"What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" -Henry David Thoreau

Gradually Green was founded in Birmingham, MI, which is the site of Gradually Green's current happenings and the focus of our first mission.

Birmingham is often compared to a garden city, a place "to live, shop and play". Spanning less than 5 square miles, it is a pedestrian friendly, well-educated, affluent area. It was settled in 1819 and is now praised as one of the Detroit area's premier shopping districts.

Birmingham was a community founded not around farmers but around manufacturers. Now we are no longer manufacturing based; what we sell is our community itself, real estate, entertainment, and access to our shopping district. Because what we produce is not material, we do not have the benefit of seeing where things come from. Because we do not manufacture using local resources, we are robbed of understanding on deep conscious levels that things come from our spaces, and that spaces suffer from over consumption.

Our neighborhoods and gardens do not become sparser the more we consume and accrue, instead they appear more lush. In this way consumption is linked to a false sense of fertile surroundings. When we go through things quickly, our space and gardens are also not effected by the decay (lack of decay) or after-life of these objects. We live surrounded by scenery that is like a mythological garden, frozen in time. Here things are always green; our resources are always replenished, our leavings simply disappear. In this way we have done ourselves a grave disservice. Because we do not see the repercussions of our actions, it is our responsibility to keep them more present in our minds.

We as a country have become very large in mental horizons since industrialization, and one repercussion of this has been that as communities we are no longer self-sufficient. Most of what we consume in our day to day lives comes to us from anonymous origins, so it is no wonder that when we are through with them we also do not consider where they go back to. We are like people pounding on drums, only aware of the effect our hands have on the drum skin, and completely unaware of the sound we are making: of our re-percussions.