Author: k.ward

“I came to Baruch because I got a scholarship. I originally wanted to do journalism,” she said. “I found graphic design classes while I was here and advertising through that.”

“I realized that I couldn’t write that much, to be honest. I think I like communicating visually better,” Moy said.

When asked about what she wanted to do after college, she said, “I want to be an art director at a creative agency.”

Darcey Lehman, 20, is much like your average college student. She goes to class, hangs out with friends on the weekend and tends to dye her hair a different color every few months. Currently it’s platinum blonde. She also has tattoos, mostly wears vintage clothing, and tends to stand out in a crowd.

Like many other Americans she’s been swept up in the coverage of the presidential election. However, she’s also living in Milan, Italy, studying fashion design through the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Each year thousands of students from the across the U.S. study abroad, according to the Association of International Education over 300,000 students studied abroad in the 2013-2014 academic year. For these students voting becomes much more difficult from abroad. This is where Lehman comes in.

Before moving to Milan she had been living in New York City but hadn’t registered to vote there or in her home state of Michigan. “We had a special meeting here with all the American students and the professors,” she said. They assisted them in registering and getting their ballots, but Lehman didn’t think that many would end up voting.

However, with the prospect of a Trump presidency looming she decided that now was the time to take action. She said when talking about the process of registering, “I thought it was going to be so complicated and for everyone else here it was super complicated.”

Unlike some of her fellow students she was able to register and get her absentee ballot via email after explaining that she didn’t believe she would be able to get her ballot in time had she requested it by mail. But she said that had the process been more complicated she wouldn’t have even registered to vote in the first place. This can be a problem for many voters, most of the time the process has to done by mail something Lehman said deterred others. According to the Election Assistance Commission in 2012 over 25 million people voted using absentee ballots, and over half a million voted from overseas. However if the majority of students overseas voted that number would increase.

From her apartment in central Milan, with it’s window overlooking a cobblestoned courtyard, the problems facing America seem far away, the news is filtered through social media, the latest scandal that has everyone up in arms may make barely a splash there. Studying abroad puts you in a bubble. “I feel super disconnected here to be honest; I feel like there’s a lot going on in America that we don’t know about here.”

When studying abroad you become self-isolated, everyday life tends to stay within the city your studying in, among the other students in the program. Lehman has lived abroad before and the experienced this before. The isolation of people, and students in particular, wasn’t new to her but because of the election the difference is a more notable one.

“I think I’m missing out on the chaos and vibe of being there during the election,” Lehman said. Although she also considers the tone of this election to be a negative one. But as she put it there is something in the air during the election cycle, a manifestation of change as it’s happening.

Even without the daily media coverage of Trump Lehman’s main drive behind voting comes from the embarrassment she would feel as an American if he won. “I would even consider moving out of the country if he became president,” she said.

 

The entire tone of the election has caused her to feel embarrassed about American politics, “They sound like children bickering…it’s embarrassing to even watch the debates,” she said. She went on to compare Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to small children.

“I just don’t want to vote for either of them,” she said, but she doesn’t want to throw her vote away. Overall she said, “It does feel kinda pointless.”

After learning about the recent scandals that Trump’s been involved in she said her low opinion of the candidate had gone even lower. However, she also wasn’t surprised but the news, “I view it as just obvious if people can’t see it they’re smoking crack or something.”

Despite the negative tone that’s consumed the last weeks of the campaign Lehman still plans on mailing in her ballot. Part of that comes from living in a swing state, it makes her feel like her vote might be just that little bit more important. “I hope we go blue again,” she says referencing her support for the democratic nominee, “I would hate for Trump to get Michigan, not where I’m from,” she adds with a laugh.

Living in Italy has changed the tone of election for Lehman because it’s changed how she interacts with it.  The pace of life is different in Italy; as a country it functions differently. The election isn’t a constant factor in her life the way it can be on this side of the Atlantic. Because of this it can be easier to ignore what’s happening in the U.S., some she admitted has been the case as more of her time has been taken up by classwork. Yet she still plans on voting because to her it’s important.

The profile piece I read was about Mike Allen, one of the main reporters at Politico. Despite that this piece is a few years old at this point, it’s from 2010, it’s still relevant to how journalism works today. The story is reflective of the man being profiled, an interesting mix of Washington politics, the crazed 24 hour news cycle, and the approach newer organizations have to covering stories. The article starts by talking about an email blast put out by Allen every morning called the Playbook. The Playbook is reflective of Allen’s own almost spastic genius, covering everything important that day while also slipping in mentions of people’s birthdays and the like.

The piece uses Allen’s work as it’s drive, with both the story being told and how it’s framed. It to is slightly off kilter much like Allen appears to be, but that adds to the story being told. The story is a long one and was originally in The New York Times Magazine.

Every election there are groups of people and areas that get a great deal of attention. Swing states like Pennsylvania are always popular topics in the news and with recent events in mind so have how several minority groups will vote. All of this is important, but what about the voters you don’t hear about? Voters who hesitate to vote maybe because they don’t indentify with one party or another, or because where they are living makes voting more difficult.

The individual I wish to profile is Darcey Lehamn, 20, who is currently living in Milan, Italy. I wish to profile her as she goes through the voting process as an absentee voter, from registaring to vote, to figuring out who to vote for. Lehman makes for an interesting subject for this profile for several reasons. She didn’t vote in the primary because she felt no candidate accurately supported her beliefs at the time. She is someone who more closely aligns with liberals on social and human rights based policies, yet is more conservative on fiscal policy. This can (and has) alienated her from the political process.

My objective is to follow her journey as she navigates both how to vote and who she wants to vote for in the last weeks of the election season.

New York’s first food forest looks more like your typical vegetable garden than anything else, with a kind of controlled chaos. Circular beds nearly overflowing with vegetation are dotted around the entrance, some with vines that snake up trellises and others with blankets of clover and larger leafy bushes. The smaller beds give way to larger expanses of green towards the back with gravel paths meandering in between and a set of picnic tables in the center. It’s only the gentle sway of the tide moving out and the briny smell of the air that gives it away, because Swale is on a barge in the middle of the East River.

The people behind Swale call it a floating food forest, and the title is an accurate one. All of the plants aboard Swale are either edible or medicinal in nature. The idea is to create an eventually self-sustaining garden, where all of the plants work together to thrive and all are edible. This is the beauty of this concept, one that Swale is currently trying to prove the validity of in urban spaces, food forests can provide a great deal of food for a community with relatively little effort. In a way Swale is a sustainability minded community garden that is open to all.

Mary Mattingly is the artist behind the exhibition. She wanted to create a platform that allowed people to better think about and understand food. And in fact creating Swale on a barge and into an art exhibition is the only way it could happen. Because part of the exhibit’s purpose is for people to gather their own food, on land that would be illegal. Whether it’s food or just a pretty flower picking something from public land is considered destruction of property.

“We can do this more publically on a barge, you can’t on land,” she went onto say that being on water, “makes you more aware of your surroundings.” The water adds an almost surreal element; it changes Swale from being merely a garden into something that does make you think about the environment around you. The constant ebb and flow of the water makes you have to think about each step as you walk around the barge and pick some herbs or a few vegetables.

Swale is proof of concept in two ways, one this it is possible to have a food forest in New York City, and two that it can be done in new and different ways. The barge is hopefully a temporary home for the food forest as the people behind it petition the city to give them public park space to create a permanent home. Swale will be at Brooklyn Bridge Park until Oct 15^th, after that the future of the project remains unclear Mattingly hopes that they will be able to stay longer.

The practices behind Swale originates in something known as permaculture. On paper permaculture sounds almost coldly scientific, various plants are grouped in such a way that they all work together. It is a science, to be able to determine what plants would work best in an environment, but it’s also an art. The results are not a clean cut and polished garden, but something that has more in common with the jungle.

Uyen Huynh, 24, from Harlem NY, is studying sustainability in the urban environment at City College. She said that she had found out about Swale through a post a classmate had made on Facebook. Huynh said, “When I first got here I didn’t think New York was very sustainable, you have to dig but it’s there.” She discovered her interest in permaculture design after moving to New York.

Huynh said, “Permaculture is about more than just growing food it’s about building relationships.” In her opinion it draws connections between people and the ecosystems around them. This idea of fostering the relationship between people and the food they eat is a large part of the foundation of Swale.

Amanda McDonald Crowley is one of the contributors to Swale, she’s worked with Mattingly in the past and has been part of the project from the beginning. She said, “Food is also about generosity… and art into that mix you can start to ask the important questions.”

To McDonald Crowley those questions revolve around how we as a culture look at food. Part of Swale’s objective is to have us look differently, both at where it comes from and how it gets to us.

Part of the purpose of art is to make us think about the world around us differently, it’s how Swale works and why it attracts people as they pass by. As Mattingly put it each visitor brings a new element to the piece contributing something to the project, helping to grow and shape the message that Swale shares as it ripples outward. Swale is currently docked at Pier 6 of Brooklyn Bridge Park overlooking the downtown Manhattan skyline.

Swale looks more like your typical vegetable garden than anything else, with a kind of controlled chaos. Circular beds nearly overflowing with vegetation are dotted around the entrance, some with vines that snake up trellises and others with blankets of clover and larger leafy bushes. The smaller beds give way to larger expanses of green towards the back with gravel paths meandering in between and a set of picnic tables in the center. It could be a cozy, charming garden anywhere in the country. It’s only the gentle sway of the tide moving out and the briny smell of the air that gives it away. Because Swale is on a barge in the middle of the East River.
The people behind Swale call it a floating food forest, and the title is an accurate one. All of the plants aboard Swale are either edible or medicinal in nature.
A food forest is essentially an eventually self-sustaining garden, where all of the plants work together to thrive and all are edible. This is the beauty of this concept, one that Swale is currently trying to prove the validity of in urban spaces, food forests can provide a great deal of food for a community with relatively little effort. They are in a way a more sustainable community garden that is open to all.
Visitors can come and pick the vegetables and herbs being grown on the barge for free.
Swale is proof of concept in two ways, one this it is possible to have a food forest in New York City, and two that we can do so in new and different ways. The barge is hopefully a temporary home for the food forest as the people behind it petition the city to give them public park space to create a permanent home. They envision this home being a food forest based community garden.