bloomer

I'm in Cleveland, which is built on two bodies of water: Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River. The Cuyahoga is famous for being the "burning river" - it caught on fire over a dozen times through Cleveland's industrial peak, and the final conflagration was such an enormous controversy that it lead to the creation of the creation of the EPA and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The river's a lot cleaner now (it's got beavers!). Lake Erie is still in a pretty bad way, though. I think about how communities under socialism might build their futures in, on, and along the water to repair ecology and restore our role within nature.

Land reform will be essential in a socialist USA, just like in every other socialist revolution. But what does that look like? Imagine a community on the lake - there's a big old public housing project in poor condition near my office, just off the shore. Give them collective ownership of the project, but more than that, give them the opportunity for new land.

Along the shore are wave breaks that extend out hundreds of meters and protect the city from the lake when it gets feisty. These are very simple, constructed out of big boulders that host no life but resting cormorants and seagulls. Perhaps that public housing community by the lake is given ownership of this wave break and given the funds to make it something entirely new. Replace the lifeless stone with sand and soil, creating an ecologically active peninsula. Widen it substantially, and, inspired by the chinampa agriculture of Tenochtitlan, layer soil and organic matter to build many smaller perpendicular extrusions into the water. The community holds this new hyper-fertile, always watered land in common. It is an ecological refuge that hosts a huge variety of birds, fish, small mammals, insects, and other animals that thrive in the fragile Great Lake lakeside biome. It is an incredibly productive food resource, where residents perform multistrata companion planting agriculture (three sisters, etc), farm molluscs for pearls and food, and fish from the miles and miles of new, sheltered coastline where fry thrive. All of this captures carbon and cleans the water. The people labor and live together.

The land and the community are co-created, each dialectically dependent on the other, every step that restores and empowers building a stronger, more just, and more sustainable base for further co-creation.

After decades of building this, an old revolutionary sits on the shoreline and watches naked children swim between the twisted shores that burst with life. Insects and birds and the constant lapping of waves harmonize with the songs and laughter and chatter. The sun sets over the water, the revolutionary's time comes to an end, and they are laid to rest in the land that will sustain their people for generations.