“Got to get ourselves back to the garden”: Sustainability transformations and the power of positive environmental communication

As places that disrupt “business as usual,” community food gardens carry the potential to experientially, critically, and restoratively recenter food systems and interconnected sustainability knowledges. Using interdisciplinary theory and practice-based observation, we zero in on the environmental planning and management space of the university campus to interpret how food gardens may not only materially change the campus landscape at a grassroots level but also act as constitutive forms of positive environmental communication. In doing so, food gardens may help realign the environmental premises of the university. At a time when universities have pressing leadership roles in rethinking the ecocultural, political, and economic dimensions of sustainable transformations of life as a whole, we illustrate how the creation of food gardens on all campuses might meaningfully and relationally reconnect university communities with the land where they work, learn, and teach, and, in the process, experientially promote ecocentric identities and empower change-making.


Introduction
Students gather on a Friday afternoon going into summer, the last day of the school year in Australia.For most of the 50 students in a final year elective in the Faculty of Law and Justice, it is the last class of their five-to-six-year degree.They have finished most of their assignments and could have skipped class to head to the nearby beaches.But every student is presentelbow deep in soil, planting raised vegetable beds in a sunny corner of a bland concrete and glass courtyard.About to graduate, these students will not see their plants grow or pick the produce, but this does not stop them from pitching in, talking animatedly and bonding as they plant for the future.
Across the world in the United States, classes have not met in person for 18 months due to COVID-19 restrictions.In one of the first courses to be taught on campus again, students and instructor gather awkwardly; do we sit, stand, distance ourselves to arm's length?We leave the classroom, form a circle in the grass next to the main campus community food garden, and students are asked to introduce themselves by describing themselves as a food plant -"rosemary," "prickly pear cactus," "sunflower."By day's end, we are shoulder to shoulder, enjoying even the tedious act of weeding.By term's end, students linger after class, exchanging ideas about beloved food documentaries, summer garden maintenance, how to cook green chile (a local staple), and secret places in the city to harvest food and medicinal herbs.
These moments demonstrate university administrators' dreams of student engagement and campus sustainability in action.In this interdisciplinary theory and practice-informed essay, we argue thatin addition to being places where food is grownurban campus food gardens can function as bottom-up planned and managed transformative spaces that disrupt the "business as usual" of university campuses and help institutions, educators, and learners not only reimagine food production but also extensive, interrelated environment and society systems.
We posit that campus food gardens are interactive, spatial and multi-species forms of positive environmental communication.Martin (1999) defines positive environmental communication as constitutive material-symbolic discourses that hearten, inspire, encourage, and engage sustainable and restorative ways of being.Stibbe (2020) builds on this definition to include a wide range of material and symbolic ways of constituting positive stories about the world in which people "see themselves, and humans in general, as part of a wider community of life" (418).While Stibbe analyzes language, we argue the staff-and student-introduced gardens themselves, the courses associated with them, as well as the tending students and staff do with gardens, are forms of positive environmental communication that, like language, have the capacity to manifest stories of care for the more-than-human world.As with Milstein (2020), we view environmental communication through a co-constitutive lens that is always inclusive of the more-than-human world and, as with Cox (2007), we embrace the ethical imperative that drives the environmental communication field of study to be praxis-focused and of aid during these times of environmental crises. 2  Relatedly, we argue such positive environmental communicationfrom campus gardens to myriad other forms of restorative discourse and practicehelps grow ecocentric identities.Ecocentric identities orient humans as a part of interrelated reciprocal ecosystems, in contrast to dominant anthropocentric identities, which orient humans as separate from and above "the environment" (Milstein 2020).Ecocentric and anthropocentric identities are two ends of a spectrum for thinking about ecocultural identity, a framework for understanding identity as entwined cultural and ecological orientations ranging from regenerative to destructive (Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor 2020).As such, the ecocultural identity framework expands conceptualizations of individual and collective/group identities to "beyond the human world to include other species and the physical environment" (Stibbe 2020, 416).Universities manifestly help students (and staff) develop individual and social identities, yet do not have a strong record of focusing on and fostering students' ecocultural identities (Orr 1994).
As forms of positive environmental communication, we argue campus gardens, planned, and managed by staff and students and employed within broader structures of university courses that require learners to consciously consider and take part in ecology and food systems, constitute spaces in which participants can exhibit, encourage, and reinforce ecocentrism among one another.We look to Milstein's (2020) work on ecocentric identity, which highlights such shared spaces of positive environmental communication (ranging from classrooms to co-housing, etc.) as among the four key elements that unlock ecocentrism. 3As students and staff contribute to such shared growing spaces and repeatedly practice care with human and more-than-human communities, they gradually experience firsthand interdependencies core to sustainability and regenerative practices.
In what follows, we first contextualize the present essay within the microcosm of the contemporary university.As scholars who are also campus food garden founders, planners, managers, and instructors, we then delve into university garden examples from two national contexts in which we have undertaken many years of practice-based observation, or action-based participation (Van Dellen 2013;Zilber 2021).This essay is not an empirical study, based on formal collection of data through interviews, surveys, and coding.We did not set out to measure and assess, for instance, what students learned in specific courses.This is not because we do not think such empirical work is important, but because our research aims with this work are more foundational.Before experiences in campus food gardens can be measured, gardens need to be planned (usually at a grassroots level) and planted.For this to occur, staff and students who do such initiating must have foundational convictions about the practical, personal, and transformative benefits of food growing, to take the time and effort to convince university administrators that gardens have academic value, to secure garden space; and then to construct, cultivate, and manage the gardens.As such, this article is normative research that draws on interdisciplinary theory and extant research as well as decades of unstructured participant observation as teachers in different disciplines, universities, and countries, working with (and without) gardens.We collate and critically analyze our experiences and lessons learned, situating them within the context of the contemporary corporate university's landscape and the globally shared ecological and food crises.Given the relative scarcity of campus gardens, and the rarity of nature-based teaching outside natural science and agriculture disciplines, the present research contributes to interdisciplinary literature and to the limited research on higher education faculty-and student-led planning, management, care, and transformation of today's universities' outdoors.
Below, we introduce theory and our collective observations to posit that campus food gardens hold the potential to inform deep and wide-ranging sustainability transformations around food systems and associated environmental practices and orientations.At a time when universities have pressing leadership roles in rethinking the intersecting ecological and cultural (or ecocultural), political and economic dimensions of life as a whole, staff and student grassroots planning and management of food gardens can provide material and symbolic transition spaces to experientially express and manifest sustainability transformations.In the process, such space can enable participants to dig in and actively take part in making change (LeGreco and Leonard 2011), and even help alter the premises of higher education.
2. Literature review: university campuses' doxic taken-for-grantedness, food gardens' transformative potential The planned design and managed use of university campuses is inseparable from broader dominant interrelated sociocultural and environmental ideologies that inform, and are informed by, these institutions.Building on Bourdieu, Cresswell (1992) describes this fusion of dominant ideology and placemaking as "doxa", a system of taken-for-granted perceptions of spatial limits that construct a "sense of reality" (9) for a given built environment, and thatwhen transgressedcan be exposed and transformed.
The dominant doxa of today's university campus has roots in medieval European religious education and, later, in the United States, in the formation of early universities dedicated to developing civic moral valuesspecifically in future leaders who were meant to emerge from their education informed by and identifying with independent criticism of unjust dominant forces (Milstein 2012).In 1852, John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University offered a vision of research and teaching joined to foster inquiry, economic growth, and liberal citizenship.By the early 1900s, science disciplines introduced premises of objectivity and professionalization, shifting focus away from philosophical and critical inquiry-based approaches.These processes of professionalization, scientification, and economicization in university education accelerated through to the present, contributing to the erosion of "the university's role in teaching students to understand the world as a complex whole" (Milstein 2012, 5).
Contemporary universities and the doxa of their campuses predominantly reflect a related rationalist division of knowledge into siloed disciplines; and reproduce an Enlightenment-informed binary between "nature" 4 and humanity now embedded in the heart of dominant political economic systems and destructive environmental identities and relations (Milstein, Thomas, and Hoffmann 2019;Plumwood 1997).Central to these premises is a latent set of geographic boundaries by which "nature" is excluded (often violently) from built environments.Thus, just as "nature" is dominantly held at a rational distance, understood largely through scientific inquiry (Haraway 1988), "nature" is excluded from most campuses, except in curated, bounded, and dominated forms.In addition, earthly topics such as naturalism have been expunged from curricula and, instead, discrete professionalized subjects such as agriculture are taught in spatially segregated, well-ordered greenhouses, test plots, and often entirely separate campuses.Combined with the increasingly modernist, brutalist, corporately modeled architecture of many contemporary campuses (Wolff 2017), these planned environments posit the university as a space of human exceptionalism, both reflecting and informing dominant anthropocentric discourses circulating in the public sphere.
As such, university campuses themselves are complex constitutive forms of environmental communication that, in producing and transforming environments, today tend to displace the more-than-human world, boxing up learning in human-centric classrooms.This material-symbolic communication conveys messages about what and who is of consequence in higher education and what and who is not.As planned and managed spaces that both extend and challenge knowledge, however, universities could be at the vanguard, countering the dominant human/nature binary and associated destructive fallacies of mono-species existence (Ferrer-Balas et al. 2008;Larr an, Herrera, and Andrades 2016;Pothukuchi and Molnar 2015).Indeed, campuses can beand sometimes arespaces that critique and reject dualistic (human/nature) thinking and co-generate positive stories of mutualistic sustainable ecocultural relations and identities (Alhinai and Milstein 2019;Debelo et al. 2017).
In fact, the environment of early universities, with outdoor walks and quiet garden cloisters, were initially planned to enhance scholarly contemplation (Batey 1981), but the grounds of contemporary universities often have a more attenuated relationship with the educational project.Universities are increasingly profit-driven entities.Although being "green" is central to many missions, planned spaces, such as outdoor classrooms and gardens, where restorative practices could be taught, are rare, ironically undermining institutional sustainability goals (Laycock Pedersen and Robinson 2018).Instead, in the contemporary corporate university, campuses tend toward impermeable hard surfaces and manicured orderly spaces students and staff pass through but are not invited to engage, let alone co-construct or care for.
Just as planned contemporary university grounds are often generic spaces unlikely to capture the imagination, the environmental management of campuses is increasingly professionalized, outsourced, and homogenized, with students and academics (and their notoriously disruptive ideas and practices) tucked neatly behind closed doors, and the more-than-human world largely excluded.Concrete paths direct walking.Intensely manicured landscapes (through poisonous herbicides/insecticides and machinery) discourage resting or nesting.Occasionally a flash of metamorphosis escapesa bird picking at lunch crumbs, a class gathered on a lawn learning beyond the confines of the classroombut increasingly, little distinguishes a campus from a bland downtown city center or technology park.Further delineating "nature" from culture and education is the allocation of construction, maintenance, and care of outdoor spaces to professional "estate" management or, in keeping with corporate "efficiency," outsourced private contractors.The absence of staff and student engagement with most campuses' flora, fauna, soil, and habitat communicates loudly that the more-than-human world has nothing to teach.
Yet a sizable and increasing proportion of university curricula in the sciences, planning, social sciences, and humanities address environmental relations, with courses or modules often focusing on sustainability, justice, and action.While science faculties may have more-than-human spaces for practical learning in their domain, other faculties generally do not.In these contexts, the recent emergence of food gardens on campuses in many countries is an intriguing moment to examine how the spatial doxa and constitutive environmental communication of the university might be positively reconfigured.
Despite the growth and potential benefits of university food gardens, research on their transformative forms and functions is just emerging.There is a proliferation of food garden studies in K-12 education (Blair 2009;McNeill and Knight 2013;Williams et al. 2018;Williams and Dixon 2013;Fulford and Thompson 2013), for specific populations (Heliker, Chadwick, and O'Connell 2001), or with a STEM (Ray, Wei, and Barrett 2013) or agricultural learning focus (Parr and Trexler 2011).However, some scholars have begun to research how food gardens can transform university campuses and learning across disciplines.Aftandilian and Dart (2013) identified campus food gardens as multidisciplinary spaces for social justice, civic engagement, and community development, while Duram and Klein (2015) surveyed 52 campus food gardens, revealing contributions they make to university sustainability through formal and informal education.Laycock Pedersen and Robinson (2018) recognized campus gardens as unique tools for teaching sustainability and encouraging healthy behaviors, drawing attention to challenges of transient student engagement and failures due to unreliable support.In a study of sustainable food system activities on 21 urban campuses, Pothukuchi and Molnar (2015) concluded that community gardens offer effective, low-cost possibilities for community engagement, service learning, curriculum development, and research.Ostertag, Gerofsky, and Scott (2019) described how garden-based instruction remains "in the margins" of academia, despite a growing trend in university commitment to sustainability goals.Murakami (2016) highlighted the complex processes of securing campus space for gardens and Eugenio-Gozalbo, P erez-L opez, and T ojar-Hurtado (2020) identified the requirement to "fight for the land" because of the lack of academic value ascribed to gardening in higher education.Examining organic food gardens in six Spanish universities, Eugenio-Gozalbo et al. documented the practical skills acquired by students, changes in their food consumption, and growth in their consciousness of pesticides, fertilizers, composting, and recycling.Jakubec et al. (2021) described "sustained community-engaged pedagogy" in public and ecological health in a campus food garden with students and staff of diverse ages and abilities.Finally, Walshe and Law (2022) compared community garden literature with Australian campus master plans to understand how community gardens might facilitate place and community building, particularly post-COVID-19.We offer the present essay to generate further intellectual and practical insight into how, as co-constitutive forms of positive environmental communication, food gardens might promote regenerative transformations in the "business as usual" of universities and actively engage learners in ecocentric identification.

Reintroducing food growing to the space of higher learning
A profound effect of urbanization is the disconnection of urban dwellers from survival knowledge, including of food production.As Orr (1994) argues, growing and gathering food serves as "a reality check on human possibilities in nature that urban societies presently lack" (117-118).Urban dwellers now constitute the majority of the world's population (and the vast majority of the West), 5 and their decreased attunement to the more-than-human world parallels dominant societies' unprecedented ecological destruction, as well as the rise in inequities and insecurities that pervade global food systems (Gordon and Hunt 2019;Schraedley et al. 2020).
In this section, based on long-term, unstructured participant observation in initiating urban university food gardens and/or teaching with them, we examine planning and managing gardens in two different tertiary institutions.Our US case is in the country's arid Southwest high desert at a state flagship R1 university of about 30,000 students.The campus, on historic Route 66 and near the city center, sprawls over 769 acres.Though space is ample, the area designated for food gardens is scarce.In 2010, after years of effort, we gained campus planning approval to establish the first food garden permitted since a WWII-era "Victory Garden" and to establish a traditional medicinal herb garden, each in remote corners of the campus.Based on their successes, we gained permission to expand, creating a vertical food garden in the center of the student accommodation cafeteria used by dormitory food hall chefs, a backyard garden with and for a university public health research program, and, in collaboration with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, an intentionally "messy" pollinator-specific habitat garden in the heart of campus, creating an urban wildlife refuge.These US case gardens, started and maintained first in courses led by the first author, continue to flourish more than a decade on from their establishment.Their resilience on a university campus otherwise largely inhospitable to such Earthly interventions is due in some measure to creating governance and collaboration mechanisms such as an academic and professional staff board to manage growth and care, cross-disciplinary instructors invited to the gardens to engage students in a wide range of courses (from English Literature to Native American Studies and Landscape Architecture), and campus support secured by close work with the university's Office of Sustainability and Community-Engaged Learning.Funding is extremely limited, with gardens created almost entirely through donations and volunteer work, as well as small internal grants for water catchment containers, and a government grant from US Fish and Wildlife for the pollinator habitat garden.
Our Australian case is located on the country's temperate southeast coast at one of the nation's leading universities.The university is in an affluent area of Sydney, the country's largest city.In contrast to the US sitewhere poverty and food access are major issues and the gardens were planned to be open and accessible to the wider communitythese gardens were designed to be used solely by staff and students for research and teaching.With about 60,000 students on a 94-acre urban site, limited space necessitated locating food gardens in in-between spaces (Sherry 2022).The first garden was created several years after the US example, in courtyards in the center of the Faculty of Law and Justice, by replacing generic landscaping plants in existing concrete raised beds.Students in a course on land-use law replanted the beds with edible plants, and students studying food law replanted in subsequent years.This garden was initiated by the second author in her faculty's building and authorized by faculty management.A cross-faculty working group of academic and professional staff formed to create a second Teaching and Research raised-bed garden, located on a concrete slab adjacent to a multi-floor campus parking lot and visible to hundreds of staff and students as they arrive on campus each day.This garden required approval by university Estate Management, and comprises seven raised beds for use by staff and students across campus.An academic in the School of Population Health, assisted by the cross-faculty group and approved by Estate Management, then initiated a third garden, with raised beds on a rooftop terrace for use by School staff and students.The beds, soil, plants, and watering systems were funded through formal university grants.

Campus food gardens as positive environmental communication
Through practice-and action-based participant observation over many years, we have observed the gardens function as direct challenges to the dominant spatio-environmental doxa of universities.In Australia, the Teaching and Research garden, in the incongruous space of a concrete slab, bounded by a high metal fence and concrete parking lot walls, positively communicates to arriving staff and students the potential to create green food environments even in the most hardscaped enclosed urban spaces.Fragrant jasmine gradually climbs three stories to protect vegetables from revving motorcycle exhaust pipes in parking spaces facing the garden.The Faculty of Law and Justice garden, filled with spinach, mint, tomatoes, and corn, transforms the formerly bland, paved law library roof, making it a space where the faculty now choose to meet and eat their lunches.In the US, the largest of the university's food gardens is tucked behind the campus real estate office, transforming what was formerly a barren dusty lot.Inside, staff making deals to buy and sell land as property now open their windows to enjoy the sights and sounds of lived common land, with community members tasting their way through the garden, student volunteers tending plants, and local wildlife (such as roadrunners and hummingbirds) feeding on flora and insects.Both the Australian and US campus gardens communicate sustainability transformationsin that they model, enact, and invite restorative ways of interacting and beingand also communicate a tacit rejection of the possessive, exclusionary logics of property (Carr and Milstein 2018;Carr and Dionisio 2017;Blomley 2003), demonstrating an ethic of land care, communal growing, and shared public space.
Unlike other urban spaces, where community gardens and other forms of sustainability transformations, such as bike lanes or farmers markets, can grease the "wheels of gentrification" (Raphael 2019), on university campuses we have observed that food gardens communicate and enhance environmental justice initiatives.For instance, upsetting a status quo of homogenized and exclusionary campus landscapes, in the US case, students initiated a project in which they secured a donated bicycle, painted it green, and attached a basket with a "free food" sign, regularly pedaling around campus to expand reach, offering their garden-grown food to anyone who made eye contact, including members of the significant street-dwelling population living adjacent to campus.In our experience, campus food gardens create dialectic tensions (Milstein 2009(Milstein , 2013) ) between the neoliberal project universities as institutions have become (Berg, Huijbens, and Larsen 2016;Mott, Zupan, and Debbane 2015) and the social and environmental sustainability, morality, and justice ethic that endures in the education project.As such, they are counter-discourses to spatio-environmental doxa reproduced by most university campuses.
Accordingly, planning and placing campus food gardens can be challenging.As sites of positive environmental communication, the first challenge is securing space, which requires engagement with and approval from campus administration.This is an increasingly difficult task in the contemporary hierarchical university, in which corporate management structures frequently disempower academic staff and students.Administrators may also resist food garden proposals precisely because of their potential to challenge the university's dominant spatial doxa.Extant research identifies campus administration as the single greatest barrier to implementation of sustainability transformations at universities (Filho et al. 2017), although this is not always the case (Ferrer-Balas et al. 2008).Our experience founding food gardens exposed us to the conflicts and challenges, as well as beneficial alliances that can emerge, when planning and managing gardens.
Although research demonstrates that universities benefit most from sustainability projects where students engage in tangible activities (Laycock Pedersen and Robinson 2018), administrator pushback occurs often because of unfamiliarity with food gardens, fear of the unknown, or reluctance to be first to innovate.Indeed, even though "innovation" is a common university mantra, the practical demands of accountability and "quality assurance" leave little space for innovation, restorative or otherwise.In addition, space is as rivalrous a resource on campus as off, and scarcity-based logics of property and "real estate" can dominate administrators' thinking, planning, and management.Food gardensas inclusive, educative, and transformative forms of positive environmental communicationdirectly challenge property logics characterized by "a radical and absolute possessiveness defined by the right to exclude" (Carr 2010, 990; see, also Blomley 2007;Carr and Milstein 2018).Urban universities, on high value inner city land, increasingly find themselves as prime actors in heated property markets (Wolff 2017).
Despite the dominance of property logics, however, university hierarchies are ultimately made of people, most of whom are striving to do their jobs well, and many of whom are kindred spirits with environmental conviction.These actors can be invested in finding a middle-ground between the conventional property approach to planning and managing a campus and the promise of institutional sustainability transformations.For example, in our US case, the administration refused to provide garden space for many years.This position changed after a member of a student group called Seeds of Rebellion naively knocked on a campus door that said "Real Estate Department" and asked whether "real estate" was available for a campus garden.The staff member knew the dustbowl behind their building could benefit from an attractive food garden and that it was within their power to say "yes."This well-placed personto-person encounter circumvented conventional planning channels.At the same time, a class group project in a course on social movements progressed a proposal through levels of university governance to gain approval for food garden space, and a lone student who planted a guerilla food garden at a dormitory simultaneously attracted media attention when groundskeepers threatened to pull out plants just before harvest.This trifecta of interpersonal communication, institutional navigation, and guerilla gardening with media attention opened doors to administrative approvals to plant multiple staffand-student created and managed food gardens after years of refusal.
The road to the creation of our Australian gardens was smoother, with significant assistance given by institutionally funded innovation projects, grounds staff expertise, and senior campus management, who, perhaps ironically, were well-versed in the benefits of community gardens, as a result of previous experience marketing "green" projects for global developers.In contrast to administrative reluctance in the US example, an Australian administrator's promise of food-growing space was followed by the question, "Do you want chickens as well?"Importantly, by the time the Australian gardens began in 2018, campus and community food gardens had become more commonplace than when the US case gardens started to form nearly a decade earlier.Consistent with research demonstrating the role examples from peer institutions can play in promoting sustainability change (Ferrer-Balas et al. 2008; Larr an, Herrera, and Andrades 2016) the authoritative positive environmental communication of other successful projects helped to facilitate approval of our Australian campus food gardens.Specifically, urban campus gardens in the US served as inspiration and empowerment (Sherry 2022), with Australian university administrators being shown gardens at the University of California Santa Barbara, Pomona College, and University of Washington, as well as commercial urban gardens such as New York's Brooklyn Grange and community gardens such as Seattle's P-Patch.All demonstrated long-term social, health, and environmental benefits and, perhaps most importantly for some administrators, aesthetic value.
As forms of positive environmental communication, both case gardens also seeded public partnerships with wide-reaching environmental planning and management effects.For example, the US gardens grew a partnership with US Fish and Wildlife Services to collaboratively reimagine the university campus as an urban wildlife corridor and refuge.Protection and replenishment emerged from this partnership, including funding that supported educational public signage, native bee and butterfly food, and habitat and pollinator pathways throughout campus.Despite administrative concerns about inherent transience of students when it comes to their role in growing and caring for gardens, enriched legitimacy from this government partnership and proven successes in staff-andstudent garden management resulted in a progressively more open and supportive culture of communication among groundskeepers, academics, and students.While student and staff gardeners once battled groundskeepers over poison-spraying and food plant removal, these parties now work collaboratively, with grounds staff taking pride in the food gardens, leading public garden workshops, and even volunteering to plant the campus's first fruit orchard next to the main food garden.Ultimately, both the US and Australian gardens have benefited from the generosity and wisdom of individual grounds staffincluding trained horticulturalists and arboristswho today see fewer conflicts in the roles of maintaining professionally landscaped campuses and supporting food growing in the educational project (Sherry 2022).
We have learned that to help materialize a living positive environmental discourse, as in the case of campus food gardens, it is essential to seek out campus allies, who can often be found in the newer offices on campuses now dedicated to university sustainability.Although few universities had sustainability plans when our US example began, most do today.These plans are implemented by professional staff with extensive knowledge of urban waste and water management, renewable energy, emissions targets, and UN Sustainable Development Goals.Such staff are increasingly ready to take a mutually beneficial approach to food gardens, incorporating them into university plans and providing logistical and institutional support in return.At the same time, institutions' appearance of ecocentric identification is enhancedfor instance, both the US and Australian case gardens now feature in their universities' sustainability promotional materials.
The cultivation of allies, supporters, and enthusiasts on campus can be strategically mobilized through the very forms of authority within the university that render its spatial doxa resistant to change.For example, in Australia, the second author used a prestigious university teaching fellowship intended to drive innovation to spearhead the food garden, while in the US, in the reverse order, garden-based teaching led to a prestigious teaching fellowship for the first author.On both sites, we have employed university mission statements on innovation, impact, and sustainability to help legitimize the gardens and threaded these into the positive environmental narratives the gardens communicate.Campus food gardens can manifest the best intentions of such awards and missionsas forms of positive environmental communication co-constituted by plants, soil, sun, water, pollinators, people, place, and practices of harmonious relations, they walk the talk (or grow the know).

Learning in food gardens: experiencing ecocentric identity through sustainability skills, knowledges, and the inside-out classroom
The gardens we have planned, managed, and enjoyed with our students rupture the orthodox environmental communication of university campuses.They contrast with manicured topiary and flat lawns intended to appeal to potential donors, and at times they communicate uncontained fertility, growth, and decomposition.(One autumn in Australia, Law staff were delighted to discover the corporate-style Faculty courtyard had been almost entirely swallowed by a pumpkin vine; Estate Management was less pleased.)The gardens also differ from most large-scale farms in that they are focused on generating community, both social and more-than-human, and on applying permaculture approaches in local, small-scale, diverse, and urban contexts.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the positive environmental communication we describe above also offers profound promise for transforming the key activity of the universitynamely, higher education and its foundational intention of fostering civic moral character (Milstein 2012).
Campus food gardens offer instructors an outdoor pedagogical environment to introduce students to the environmental, political, and cultural complexities involved in the thrice daily act of eating.Most students come to university with no experience of, or identification with, the food production systems that bring meals to their tables.Students in the US campus gardens often have relatively recent family history with farming, but the vast majority have never engaged with growing food personally.In one of the garden courses, cross-disciplinary students visit and volunteer on a minority-owned urban farm, in which the lead farmer, who is Mestizo (Indigenous and Spanish descent), has asked students how many generations ago their family were farmers; typically, it is no further back than three generations.In the Australian gardens, while some students are likely to have immigrant grandparents who farmed in their countries of origin, almost none have backgrounds in contemporary Australian farming.And, in both countries, only a small number have direct knowledge, background, or identification with Indigenous or Western food-growing practices.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this lack of connection with practical food production, many of today's students actively seek ways to identify with larger sustainability issues, such as climate justice, through proactive experiential learning rather than solely from often overwhelming classroom-based lectures.Work-based learning in food gardens satisfies students' (and educators') deep need for joining theory with hands-on transformative praxis around these big issues (Milstein, Pileggi, and Morgan 2017).Consistent with research on private and community gardens (Diduck et al. 2020;Church 2018), students learn and form identification through practice, experimentation, and discussion with fellow growers, applying theory to experience and vice versa, as have humans throughout time.During the 2022 eastern Australian floods, for example, seeds planted by Food Law students did not germinate due to excessive rain and a lack of sunshine, opening up conversations and new embodied orientations connecting climate crisis, farmer crop losses, supply chain disruption, and food security.
Food gardens communicate what we can and cannot control as environmental managers.They also communicate positive experiences of acting in ways that tangiblyeven rapidlymanifest a better world.Learning through tending food in this way also counters dominant discourses that such activities are the responsibility of others, people "not like us" and not at universities, who labor in other communities or countries, often as migrant farmworkers, paid meager wages in exploitive working conditions.In contrast, campus food gardens transform discourse so that knowing about growing becomes who university goers are as well.
In these ways, campus food gardens exemplify the inside-out classroom, a positive environmental communication-inspired pedagogy that supports embodied, emotive, and empowering learning (Milstein, Alhinai, et al. 2017).The food garden as classroom manifests core tenets of inside-out teaching, fostering collective transformation by starting inside from learners' self-identified personal passions and questions (e.g.hunger, food justice), relating these inner drives to course sustainability concepts, and bringing these drives and concepts to bear outside within their immediate environment.In effect, students get to try on ecocentric identification together and collectively experience how this feels as they learn (Milstein, Alhinai, et al. 2017;Milstein 2020).In Australia, campus food gardens open conversations about ways the continent bountifully supported the oldest continuous culture on Earth for more than 60,000 years, and why, in the 230 years since arrival, non-Indigenous Australians have largely failed to learn how to live reciprocally with the land.Similar conversations around Indigenous and settler water relations happen in the US gardens while walking ancient, in-use desert irrigation ditch networks.Classrooms contained in four walls seem less effective when learners are immersed in their immediate terrain, acknowledging Indigenous rights to land upon which they stand, and discussing, for instance, how a single cow emitting 220 pounds of climate-damaging methane a year eats enough food to support an entire town (Ritchie and Roser 2019).In both settings, students learn about sustainable relations as they also co-create them, simultaneously finding their own senses of comfort within ecocentric practices.
These opportunities for learning and transformation extend across disciplines.For instance, the US gardens have supported courses in Sustainability Studies, Communication, Native American Studies, Nutrition, Art, Geography, Education, English, Anthropology, and Cultural Studies.In Australia, the gardens have supported courses in Law and in Public Health.Ecocentric identity knowledges come to life through learning.For instance, US students study at a nearby urban permaculture farm with local First Nations communities and Guatemalan Mayan growers who teach them how to save seeds, that seeds are our ancestors, and that seeds have led to wars and continuously feed us and the more-than-human world.As they listen, students experientially learn how to grind blue corn into flour, which they learn to cook into tortillas, and then eat with elders who recount long-standing regenerative food histories.In our Australian site, the gardens supplement book-based learning on urban agriculture and greening, by engaging students in the soil, equipping them with the skills to plan and manage the food productive greening of their high-density residential and commercial city environments.
The course that first planned and created the gardens in the US has transformed into a course dedicated to managing the gardens and also moving ever more outward, engaging in research-service-learning beyond campus in food justice sites, such as urban community gardens and farms, and gardens at safe shelters for street-dwelling populations and undocumented immigrants.Such experiences, combined with growing the campus gardens, helps to produce ecocentric identities grounded in awareness of the structural interrelatedness of social and environmental problems to which many previously were blind (Amprazis and Papadopoulou 2020).Many of our students in Australia and the US go on to implement garden-based learning in their lives and/or their wider communities, growing food on their rental properties or apartment balconies, building do-it-yourself worm farms, reducing food waste, or starting and managing urban school and community gardens.This fertile inside-out learningmeshing positive environmental communication experiences with ecocentric practicesnourishes ways of identifying that help them feel empowered to address larger, interconnected environmental and social crises.Such justice-informed ecocentric ways of identifying are direct manifestations of early higher education's original, foundational intention of fostering civic moral character.
4. Discussion: positive environmental communication, grassroots planning and management, and sustainable transformation Anthropogenic crises of food, environment, and climate systems call for restorative shifts in spatial doxa, environmental communication, and ecocultural identity.These crises provide moments when the transgression of existing spatial regimes leads to questioning that which was previously unquestioned and to powerful groups, in response, seeking to defend the "order of things" (Cresswell 1992, 20), thus revealing the latent power behind a naturalized order.In the present essay, we have argued that bottom-up, grassroots planning and managing of humble campus food gardens can play a transformative role in helping to sustainably rearticulate the human place in food ecologies and, in the process, to reframe university spatial doxa within discourses of positive environmental communication that help manifest ecocentric identities.
While universities have positioned themselves as spaces of pure unlimited inquiry characterized by intellectual freedom and a spirit of questioning, they remain profoundly embedded within broader dominant urban, cultural, political, and economic systems they serve and, in turn, on which they depend.By introducing forms of positive environmental communication normally excluded by the dominant doxa, food gardens shift what the university means.Indeed, by reintroducing to campus the messy, sensorial, earthy vocation of composting, planting, growing, harvesting, and positively engaging with the more-than-human world, food gardens prompt a productive "crisis of doxa."The campus food garden, with its growth and seasons, visible labor, multiplicity of projects, attractive bursting forth of food (like forbidden fruits of knowledge), and biotic complexity, helps reintegrate more-than-human knowledges and methods.Within the almost fetishistically maintained space of the average campus, grassroots sustainable food garden management tacitly critiques the latent materialsymbolic discourse of human mastery over "nature" manifested in dominant landscaping practices of reordering, tidying, and manicuringa sisyphean effort to control and exclude other species and ecological processes classified as out of place in spaces of higher learning.
Thus, campus gardens carry the potential to serve as both formal and informal learning spaces, expanding and refining not only communication around the university as a space of sustainability knowledge production, but also self-definitions and identifications as ecologically embedded and productive individuals with metamorphic ways of identifying (Milstein 2020).Embodied, personal and political positive environmental communication happens within, and emerges from, direct experiential engagement with such food growing, tending, and sharingwhich can lead to active questioning and reimagining of dominant modes of food production, consumption, cost, waste, access, and justice.This pedagogic interbreathing (Abram, Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor 2020;Milstein et al. 2017) turns the spatial doxa of campuses inside-out, destabilizing prevailing anthropocentric identifications.
From an environmental planning, management, and communication perspective, campus food gardens have the potential to expand the conception of the university campus beyond a place of research and learning to a site in which many, in fact, live much of their lives and that, therefore, impacts the quality and potential of those lives.Unsurprisingly, garden and green spaces planned into campus designs are beneficial to community health (Eugenio-Gozalbo et al. 2021).We've observed, too, that communal management of gardens nurtures work-life balance and offers inclusive and invitational spaces in which children, partners, friends, neighbors, passersby, and traditional healers gather.With pandemics and extreme climate events forcing a re-evaluation of how much of our lives take place in working (and learning) spaces, respectful connection with community, the more-than-human world, and sustainable transformation of all types must be planned back into university campuses.
By enabling a host of users to rethink their relations with the environment and each other, food gardens as forms of positive environmental communication can serve as a seedbed for rethinking the very nature of lived experience, on and off campus.Through transdisciplinary engagement of courses, gardens can even help to break down academic silos for more holistic sustainability teaching and research.University gardens also connect campuses to the wider community and environment, linking diverse students, staff, organizations, farms, and neighbors in shared acts of cultivation (Jakubec et al. 2021).In the Australian example, for instance, we recently invited staff and students to walk together to nearby beaches after storms to collect seaweed for garden fertilizer.In the US, a professional staff member's family brought their horses on campus to plow compost into the first garden plot.In both countries, we organize staff and student potlucks of food we have all grown and/or made.
The food gardens enable a shift in the spatial doxa of the university to embrace many facets of life.Such a turning toward life comes at an essential moment for university campuses.Between the rise of distance learningwith institutions such as Arizona State University working to add 100 million online learners by 2030 (Belkin 2022)and increased demand for the physical spaces of campuses to serve as spaces for disrupting colonial power structures and patterns of urban inequality beyond their gates (McNeill et al. 2022), the time is ripe to rethink the roles of in-person university learning and how the campus can facilitate them.
Relatedly, campus food gardens manifest positive environmental communication within which issues of sustainability justice and inclusion can be addressed.The planned introduction of food growing to campuses, and the resulting crises of doxa, create openings for rendering visibleand interrogatingdiscourses around order and belonging often taken for granted.Just as managing food-growing on campus and learning by getting one's hands dirty have until recently been "out of place," so, too, have a broader range of excluded identities.The very concept of "community" within food gardens consistently provides examples of how such tensions manifest.While most university campuses are physically open, lacking barriers that might exclude the public, a powerful doxic sense remains that only those directly affiliatedstudents, staff, educatorsare welcome on campuses.In planning and managing food gardens as common spaces, this doxa can be disrupted, challenging an exclusionary lens.For example, once gardens are established, administrators may seek to limit access via fences and locks out of concerns about the very communities gardens could serve.One administrator in our US example, for instance, repeatedly raised concerns over the possibility that "the homeless" might enter the garden to eat foodeven though feeding the hungry is a central purpose of such projects.Indeed, examples abound of campus gardens and farms in both countries that are fenced and locked (albeit intermittently) over concerns about types of "community" that might be attracted.These concerns are not always unfoundedour gardens in the US at times experience discarded hypodermic needles and equipment theftbut they highlight difficulties of managing gardens for inclusivity while simultaneously challenging the university to make real commitments to public outreach, inclusion, and sustainability benefit.
Finally, there are tensions between spatial discourses of the university as a stable provider and the actual precarity many students face.In Australia, for example, strict COVID-19 lockdowns presented the grim reality of international students, excluded from government assistance, struggling to feed themselves through the pandemic (Chrysanthos 2020).Local restaurants and food banks provided students with free food, which highlighted the vital role campus food gardens (and, even more so, campus farms) planned and managed for abundance could play in times of crisis and food insecurity (Ullevig et al. 2021).As many, less precariously positioned Australians remained ensconced at home, international students turned to some of the only available work, cycling restaurant deliveries up and down steep coastal roads (Tuohy 2020).The paradox of hungry students, living on campuses that could and should be sites of food generation, delivering food to others illustrates a broader range of sustainability precaritieseconomic, health, social, ecologicalfaced by marginalized populations, and underlines the need for the positive environmental communication of campus food growing to escalate from grassroots to institutional and broadscale.
These moments of exclusion and inclusion also provide opportunities to examine sustainability contexts and drivers that run through and beyond planned campus food gardens, including dynamics around belonging, survival, and social and environmental control.And they provide opportunities to proactively and regeneratively engage in positive environmental communication about sustainability transformations to plan, manage, and shape us and the wider planet.We offer the present focus on bringing the university campus "back to the garden" to sprout thoughts around cultivating ecocentric identification in environmental planning, management, and communication.While our gardens are admittedly idiosyncratic by design, they offer overlapping and complementary lessons for planning sustainability transformations into spaces that would benefit from, but may initially resist, such change.
While food gardens are an increasingly common phenomenon on university campuses, they remain at the margins of the educational project.Using practical exemplars and theoretical analysis, this research makes normative arguments for the inclusion of food gardens in the educational project of all university campuses.Food gardens are complex and broad-ranging forms of environmental communication: they demonstrate institutional commitment to sustainability; they teach students and staff about the precarity of the natural world and present alternatives to damaging mainstream food systems; and, by facilitating direct engagement with the more-than-human world, gardens allow staff and students to develop ecocentric identities grounded in restoration.The humancaused climate emergency and sixth mass extinction amply demonstrate universities' failure to provide past students with adequate environmental education.Institutions that are serious about meeting the need for regenerative environmental transformation should welcome staff and student food garden initiatives, precisely because they positively and proactively disrupt the dominant spatial doxa of contemporary campuses and the enduring anthropocentrism embedded in the educational project.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1.The first part of the title is borrowed from the song "Woodstock," written by Joni Mitchell in 1970 when she was 21, the age of many university students.The lyrics (e.g."We are stardust, Billion year old carbon, We are golden, Caught in the devil's bargain, And we've got to get ourselves, Back to the garden") highlight forms of positive environmental communication and ecocentric identities at play more than half a century ago in Western counterculture discourses.2. The phrases "more-than-human" and "more-than-human world" were first coined by Abram (1997) to leave behind potentially human/nature binary-reproducing framings such as "nature" and "the environment" and instead constitute the embeddedness of humans among other species within and as part of our shared environments.We likewise use these phrases here.