Abstract
This chapter acknowledges the antipodal nature of red and green zones while cautioning against casting green zones as a uniform response to human or ‘natural’ disturbances. Land allotments for gardening and farming are staple green zone behaviors and have deep historical roots. Carefully considered, these roots reveal that green zones originate from above, as social control, as well as from below to protect citizens and subjects against state misadventures, industrial dystopias, land enclosures, and environmental crises. The chapter seeks to show that green zone land policies can be top-down or bottom-up, are historically contingent, and will continue to evolve and hybridize as they have done in the past.
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Though some commoners held land during the Republic, much of it passed into patrician hands. Roman elites also usurped public lands, causing further tensions between the two classes and eventual civil war in the last century of the Republic (Hopkins 1978).
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Max Weber wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Berlin on Roman agrarian law and land policy in the Empire, exploring Rome’s strategy to use land surveys and ownership opportunities to stabilize peripheral areas (Weber 1891). Inspiration for this thesis came in part from August Meitzen (see Roth and Wittich 1978: 3).
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The Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office holds indexes for these early land grants (see http://www.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/familyhistory/fillinggaps/land).
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If Simon Schama (1995) is correct, the Romans associated the German tribes—their esteemed but mortal enemies—with nature and forest and viewed them as all the more barbarian for it.
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Of the many depictions of this era, few capture it better than the British-Irish author, Oliver Goldsmith in these words in The Deserted Village (1770): ‘Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay’.
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To these ends Kropotkin advocated irrigation and growing under glass to boost local food production ability. Today, his work has a progressive ring in its critique of industrial reliance on fossil fuels and the need for clean energy alternatives.
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Space does not allow treatment of the Free Soil and Homestead movements in the United States nor the great debates about the western frontier as a safety valve for the eastern working class—an image made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous paper read in Chicago in 1893 (Turner 1920). At base, this continental campaign by labor, abolitionists, nationalists and others was a protest against slavery, both racially and occupationally defined. The role played by working mechanics such as George Henry Evans and journalists such as Horace Greeley is astutely summarized in Zahler (1941).
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Geisler, C. (2014). Green Zones from Above and Below: A Retrospective and Cautionary Tale. In: Tidball, K., Krasny, M. (eds) Greening in the Red Zone. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9947-1_16
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