Gardens versus Bureaucracy
Submitted by Robert Daeley on Mon, 2006-06-19 02:49.
LA Times: Time Is Ripe for L.A. School Gardens
…teachers yakked about how troubled they were by the sight of children running about on days when the sun-baked asphalt seemed capable of melting sneakers. They raged at the notion that it was OK for kids to play with only chain link separating them from the fumes and cacophony of the Santa Monica Freeway.
“I wanted to call Amnesty International,” says [Times food and gardening writer Emily] Green.
What struck these plant lovers as particularly cruel was the fact that many of the school’s 1,100 students have roots in the farmlands of Mexico or Modesto but live in over-packed apartment buildings where it’s easy to imagine that concrete is the Earth’s natural groundcover.
Why couldn’t the money earmarked for asphalt be spent to make part of that blacktop wasteland greener, they wondered? The district had a million reasons why that would be far too hard to do….