustice, because that's what it is.
00:10:23.520these areas that are so-called underserved, they're underserved. Why? Because they're
00:10:29.040underserved. That's the only reason. Why all of a sudden when the complexion of the community0.99
00:10:33.020changes, there's cafes and fresh food and juice bars and coffee shops everywhere and everything's
00:10:40.640convenient. It's the same city. It's the same street. It's the same trees, the same storefronts,
00:10:46.540but all of a sudden the complexion changes. And I want people to realize all of this is by design.0.90
00:10:51.980And I got to address a bunch of mayors like that. You know, it's like these underserved communities are underserved because you're not serving them until it benefits you. But then people don't realize the billions of dollars that are being made from poverty or the delusion of poverty, that we have companies, fast food companies, diabetes centers, these what are these drugstores in our neighborhoods that are making billions and billions of dollars off of people's suffering, off of people's misery.
00:11:19.940So if there's no money in these communities, how are they making all this money in these communities?0.74
00:11:25.380How are the slumlords living in different parts of the community like Beverly Hills and Palos Verdes if there's no money in these communities?0.99
00:19:30.440it's really funny when just to hear you say growing food isn't radical it when did it become
00:19:48.020radical because we think just in the last hundred years how much has changed i think still in russia
00:19:55.780something like 90 percent of the country's food comes from people's gardens it comes from people's
00:20:03.520small front yard it's interesting how in some groups things have become radical because that
00:20:10.460is how screwed we are it shows us that that's how far we've gotten from being healthy humans
00:20:18.560in their environment and i am also i really resonate with the tech issue because so yes i
00:20:26.540mean children are being raised from babies on technology and it's all about getting these jobs
00:20:33.240in tech and and that's fine and well until something actually happens in the physical world
00:20:39.040and then you're not going to be able just to code something on a computer to fix a bridge that goes
00:20:44.300out when you can't get home or or what is a hammer which one of these things is a hammer
00:20:49.380you know it's like that and i mean that's real that's real you know i got i got 26 year olds
00:20:56.04027 year olds around me that's never used the saw and they think it's a miracle that you can take
00:21:02.380a pallet and make an anirondack cheer out of it a lot of what we do a lot of what we advocate and
00:21:08.300teachers, there is no trash. It's only art waiting to happen. It just depends what lens you look at
00:21:15.520it through. That's why I go back to say the field that needs to be cultivated is that space between
00:21:21.140your ears, because we value what we've been trained to value. And it's the things that
00:21:26.880they want us to value. We pledge allegiance to a flag. We don't pledge allegiance to your
00:21:32.940to your family your neighbors to life itself to we don't pledge allegiance to mother nature
00:21:38.420why why is this so it's that well i think about the way that you embody empowered creativity and
00:21:47.360then tangibly act upon these creative visions and dreams for abundance and care of the whole
00:21:54.560world and it's really inspiring i want to read a quote from you from an article titled
00:21:59.880the renegade gardener and yes magazine and you write i wanted to beautify my block and my first
00:22:07.740thought was smell i wanted people to come by and smell lavender and jasmine i wanted to just
00:22:13.960bombard people's senses with smell that's basically where it started end quote and so i'm intrigued to
00:22:21.600ask you how you see beauty or gardening as an art form as an antidote for the manufactured
00:22:29.440monotony and intentionally oppressive design of cities, especially in certain neighborhoods,
00:22:36.560and how tapping into the beauty, the art, the tangible senses, how that just shifts the entire
00:22:44.400space. Well, it's like I said, it's amazing what a sunflower can do. It's almost difficult for
00:22:50.920people to walk and see a sunflower and not smile and not engage, especially when this sunflower
00:22:57.400might be 10 to 12, 14 feet high. Because people in the city, they've not been exposed to this.
00:23:03.660And it does. It transforms people. To walk down the street and all of a sudden,
00:23:08.320you just smell beautiful smells. You see color. I mean, they know what color therapy does.
00:23:14.160You know, why are these elementary schools and why are they the colors? Why are they just bland
00:23:18.900beiges and grays? They already know, all the psychologists know what these do to your psyche.1.00
00:23:25.140You know, you're in a fenced area, you're in a place with little windows, you know, you're already confined. So a lot of times you look and it's like, wow, these kids, they're already in prison. So when they go to prison, it feels like normal. So it's like, but I have a real simple saying, it's beauty in, beauty out.
00:23:43.980If you put beauty into a space that has none, that's what you're going to get out of it.
00:23:49.260It's the same thing that you put into your body.
00:23:51.720If you put healthy, nutritious, vibrant, alive food in your body, that's what you're going
00:23:57.860to get instead of the dead things, instead of the chemicals that we are putting into
00:25:55.980our sense of intuition, our sense of beauty,
00:25:59.320our sense of smell, our sense of color,
00:26:02.160all of these things that you've been bringing up.
00:26:04.560Again, it's by design, and it helps whoever we want, you know, corporate capitalism or however we want to call it, be able to have control over people as just being consumers to keep the system going, going, going, going, going.
00:26:19.680When you think about it, you think about, okay, you have a child, right?
00:26:23.560He was given or she was given Similac, which had too much estrogen in it to start with.
00:26:29.580First thing, you know, has a child, has an infant.
00:28:08.440You were touching on this earlier, but to dive deeper,
00:28:12.760How do you see urban nature and gardens and skills intersecting with the atmosphere of state violence in inner cities and the prison industrial complex?
00:28:23.340What we have to do is let people know that it's a setup and you don't even know it's a setup.
00:28:30.020You're right in it. But it is a setup.
00:28:32.480every all the media that you hear the ads drink this hey drink and you got athletes and you got
00:28:39.380entertainers sponsoring these sodas that you know they know cause diabetes and everything else and
00:28:45.520if you're cool you'll drink this if you're cool you'll do this people have to have the knowledge
00:28:50.620of self to realize that they've been played and they need to wake up it's like with me i i tell
00:28:56.600people i'm not you know people oh are you doing gardens here are you doing gardens i'm like no i'm
00:29:01.240not doing nobody's garden. Do your own damn garden. I was like, I'll help you, but I'm not0.99
00:29:06.320the help. Because if you don't physically know how to do it yourself, you're still in the system.
00:29:11.500I want people to get out of the system. I want people to be self-sustaining. That's gangster to
00:29:16.640me. People wonder where that whole gangster gardener came from. It didn't come because I'm
00:29:21.100some ex-gangster or ex-gang member. It's because being a gardener is one of the most gangster things
00:29:26.960you can do. Mother Nature's is the ultimate gangster to me. You know, so that's where that
00:29:32.500came from. Being self-sustaining, that's gangster. And that's what I want people to see. They don't
00:29:39.420know they're being manipulated. They fall in all these celebrities and rappers and, you know,
00:29:44.740who's promoting being alcoholics. And you see a lot of them, they become alcoholics from what
00:29:50.540they were promoting. How much land was taken like that throughout history? How are we going to
00:29:56.580change that is just that. We have to change it with value of self. That's how it's going to change.
00:30:26.580I don't need to be blind to the weed's effects inside, breathing easily in all those beliefs that were recently mistaken by the feet and where they're really leading me and being ropes in the deep, in decency, choking how I think, increasingly a host of things that needs to be addressed, within the complex, I'm upholding right sex, I smoke, I confess, to all the moments I forget, stuck upon the crutches of the dumb sects, while at home I finally met with everything I'm eating, stroking pets, but truth be told, I'm still coping with his death.
00:32:50.560Well, don't even don't even answer. OK, so it's real simple. So you're in school, right? And you go to college. Was it four years? OK, that's already by design. So you go to college and it's four years and you study whatever you study and then the debt.
00:33:06.700So now they want you to go to overgrad, undergrad, sideways grad, backwards grad.
00:33:12.320OK, so now how many years have you put in? That's seven, eight years in college. Right.
00:33:16.460And then you leave college. And where do you start? At a position that is introductory position, an entry level position.
00:33:26.120Why? Because all that stuff you learned eight years ago is now antiquated.
00:33:32.400Why is everywhere you go, it's a four year university? It's a this and that. It's designed
00:33:36.700like that. You think they don't know that? Everybody can't be on the street at the same time.
00:33:41.280What are they really teaching you? What are you really doing in college? It's almost like a
00:33:45.560holding tank. That's why. And it's, I can go deeper, but I don't. I just think it's a joke,
00:33:52.800you know, with all of these studies and these papers that these college professors do and who
00:33:58.460gets to read them you know you got a 700 page you studied how does leaf mulch cure cancer you know
00:34:05.940who gets to read that paper nobody but how much money did it cost you know somebody spends several
00:34:11.960millions of dollars just for you to do this paper that maybe two people are going to read so it's to
00:34:17.040me it's a it's a scam some things yeah you need doctors or whatever yeah there's certain things
00:34:22.240that do but it's a lot of things you don't need college and most people who've gone they're not
00:34:27.140doing what they went to college for because they wound up realizing I hate this I don't want to do
00:34:32.700this and there's not the jobs people right they go to college for four years six years I mean
00:34:41.560get their master's degree and they come out and they don't have jobs for what they've studied
00:34:46.060I have some guys that were working with me and they went to school for it they studied all that
00:34:51.460tech coding they can't find a job even in that that's where everything's going to yeah the jobs
00:34:58.280aren't there and then the debt is so large from college and then you can't find the job and again
00:35:04.940this is another setup like you've been talking about keeping us in the system keeping us indebted
00:35:11.400and then I just want to touch on what you said about the college papers I've been doing some
00:35:17.220major research into the restoration industrial complex of forest ecosystems and trying to
00:35:27.620break into the forestry industry and it's incredible because these papers on whether
00:35:36.220that's replanting of redwoods or you know what you said about the mulch or whatever it is it
00:35:41.560it doesn't even matter but all of these papers they're not even accessible you actually if you're
00:35:48.440just a regular person who does want to help replant a forest you can't even get to that
00:35:53.780paper or you have to spend an absorbent amount of money to buy that paper but to even find that
00:35:59.680paper you almost have to be in this you know exclusive group to even know where to find it
00:36:06.200and then to find it and then you have to pay for it and then it's written in such a way
00:36:09.860that is so honestly boring most of the time are so convoluted or so tangled up that it doesn't
00:36:18.000just allow somebody to read it and then get the information and then do the task even if it's for
00:36:24.620something good and so it's really fascinating how university colleges the system you know all of
00:36:33.360those pieces actually keep us so far from being self-sufficient, from being connected to our lands,
00:36:42.040from being connected to one another. It is this really massive barrier.
00:41:14.320It actually just creates the system to continue to be hierarchical.
00:41:19.720So I really am enjoying how you're talking about stop trying to get it from this other place.
00:41:30.180I think that's what you're getting at.
00:41:32.140And so I'm interested to hear more about the self-sufficiency, more about how individuals, communities can stop using so much of their energy and their resources to try to get other people to care to then basically just give them breadcrumbs in return, if anything.
00:41:50.580that's a big mindset that again i'm gonna go back to one of the first thing i said the space that
00:41:59.960needs to be harvested is the space between our two ears that's what's going to change it and
00:42:04.960that's what what we do is about people food is a very small part of it yeah we need food but
00:42:11.940when you put yourself in a place where you understand where you are who you are and what
00:42:18.700really matters to you. We got a world where you got people that would kill somebody over a pair
00:42:24.440of tennis shoes. Think about that. What kind of value system is that? And that's the thing that
00:42:29.740has to change. And a lot of this is a lot of this is celebrity driven. You know, what we're doing
00:42:34.620with the Ron Finley project is I know a lot of celebrities. They're not in the standing out there
00:42:39.540with me. Well, why don't you get the celebrity to go do this with you? Because I didn't want0.97
00:42:43.720this to be celebrity driven. I want this to be purpose driven. I want people around me to have
00:42:48.980a purpose that literally truly wants to change this, not just a name that people want to come
00:42:55.280see or you're famous. That's not what this is about. We have to change our value system.
00:43:00.760Everybody. Yeah, I think about that a lot, how this system, this current paradigm,
00:43:06.780it sets us up to value tennis shoes diamonds celebrity but not value oxygen not value
00:43:14.840clean water not value each other not value our neighbors like you were saying earlier you know
00:43:21.180we pledge allegiance to the flag we don't pledge allegiance to even the person who lives next door
00:43:26.060to us we don't pledge allegiance to the creek that runs down a couple miles away so it's yes
00:43:32.200this value system is so it is the crux it's the crux of everything but who has thought about that
00:43:38.700has anybody thought about that no have it no one thinks like that and that's why they oh you're
00:43:44.360you're a critical thinker that's not critical that's real
00:50:56.420they can go on our website with the function which is happening june the 30th at vermont square park
00:51:02.920it's just a fun field way that we show people how to have fun with very little effort and it's free
00:51:10.860for the whole community and there's everything from circus training to weaving to we have people
00:51:18.520who make pottery and jump rope and tug of war and dancing and live groups and we had someone
00:51:26.320last year that you get to make your own facial care products so it's just a fun thing you know
00:51:31.660one of the one you made me think of one of the things recently i have a neighbor down the street
00:51:37.120and her daughters they i have this this hut a twig hut they call it that's been built on the street
00:51:42.540right on the street and they come they used to come in and play with their dowels and different
00:51:47.300things and then all of a sudden i noticed all my blackberries would be missing and they would they
00:51:52.500So they would come early and eat all my blackberries. But I just last week they came by and they they brought a friend and they just ran and start eating nasturtiums out of the garden.
00:52:05.360I asked her, I said, what have you created? She says, I didn't do this. You did.
00:52:09.140You know, and it made me think all of a sudden that I got these young girls that are running to the garden to eat flowers out of the garden.
00:52:17.800So, yeah, it could happen. Again, it goes back beauty in, beauty out. I literally get to see a change that I've had a hand in making, and I'm honored by that.
00:52:30.220Well, thank you, Ron. I'm honored to have had this conversation with you today and all of the places you went with us and really helping.
00:52:43.500No, I love it. I love it. Because like you said, we got to get between the ears. We have to shake each other up to shake off the conditioning so that we can start to see clearly and start to value clearly. And we need people like you who can crack and find the fissures in our conditioning to break it.
00:53:08.680And so I really loved it. I loved being able to talk about college and the prison industrial complex and the nonprofit industrial complex and food growing. And I really loved hearing from you how it isn't for you about farming or growing other people's food.
00:53:25.840It is, yes, growing your own food, but it's about the self-actualized sustainability of one's self to have the skills, to grow the confidence, to value oneself, to value one's own skills for self-sufficiency.
00:53:43.880that is huge that that really is a is something that isn't talked about because it's been so
00:53:51.260overshadowed by celebrity consumerism alcohol on and on and on like all the things you've talked
00:53:57.900about so i i just really appreciate everywhere you went i appreciate you giving me the time