A Georgist's Guerilla Gardening Guide | Hacker News Reader

A Georgist's Guerilla Gardening Guide

taylor.town

65 pointssurprisetalk35 comments

The first rule of breaking the law is never break 2 laws at the same time.

If you’re going to “litter” plants onto someone else’s property, your reasoning for what plants to plant needs to be immaculate.

That doesn’t have to be a big complicated thing. Plant local wildflowers, from low weed content seed sources. Plant common imported plants like you find at the local nursery. Don’t pick random shit that’s invasive, or has poor nutrition that starves local insects. Don’t jump fences, think really hard about if you want to be taking things away like trash rather than relocating it on the property.

Somewhat off topic, but if you live in NYC you've probably noticed the "School of Practical Philosophy" advertisements in the subway. They always gave off cult vibes to me and I ignored them, but one day I finally decided to lookup what they're about. To my surprise, they started out as a Georgist reading group (!) that meandered into Gurdjieff and then Advaita Vedanta (via Maharishi's TM and his followers).

I really was not expecting to read Henry George's name when I opened that wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Philosophy_and_Econo...

The downtown of my relatively wealthy Canadian city is surrounded by vacant parking lots & run down slums owned by real estate speculators. We are still living with the problems that Henry George wrote about.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...

> If you own dead/brown/unoccupied land, you're an asshole.

Well said.

But yes, we should all be re-reading Progress and Poverty (1879), as our world shares many similarities.

The real asshole is the one telling people how to live and making assumptions about other people's intentions because of the state of their property. If you are trying to sell an empty lot where a building used to be for example, you can't just start planting tomatoes. You also can't let random people enter your property because you'll be liable for their injuries.

Why can’t you just start planting tomatoes?

There is usually no technical reason why you can't, but any vegetation needs labor to maintain, a source of water, soil that is actually suitable and not poisoned. Then this vegetation would make the property hard to visually see or traverse, and it would likely be destroyed by the buyer anyway. There may also be zoning restrictions against growing tall vegetation on random land, leading to fines and fees. If you create visual obstructions, homeless people might also start squatting on the land or littering, leading to further headaches.

As cool as it sounds to just whimsically plant flowers, vegetables, and trees everywhere, this does create problems for people. Just because someone has property and you don't doesn't mean you have a divine right to tell them what to do with it. It could literally be owned by an old granny who is trying to sell it with the least amount of headaches, or someone who intends to build on it as soon as they save enough money to do so.

> If you own dead/brown/unoccupied land, you're an asshole.

Swap land with housing and you get something that has been going on for some time over here: homebuilders receiving government funding to make lots and lots of new homes then after they're finished letting them empty to keep homes prices high by reducing the offer compared to demand. This goes on for years, sometimes even forever until either they rot or become refuge for squatters.

Unless you own a majority of the homes, it is never more profitable to let them sit vacant. It's literally money left on the table. So I am skeptical about claims of this happening on a large scale.

Permaculture is about maximizing sustainable benefits from a piece of land at minimal cost and effort over the long term:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwdjtwsRtRE

Also Greening The Desert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhU7eTupnYk

Ron Finley, who is mentioned in the article, sells shirts that say, “Plant some shit.” But I don’t like the art direction on the current design and am forever kicking myself for not buying one of the originals.

> 7. ... Remember that squatting is legal.

Not in Michigan it isn't. It's a criminal offense, punishable by fines and jail time.

"all the b̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ land"

"Bitcoin is Land" (2013) - 8 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494583

I suspect that anyone who advocates for what this page advises is either functioning from a sort of victimhood or resentment; or so privileged as to have never comprehended the likelihood of a consequence; or is so spiritually emancipated that their sense of morality and ethics has become subjected to whatever appeals to their desire to subvert an unjust authority, in spite of the fact that the outcome is that if they somehow achieve power themselves, they will soon become an unjust authority in their own right.

There's plenty of available gardening space in unused yards. Ask your neighbors if you can garden their unused yard in exchange for them getting a cut of the produce or flowers.

Ok but private property is private property. This is just trying to normalize vandalism and criminality. “I don’t like it so I’ll do whatever I want and violate others.”

Private property is whatever we collectively decide it is. We can only build infrastructure such as railways and highways because we collectively decided those are okay to build on private property. We can do the same with anything we consider essential for the common good.

sounds a little too much like communism for my liking :shrug:

private property should be whatever the owner decides it is

Yes, we can decide it collectively, through the political process. But individuals should not be allowed to just do whatever they want in violation of other individuals. If I think your tree isn’t great, is it okay if I were to come chop it down? Where does that line of thinking end?

Since you are not a fan of private property, maybe we should collectively decide that your property is no longer yours but a public botanical garden and ofcourse you don't get to live there (for the greater good)

Sounds fun right :)

Consider the claim more thoroughly:

>We can only build infrastructure such as railways and highways because we collectively decided...

Therefore a landowner cannot build without collective approval? I disagree. Obviously a single individual can improve land and create value independently of a collective.

Another popular claim is that property only exists because of state enforcement. Again, a single individual can enter a frontier and improve land. This is often accompanied by the claim that the state exists to enforce property ownership. Clearly one must preclude the other. If property ownership does not exist, there is no motive for creation of the state.

If we go back to basics we find that academics have already covered this territory. Improvement of unutilized land is often cited as the origin of ownership. While many will make arguments about the virtues of collectivism, that is beyond the scope of the specific origins of land ownership. These are generally arguments premised on, "The ends justify the means".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle

If this is the future of vandalism and criminality, I say we let it be normalized yesterday. Not much of a "violation of others" to put some planters down in a lots that's had nothing but litter blowing through it for 2+ years, and a "violation" that's quite easily reconciled if the owner wants to remediate it.

I find it just as much of a violation - a much more egregious violation - to let land go to shit in areas where people live, unmanaged and blighted, with no regard for the people that actually inhabit that space. No, I'm not making a legal argument in a court of law here.

I think the right way to do it is to first advocate for a change in the law, and not just violate someone’s private property.

Just put some planters down and leave contact info. If someone wants them removed, pick them up. We're not talking about taking a backhoe to someone's manicured lawn.

> If this is the future of vandalism and criminality, I say we let it be normalized yesterday.

Would be vandalism if I hit somebody's with a bat in their back?.

And if I destroy their back seeding kudzu in their home, for them to remove it for the rest of their lives?

What If I seed flowering thistle?.

Seed bombs are a moronic trend from people without gardens that are playing to be gardeners, without a clue of the responsibility of keeping a collection of life beings.

I haven't said a thing about "seed bombs" - your strawman argument where people are maliciously planting the least desirable invasives is a bit different than neighborhood residents putting native wildflower seed in unmanaged dirt patches.

Property is only private if the government chooses to Defend your ownership and use or lack there of through force. There are many cases where people thought they owned land only for someone more powerful or influential to take it away

I too dislike vandalism but "private property is private property" hides the many nuances on how much private property is a limited right.

FFH4X!?

Georgism fans feels like people who discovered socialism via Wikipedia.

Either this or they worship Progress and Poverty like a lost religious text

hmm, one of those old fashioned web sites, nice to see they still exist.

I have always wanted to do something like this actually, hampered only by the fact that I suck at gardening.

You could partner with someone who doesn’t suck and distribute seed bombs.

They don’t work. Only weeds grow out of them

Focus on researching what grows naturally in your environment and find a good source of those seeds. This will lead you to learning about your soil, the sun per day in the area, localized temp and humidity, etc before selecting the plants and using that info in your search for more plants that would be viable. Then the plants will grow themselves and you won't need to be good at corrective measures that require a lot more work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com