Gardening as a radical act: home gardening in the context of the covid-19 pandemic and climate change

Keywords: urban agriculture, gardening, food system, pandemic, climate change, resilience
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 70

Abstract

Disruptions to our global food system have been apparent during the covid-19 pandemic, and are likely to grow as due to increasing pressures from climate change. The rapid increase in home gardening during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic spurred preliminary conversations about its potential to build a resilient local food system that can respond to longer term social and environmental crises. This project examines the experiences of home gardeners throughout the United States from June to December 2020. We examined their perceptions about how their home food production can create greater physical and social resiliency in our food systems in response to both short and long term crises. We use a mixed methods approach to address how gardening has been used as a pandemic crisis response collecting and analyzing data from social media (twitter), an online survey, and semi-structured qualitative interviews with novice and experienced home gardeners. We found that many participants framed home gardening as ‘radical acts of resistance’. By not participating in the current global, industrialized food systems, participants viewed their home gardens as a means of regenerating of our local food systems and communities, moving beyond the goal of home gardening for food production to the broader goal of strengthening community to build social resilience. The lessons from this have the potential to guide efforts towards building social resilience in the context of climate change adaptation.