Environmentalists Adopt New Weapon: Seed Balls

by Margot Adler
April 15, 2009

Neighborhood organizations across the U.S. that want to improve the environment are using a surprising weapon: seed balls.

It's a technique for planting in abandoned places and often inhospitable land that was developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer in "natural farming."

The technique has worked its way to Brooklyn, N.Y. In the Greenpoint neighborhood on a recent Sunday afternoon, a small group of activists walked the streets carrying paper bags filed with little balls made from clay, compost and seeds. They are members of a local group called NAG, or Neighbors Allied for Good Growth. They drop the balls on dirt piles and throw them into abandoned lots.

How To Make Seed Balls

Emily Gallagher, a NAG member who specializes in open space issues, says it's easy to make seed balls.

"First, we mix the mulch and a seed mixture," Gallagher says. "We try to pick a seed that is native to the area and can withstand drought. We mix those together, and then we knead it like bread into a red terra-cotta clay. It is important to use the red terra cotta, because other kinds have different chemicals in it that affect growth."

The mixture is rolled into little balls, which then has to dry. The group then puts them in bags and distributes them. The mud and clay protect the seeds from being eaten by birds and rodents. After three to five rains, the balls break down and the seeds germinate. The seeds used in Brooklyn are mostly wild cornflowers, lovely blue daisy-like flowers often seen by the roadside.

Development On Hold

The Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg have been gentrifying. There has been lots of development and little attention to open space. But with the economic crisis, a lot of development is now on hold.

Michael Freedman-Schnapp, one of the co-chairs of Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, says that community gardening and the "guerrilla gardening movement" of the 1970s "was a reaction to all the abandonment in the city at the time."

"We are at the end of a development boom, and it is clear that the city's resources are going to be constrained," he says. "They are not going to be able to take care of everywhere in the city. And so the city is going to have to rely on citizens stepping up and taking care of their own surroundings."

There are a lot of fenced-in areas in the neighborhood. On the water front, there is a chain-link fence that has a sign with the little maple leaf that signifies a city park, but it's locked. A new re-zoning plan has promised that it will become a park, but nothing is happening yet.

Taking Control Of A Small Piece Of The Planet

If you look around the neighborhood, you can see people sneaking into abandoned, trash-filled areas near the river, finding places to fish, to jog and to walk their dogs.

Gallagher says that seed balls allow people to take control of their small piece of the planet. She says walking around on a Sunday morning throwing seed balls is fun and easy.

"I think it is really important to break down these larger tasks — of taking back our neighborhoods and cleaning up our open spaces — into tasks that are completely doable," she says.

Most people, of course, still have no clue what seed balls are. Back in 2003, during a World Trade Organization protest, a dozen police surrounded a parking lot. They were concerned that these strange pellets they found might be dangerous weapons. They threw them against walls and watched them "explode." It took them a while to figure out that they were seed balls.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103129515

South Carolina State Sen: Today’s Tea Party Should Go After Corporate Power Like Original Boston Tea Party Did

By Lee Fang
Apr 23rd, 2011 at 9:30 am

At a the Tax Day Tea Party on Monday in Columbia, SC, a number of politicians, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), gave rather routine speeches blasting the Obama administration and liberals. Towards the end of the event, one speaker delivered a fiery speech excoriating both Democrats and Republicans for giving away hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to well connected corporations in the state. State Sen. Tom Davis (R-SC) explained to the crowd that corporations are dominating South Carolina by hiring lobbyists, then demanding huge tax giveaways from the “ruling elite” of politicians. By giving money away to already powerful corporations, costs are pushed upon regular people in the form of service cuts or higher sales taxes.

After his speech, ThinkProgress spoke with Davis about corporate influence in politics and his fight against tax giveaways to powerful businesses. We also spoke about how receptive the current Tea Party movement is to his message. In fact, as many historians have accurately noted, the real Boston Tea Party was a revolt against a massive corporate tax cut given to the East India Trading Company. The tax cut effectively gave the British corporation a monopoly over the tea trade in colonial America:

DAVIS: You’ve got leadership in the House, Republican and Democrat, leadership in the Senate, Republican and Democrat that are presiding over this ballooning in special deals that are given away to corporations. And the numbers don’t like: $34 million dollars worth of targeted “tax credits” back in 1998 to corporations who lobbied for them has ballooned to $523 million in 2008 and this year it has ballooned to over a billion dollars. We’re not a big state. Our general fund is $5.1 billion dollars. And with a $5.1 billion dollar general fund budget, we’re giving away one billion dollars in tax credits to targeted industries that have lobbyists that are going to lobby for them? Somebody pays that bill, and there’s no free lunch. Who pays the bill are those folks out there that don’t have the power to hire lobbyists. [...]

FANG: The Tea Act that kind of sparked the revolution was actually a specialized tax cut for the East India Trading Company and it basically pushed the price of American imported tea out of the market. And it seems very similar to what you’re saying here.

DAVIS: And the Tea Party was about 1773. Here we are in the year 2011 and we’re still talking about politicians passing out special tax breaks to help--

FANG: To big corporations, like the East India Trading Company was a British corporation.

DAVIS: Oh yeah. It’s absolutely crazy. And its not the free market and its not what made our country great. Our country has been because we’ve counted on individuals taking risks, saving money, working hard. Now, it’s large corporations that have access to lawmakers that get huge tax breaks and there’s no way that the little guy can compete.

Watch it:

The anti-corporate streak of the Tea Party has been muffled by corporate-dominated front groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, which are both run by lobbyists. But in ThinkProgress’ conversations with ordinary Tea Party activists, many have expressed concerns that corporate lobbyists have far too much influence in politics. When asked about massive subsidies given to the oil industry, or the fact that dozens of some of the most profitable corporations in America don’t pay a dime in corporate income taxes, Tea Party activists have agreed with progressives that there is a structural imbalance in the political system towards corporate power.

Notably, many companies like Koch Industries (which funds fronts like Americans for Prosperity) have falsely claimed to represent the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. In fact, Koch Industries has used its lobbying power to demand a $50 million tax break from states like Kansas, and has lobbied to pollute tens of billions of dollars worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for free.

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/23/south-carolina-state-sen-tea-party-should-go-after-corporations/