Read an E-Book, Save the Nation’s Largest Urban Community Garden
In LA, the South Central Farmers, 350 families maintaining the USA's largest urban community garden are peacefully fighting to keep the garden from being razed. To support the South Central Farmers, Oestara Publishing LLC, from June 1st until midnight (EST) of the 4th of July 2006, pledges 100% of its profits of two of our PDF e-books, Zollocco by Cynthia Joyce Clay, and Mundilla by Joaquin Ramón-Huguet, when they are purchased directly from the Oestara Publishing LLC website, Oestarapublishing.com.
Key Biscayne, FL (PRWEB) May 31, 2006 -- In a heroic attempt to save the nation’s largest urban community garden from being razed to build a warehouse, Joan Baez is now living in a tree in vast garden. In LA, an oasis of food-producing gardens feeds 350 families and provides the public with community events. Oestara Publishing LLC believes public gardens, especially those that feed families, are essential in providing, beauty, respite, and healthful services and goods to their communities. Therefore, to support the South Central Farmers—the families which maintain and farm this verdant spot in an otherwise despoiled area— Oestara Publishing LLC, from June 1st until midnight (EST) of the 4th of July 2006, pledges 100% of its profits of two of our PDF e-books, Zollocco by Cynthia Joyce Clay, and Mundilla by Joaquin Ramón-Huguet, when they are purchased directly from the Oestara Publishing LLC website, Oestarapublishing.com.
Why is the nation’s largest urban community garden in danger, and why is Joan Baez living in one of its trees? This is the story behind the story:
Since 1992, the 14 acres of property located at 41st and Alameda Streets in Los Angeles have been used as a community garden or farm. The land has been divided into 360 plots and is believed to be one of the largest urban gardens in the country. 350 families, now known as the South Central Farmers, use plots at the garden to grow their own food. The families using the plots are low income and depend heavily upon the food they grow to feed themselves. In addition to growing food for themselves, the people involved with the community garden hold Farmers' Markets, festivals and other cultural events for the public at large.
In 1994 the Harbor Department contracted with the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank to operate the property as a community garden; the Foodbank has been operating it as such since then.
However, in a closed session in 2003 the City Council decided to sell the property to Ralph Horowitz and the Horowitz Family Trust, The Libaw Family LP, Timothy M. Ison and Shaghan Securities, LLC. The City’s sale of the garden property to the Horowitz interests is said not to comply with the procedures required for sale of property no longer needed by the City. The Court of Appeal held, nevertheless, that the City did not have to comply with these provisions because it had not determined that it no longer needed the garden property.
Says teacher Kirsten O'Brien of Watts, LA, CA, ”I teach about 50 blocks south of the garden and have taught there for 6 years. This area is bleak, and the families are often living 2 or 3 families to a house to afford the increasingly high rents (or in a few lucky cases, mortgages). Gang warfare (and police 'crackdowns') claim lives daily. Fresh food is hard to come by, as grocery stores often sell only the sad remains of harvests passed over by the bigger chains. The food these farmers raise has been a safety net, and a source of both peace and pride.”
South Central Farmers has a website, http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1, if you want to contact them directly, for support or anything else.
Zollocco: A Novel of Another Universe by Cynthia Joyce Clay is one of the PDF e-books that Oestara Publishing LLC is donating its site sold profits from is about a young woman who escapes from a dying Earth to the solar systems Imenkapur, where she lands on a planet governed by cognizant forests. Despite becoming a priestess of the governing forests, she is hounded from planet to planet by the Toelakhan, an interplanetary corporation always at odds with the forests’ stewardship of the planets. The Toelakhan wants to profit by putting the young woman up for sale as an exotic pet. An Eppie finalist which readers and reviewers rave about, Zollocco is a read that lovers of community gardens will be sure to enjoy.
The other PDF e-book that Oestara Publishing is donating proceeds from is Mundilla, by Joaquin Ramón-Huguet, a Spanish language utopia novel. The author Joaquin Ramón-Huguet wrote the laws for cooperatives in Venezuela and founded internationally successful coops. He has been a leader in the international cooperative movement. His exciting novel is about a septuagenarian, Javier Malco Tovar, who is woken from a cybernetic sleep when a cure for the disease he has—AIDES—has been found. He awakens to an ideal world he had worked to build, but there are those who seek to rip, through terrorist actions, the people’s prosperity from them and return the world to a state of those who have and those who have naught. Javier Malco Tovar from his life’s knowledge of his work in the cooperative movement, must help unravel the mystery of who the terrorists are, or the world’s people will again be plunged into poverty and ruled by greedy, conscienceless, corporate heads.
Buy Mundilla at oestarapublishing.com/product_7.html and/or Zollocco as PDF e-books at oestarapublishing.com/product_2.html from June 1st until midnight of the 4th of July, 2006 and %100 of the net profit of your purchase will be donated to the South Central Farmers. Remember; Mundilla is only available in Spanish.
Buy an E-book, save a Garden at Oestarapublishing.com.
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