Eco HEROES

Suzanne Husky

After living a few years in the United States, my attention was caught by a handful of people who chose to escape the wasteful aspects of more typical American living by ignoring the pristine suburban lawn aesthetic, reducing their contribution to the human footprint, and advocating environmental awareness in general. I started looking for more of these “Eco Heroes” and upon finding many living throughout Berkeley and Oakland, California, I began photographing them to document their work. In this book the “Eco Heroes” stand in the spaces they altered and molded for their eco-integrity. This publication focuses on their simple yet effective ideas implemented in the intimate garden space. The garden space, in addition to being domestic and private, is very political in that it is a setting for addressing issues of food, water, sustainability, health, and the human footprint. These “Eco Heroes” act to protect biodiversity by saving seeds and providing wildlife with native plants habitat they can feed from. As locavores, (a person who practices eating foods grown locally) they protest consumerism by growing healthy food, cultivating honey, and canning the fruits and vegetables they have produced. They make the most of their water by using gray water filtering systems, they compost, they make humanure, they build sheds with natural and local materials, and they invent a myriad of systems that bypass the waste of consumer culture. All of the people depicted are not only active in the private realm of their personal garden, but they are also involved in the broader arena of political activism working against environmental racism nationally and internationally, educating, and promoting food justice, green and sustainable architecture. The east bay activists are numerous and vary in age and backgrounds in broader ways than I could depict in this publication. I chose to show some of the most exiting “eco heroes” I crossed paths with, those who maximized the applications of their philosophies.

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