Grenades Are Green

The first seed grenades were made from condoms filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer. Envisioned by Liz Christy in 1973 when she started the "Green Guerrillas," the grenades were thrown over fences into the empty lots of New York in an effort to rehabilitate underutilized portions of the urban landscape. Christy was angry and resentful of the waste left by urban sprawl and critical of the ways in which we were squandering our spatial resources. What it sparked was a whole movement of eco-lawlessness, engendering everything from moss graffiti to clean marketing, and giving voice to the militant faction of green peace.

But today, sustainability has lost its fangs. With Brad Pitt's face now poster boying the movement, it is hard to remember that the green movement was once a grass roots movement, small in scale and loyal in dedication. In 1997 when the US renounced the Kyoto Protocol, being green was still something the nation at large was increasingly skeptical of and living sustainably meant making individual silent sacrifices and asking other to do the same. In an attempt to grow in its global endeavor, green officially went public somewhere around 2007 when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." After that, it was a snowball with everyone from Toyota to OPAC getting in on the action. By 2010, green was a bumper sticker you put on your car.  

Even seed bombing, once the staple of the eco-urban malcontent, is getting a commercialized neutering as both Visualingual's Etsy and Anthropologie have put out commercialized lines of all in one seed and fertilizer balls. They are packaged in a number of different seed variants and sizes to fit any microclimate and budget. Others, such as Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud of Common Studio, think that seed bombing should be as mainstream as gum. In their project Greenaid, Common Studio is taking the old typology of the gumball machine and transforming it into seed bomb dispensers scattered throughout Los Angeles. A small booklet attached to each dispensors informs the bomb buyers where the best local urban targets are for their twenty five cent purchases. Common Studio says that "Greenaid is equally an interactive public awareness campaign, a lucrative fundraising tool, and a beacon for small scale grass roots action that engages directly yet casually with local residents." All of this action makes me ask: what does it mean for green when even the Los Angeles Times is willing to run a story on how to make a home grown seed bomb? I think the answer is simple: we have lost our balls.

Revolutions sustain themselves only if they remain revolutionary. What has happened instead is that those once opposed to the sustainable movement, big oil and genetic farmers, have become its biggest seeming supporters, investing huge quantities into bio-tech research as well as sustainable practices. As a society, we have accepted this self imposed sacrifice as an appropriate censor. It would be fine if it we as simple a matter as letting the world's biggest polluters off with a warning, but  by giving them control of the fiscal reigns of the movement, really what we are doing is letting these corporate entities set the terms for the sustainable movement. In essence, we've accepted a honey-but cheerios version of sustainability. If the only balls that green has are seed bombs, then I do not want any part of it.