equality – Alchemical Nursery

Here is a map of publicly available sources of food that can be harvested in Onondaga County and the broader Central New York region. This map is being shared by popular demand. It is our hope that we, people sharing interest in public food sources and all their co-benefits, will populate and maintain this resource as a community. The map is viewable and editable by the public, hosted and occasionally backed up by non-profit mutual aid group The Alchemical Nursery Project, Inc. of Syracuse, NY.

Please respect the land these potential harvests are on. Alchemical Nursery is not moderating every map entry, and we cannot ensure that points on the map are 100% publicly accessible for harvesting. You sure are welcome at the public community gardens we host, which are on this Public Harvest map and are listed in our Projects page. If you have questions or suggestions, please email us ( info [at] alchemicalnursery [dot] org ) for assistance. Please harvest honorably.

To use this map, go to the following link for zoom and search functionality: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kYz4UCuVrOMYC45WO4C1SspzhXc&usp=sharing

Or in the map below, you can click the top-left icon to view a legend of potential harvest points.

Our society has skyrocketed in efficiency. I see this efficiency and how it’s been a long-time in the making. I also see in politics how the left-right arguments tend to highlight a supposed battle of equality vs liberty-and-efficiency. How, if at all, does liberty and efficiency go together nowadays, and how does our prioritization of efficiency impact equality?

I think our preference for efficiency has led us to an imbalanced state. In mainstream tendencies, I see that we prioritize efficiency highest of all. Because of this, equality has suffered, and even liberty is at loss; concentrating power in few makes it more difficult for the many individuals and common goods to reach real opportunities and to contribute to their personal and our collective potential. What kind of liberty do I have in a setting rigged[1] by powerful few, keeping their own high-and-mighty interests & direction in mind? What kind of liberty can both my neighbors and I enjoy, if we found our success in debt-based finances[2]? Though I hear folks claiming to fight for liberty by supporting high prioritization of efficiency, I see the preference for extreme efficiency breeds an authoritarian oligarchy, destroying liberty in the same breath as it blocks equality; destroying our common resources and environment in the same breath as it blocks the human spirit.

Liberty is something important in the middle I think. In libertarian philosophy there are subsets which sway to the left, favoring equality, and subsets which sway to the right, favoring efficiency. What is the middle ground? In the United States, we are familiar with the word as we pledge our allegiance “…with Liberty and Justice for All.” How can we move in this middle way?[3] The last word of that pledge is “All.” The core value of equality comes from that word “All” and its meaning, and it fits naturally in a saying calling for liberty and justice.