A man named Seneca Scott built community in West Oakland by building a community garden. Bottoms Up Garden lost its crops during the pandemic, but the community it built is still there.
Seneca was no farmer when he moved to West Oakland from inner-city Cleveland via Cornell. But his neighbor Jason Byrnes was from rural Michigan and knew how to manage chickens, goats, and vegetable patches. They started talking, they argued over politics, and eventually they took action. They helped turn West Oakland into a neighborhood where baby strollers were safe on the street at night.
How could planting turnips lead to that?…