Friday, April 22, is Earth Day, a time set aside to appreciate nature and to dedicate ourselves to protecting and sustaining it. New York City, a place many think of as an "urban jungle," is home to more than 500 community gardens where the crops are as diverse as New Yorkers themselves.
一提到纽约市，人们会联想到一个城市建筑丛林，其实，纽约市有500多个社区花园，花园中的植物和纽约市人口一样多样化。
Creating and sustaining these green spaces offer pleasure, camaraderie and much needed contact with the wonders of nature.
这些绿色空间为市民们带来快乐、友爱，并让市民能够和大自然亲密接触。
It’s nearly nine a.m. on a workday but Noah Kaufman, volunteer manager of the 113th Street Play Garden, cannot help stopping at the 12-by-30-meter green space. Grabbing a hand trowel, he turns over the pebbly loam looking for worms for his plot.
这是一个普通工作日，早上大约9点，第113街“游玩花园”的志愿者主席诺厄·考夫曼情不自禁地停在这个3千平方米的绿地上，用一把小铲子挖开铺满砾石的土壤，看看土里有没有害虫。
"New York City is, if anything, the built environment. We have plenty of concrete. We have plenty of bricks. We have plenty of steel," says Kaufman. "We have little, little places like this vest pocket park, which are a small oasis, a piece of green, a place where there are trees, where there are weed trees, fruits trees which have been planted by humans or planted by nature provide a little refuge from the city. So for the neighbors here on 113th street, this is our front yard and we share it."
考夫曼说：“纽约市高楼林立，到处都是混凝土、砖、钢铁。但我们没有很多地方象这个袖珍小公园一样，作为一个小小的绿洲，长满了人类种植或者是大自然种下的、能够为市民们带来些许庇护的大树、野生树和果树。对第113街的居民来说，这里就是我们的前院。我们保护它，分享它。”
The community garden has been a refuge for Alexandra Patz and her 7-year-old son ever since her family moved to New York from the suburbs where they had their own yard.
亚历桑德拉·帕策和7岁的儿子从郊区一个带后院的房子搬进纽约市后，常常躲到这个小公园里来。
"When we moved to the city, I was glad to find on this block that there was this little garden where we could become involved, and where my son could experience digging and growing things," says Patz.
她说：“如果我儿子想做一个鸟窝，或者在树上挂一个鸟窝，他至少有一个地方可以这么做。这也算是一种户外活动，我们可以听到小鸟叫。”
New York’s community garden movement began during the 1970s. It was a difficult era, when the city’s population was declining and many city-owned lots were trash-filled, rat-infested eyesores. Erica Packard is with the Manhattan and Bronx Land trusts, which raise money to buy urban green space and transfer ownership into community hands. The city offered to give the lots to organized groups in exchange for improving and maintaining them.
纽约的社区公园运动是上世纪70年代开始的。那是纽约的一个困难时期，市区人口下降，很多公有土地垃圾成堆，老鼠横行。纽约市土地信托公司筹款买下城里的绿地，然后把土地所有权转移给社区。信托公司的埃丽卡·帕卡德说，有组织的群体得到土地，条件是美化和维护这些土地。
"Those neighborhoods were, and still are, least served by the existing parks system," says Packard. "So they provide some of the only open accessible green space, particularly for seniors and children in low income neighborhoods."
她说：“现有的公园系统一直极少惠及那些社区，因此这些地块成了人们、特别是老人和孩子们可以享用的唯一绿色空间。”
A milestone in the movement was the creation of Operation GreenThumb. It’s a program within the city’s Department of Parks that offers free gardening classes and light equipment like shovels and rakes. Still, in leaner times, many communities have had to fight to keep control of their gardens when the city wanted to auction the plots to tax-paying real estate developers. Some green spaces have been lost this way because people couldn’t maintain them properly.
这个运动的一个里程碑是“绿色手指行动”的创立。这是纽约市政府公园部开设的一个项目，为人们提供免费园艺课程，以及铲子和耙子等轻便工具。但在经济不景气的时候，很多社区不得不为保留这些花园而抗争，因为市政府想把土地拍卖给能给城市纳税的土地开发商。一些社区因为没有做好维护工作而失去了他们的绿地。
Community garden organizer Catherine Wint, of the Manhattan and Bronx Land trusts, says that because gardens are governed by grassroots volunteers with diverse interests, keeping them going is an exercise in democracy.
社区花园组织者、纽约公共土地信托公司的凯瑟琳·温特指出，由于社区花园由草根志愿者管理和维护。
"It’s different than a park because individuals in a community garden have to have a relationship and they have to work democratically," says Wint. "And they have to come up with procedures to enable them to share this very small space in a way that’s going to benefit everyone."
而每人都有自己的工作日程、不同的领导方式和品味，因此保留花园其实就是行使民主权利，他们要通过民主协商，制定出相关程序，让这块小小的绿地给所有人带来好处。
The diversity of plants in the city’s community gardens reflects the variety of New Yorkers themselves. For example, there's a bed of special red peppers planted by a Mexican immigrant family growing next to a stand of flowering peonies tended by a homesick Chinese gardener.
花园中植物种类的多样性反映出纽约市民的多样化。比如，一个来自墨西哥的移民家庭会种一些特别的红辣椒，而旁边却是一个思乡的中国人培育的牡丹花。
Mint says gardens in African-American neighborhoods often feature the collard greens and black-eyed peas favored on many Southern family farms.
在非洲裔美国人社区的花园里，常见的是羽衣甘蓝和黑眉豆，这两种食物是很多南部美国家庭农场最爱种的。
"And they hold up that tradition of farming because it’s still within the memory of the family. They still go back down South and their relatives still come up to New York. So it’s always a source of pride for them to bring their relatives to the community garden to see that they are continuing this tradition that’s gone on in their family for so long. And people walk by it and say ‘That’s a farm. That’s a farm.’"
温特说：“人们保持着耕作传统。他们到南部州串亲戚，亲戚们也来纽约拜访。纽约的主人会骄傲地带着客人去参观小区花园。路人走过花园时也会赞叹，这就是一个农场嘛。”
There is pride on the face of Lori Harris as she surveys the half square block of green her farm-raised father, now 90, helped create from a rubble-strewn Harlem lot in 1979.
这种骄傲洋溢在洛里·哈里斯的脸上。她正在巡视她那一块地。1971年，哈里斯从小在农场长大的90岁老父亲把哈莱姆区这块到处是碎石瓦砾的土地变成了花园。
"You have to give back to the Earth. You can’t just take everything from it. You gotta learn how to recycle and clean up. People think groceries come from the grocery store, but they come from a farm," says Harris. "They start from somewhere. So you really have to treat Mother Earth right and she treats you just the same."
哈里斯说：“我们必须回馈自然，我们不能只向大自然索取。我们应该学习如何回收和清理。人们以为食品来自食品店，但其实食物是来自农场的。好生对待地球母亲，我们就能得到相同的回报。” |