Fueled by the recent fascination with all things DIY, community gardening — like brainstorming clever uses for Mason jars and eating like a caveman — has been popular lately. But on a large plot in inner-city Baltimore, gardeners have been working the land for almost 25 years. The Duncan Street Miracle Garden, a lush rectangle crisscrossed by grape arbors and trellises, sits in a desolate patch of East Baltimore where 44 rowhouses once stood. On a recent spring day, the blue sky was visible through the empty shells of neighboring buildings and birdsong competed with police sirens.

“I call it ‘God’s little acre,’” says garden manager Lewis Sharpe, 74. The garden is in fact nearly an acre, and it owes its existence to a core group of dedicated gardeners. In 1988, with Baltimore in the throes of the crack cocaine epidemic, a local men’s group cleaned up what had become a dumping ground after the city razed a stretch of crumbling rowhouses. The gardeners then convinced the city to close the alley to traffic. Decades later, it is dotted with trees, including a mulberry that Sharpe likes to nap under, and row upon row of flower, fruit, and vegetable plants.

A few — the “fruit cocktail tree” and the “strawberry tree” — do sound vaguely miraculous. But the biggest miracle is that the garden is here at all.

A chain-link fence surrounds the plot, though it does nothing to thwart the rats, the garden’s worst pests. Instead, it was built some years back to deter a two-legged nuisance: drug dealers. “At one time they was running through here with police chasing ‘em,” Sharpe says. “Now they ain’t got time to go over the fence. They go around it.”

Sharpe joined the farm in 1989, and as founding members passed away or began to garden less, he became its self-appointed manager. He — like famous Milwaukee urban farmer Will Allen — grew up on a farm, in his case in rural Virginia. “During the summer, grandma got us up at 6 a.m. and gave us a hoe or a shovel,” Sharpe says. “We’d go out there and cut the rows, put the seed, put fertilizer down.”

Health problems have kept him from retiring to his ancestral home, so Sharpe has done the next best thing: create an urban facsimile. “It keeps me busy,” he says simply.

In Baltimore, at least, his work fills a unique niche. Sharpe and his fellow green thumbs — there are about 10 — grow much more food than they can eat, so roughly half of the produce goes to local soup kitchens and neighborhood residents. (Sharpe also plants string beans outside the fence for passersby to snack on.) Moveable Feast, a local organization that helps homebound HIV/AIDS patients, has a plot here, as does a neighborhood Baptist church.

Buy-in from organizations like these will likely help the garden to survive in the future, as will participation by younger generations. Anita Stewart-Hammerer’s children have been gardening at Duncan Street for five years, since they were 5 and 8 years old, respectively. “I met Mr. Sharpe at the garden and we hit it off,” Stewart-Hammerer says. She worked in community development for a local organization at the time. “He said to me, ‘I’m gonna make a farmer out of you.’” Stewart-Hammerer is now Sharpe’s right-hand woman, responsible for the paperwork — applying for grants, soliciting donations — that keeps the gardeners in mulch, tools, seed, and plants. (It costs all of $20 to rent a plot for a year.)

Devoted gardeners and some nonprofit support have sustained Duncan Street over the years, but until recently it was living on borrowed time: There was nothing stopping the city from selling the land and evicting the gardeners. Then, in 2010, Baltimore Green Space, a local land trust, purchased the garden from the city for $1 per lot. The trust — which owns three other spaces, including a horseshoe pit — protects the garden from the vagaries of absentee landlords, developers, and the city, if not the ills of the neighborhood.

Land insecurity is a perennial (ahem) problem for urban gardeners. In 2006, after more than a decade, one of the largest urban farms in the country, South Central Farm in industrial Los Angeles, was bulldozed by a developer who wanted to build a warehouse there. Sharpe gazes out over the many species he favors that take years to produce: figs, asparagus, apples, grapes. “We don’t have to worry about that anymore,” he says.

“It’s a much easier sell to a city to say ‘It’s a win-win, just give it to us for a dollar,’” says Baltimore Green Space founder and Executive Director Miriam Avins. “Instead of looking at, you’re not going to be getting taxes from this piece of land, think about how it improves property values around it.”

That could be one of the ironies here: Some research has shown that community gardens improve property values [PDF] and lower crime rates, which could, paradoxically, lead to development.

The land trust will be there to protect the garden should that happen, however, and it seems like a distant threat in this stretch of East Baltimore. In any case, Avins says, community gardens like Duncan Street often serve as an organic (a-a-ahem) remedy for a problem that should never have existed. “A lot of our neighborhoods don’t have green space,” she says. “It’s kind of like people are retrofitting their neighborhoods with what should have been there.”

Though there’s always plenty of work to do at Duncan Street, that hasn’t stopped Lewis Sharpe from hatching grander plans. He has adopted at least a dozen neighboring lots from the city — under the program, residents steward a piece of land for a limited time — in order to make sure the grass is mowed and litter picked up. And he’s gardening another swath of vacant land that borders Duncan Street. As he says of his love for watermelons, “I don’t like a little bit of something. I like a lot.”

As bikini season approaches, Jersey Shore beach towns are preparing for their annual influx of tourists. This year, that will mean more than dusting off the cotton candy machines and stocking up on vomit deodorizer. When Hurricane Sandy hit last fall, boardwalks from Long Branch to Atlantic City — including Seaside Heights, of Jersey Shore fame — were damaged or destroyed. The shore is now in a frenzy of rebuilding and repairing, gearing up for Memorial Day. But environmental activists have been something of a buzz-saw kill.

The decking of these boardwalks pre-Sandy ranged from southern yellow pine to wood-plastic composite lumber to a tropical hardwood called ipe. That last option has rainforest advocates and town officials at loggerheads. Ipe, also known as Brazilian walnut, is the Cadillac of decking materials, prized for its density, fire resistance, and durability. More than one town is considering using it for boardwalk material. Environmental groups, including Rainforest Relief, Friends of the Rainforest, and the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, say tropical hardwoods are a poor choice environmentally speaking, particularly given the circumstances.

“What happens in the Brazilian rainforest [where ipe is often logged] affects the climate,” says Jeff Tittel, director of the Sierra Club’s New Jersey chapter. “It’s unconscionable to add to climate disruption when you’ve just been destroyed by an environmental disaster that was caused by climate disruption.”

It’s been estimated that as much as 80 percent of the logging conducted in the Brazilian Amazon is illegal. And some activists say harvesting a tree like ipe — with only one or two growing in a given acre — is a devastating affair even under legal circumstances. Logging requires roads, and neighboring trees are often incidentally felled, they say. And since old-growth tropical rainforest supports the greatest biodiversity on the planet, says Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief, every injury is magnified. “You damage ecosystems there, you’re automatically losing species,” he says. “These are the genetic libraries of Mother Earth and we are burning them down to make boardwalks.”

Well, if that doesn’t just drop a doggy bomb on your beach towel …

The battle over tropical hardwoods long precedes Superstorm Sandy. In the 1990s, Atlantic City and Avon-by-the-Sea rebuilt their boardwalks with ipe, despite protests from environmentalists. In 2007, activists convinced Ocean City not to use ipe to rebuild its boardwalk. But in 2009, Wildwood replaced a section of its boardwalk with ipe after having pledged to use black locust.

Post-Sandy, activists have had some successes. The borough of Belmar had planned to use ipe to rebuild its boardwalk but in January reluctantly decided against it after environmentalists threatened to sue, potentially slowing reconstruction. “We cannot allow out-of-town interests to hold our community and small business owners hostage,” Mayor Matthew Doherty told the Asbury Park Press.

And in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg says that the Rockaways boardwalk, heavily damaged by Sandy, will not be rebuilt with tropical hardwood. The city is one of the largest consumers of the stuff in North America. The Highline, South Street Seaport, the Brooklyn Bridge — they’re all decked with tropical hardwoods. (One group even wants to designate a rainforest in Guatemala as the Brooklyn Bridge Forest, for future repairs.) But in 2008, under pressure from environmental groups, the Parks Department pledged to reduce the use of tropical hardwoods and, Keating says, has begun to follow through.

Yet little Avon-by-the-Sea remains a hard nut to crack. The borough plans to rebuild its three-quarter-mile boardwalk with ipe, despite letters, petitions, complaints to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (75 percent of the $1.5 million tab for rebuilding the boardwalk will come from FEMA), and threats of a boycott and to sue. Keating estimates that some 766 acres of tropical rainforest will have been felled for Avon’s boardwalk. That’s about twice the size of Avon itself. He and other activists are advocating for recycled plastic lumber or sustainably harvested domestic hardwood instead.

But borough administrator Tim Gallagher says their arguments — much like ipe itself — don’t hold water. “We’re happy with the product that we chose and we think it’s more environmentally friendly than the other stuff,” he says. Gallagher says the durability of ipe means it won’t need to be replaced as quickly. (Avon’s first ipe boardwalk was built in 1993 after a storm destroyed the previous incarnation.) And, Gallagher says, the wood Avon has purchased — it’s already en route — has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international nonprofit forest management organization.

Here’s where things get a little … knotty. Those protesting the use of ipe don’t put stock in the FSC certification process when it comes to the tropics. Keating maintains it’s likely impossible to harvest wood sustainably from such a complex ecosystem, with such long-lived species. “Ipe trees are 250 to 1,000 years old,” he says. “How are you gonna have a 25-year management plan?” And the methods of the FSC have repeatedly come under fire. One of its founding members, who now runs an FSC watchdog group, has called the organization “the Enron of forestry.” Many environmental organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Conservation Society, continue to support it, but Greenpeace International recently produced a critical report [PDF], and some environmental advocacy groups — like Europe’s FERN — no longer endorse it.

This is not a debate Gallagher cares to join. “It’s a done deal,” he says. “We’re using ipe.” But seasoned boardwalk battler Georgina Shanley, a founding member of Friends of the Rainforest, is holding out hope. Shanley helped convince Ocean City to avoid ipe in 2007, and in that case the town already had the wood. “I really believe we’re going to fight this to the very end and we’re going to win,” she says.

Even if she’s victorious this time, rainforest advocates aren’t out of the woods. Shanley likens these ongoing battles along the Shore to a boardwalk arcade game, the one where crocodiles emerge one after the other and the player must hit them on the head with a hammer before they disappear. “Another one will pop up,” she says. “I have no doubt.”

A charming memory, but for the fact that Ross grew up in an industrial section of East Baltimore and this bucolic scene bordered a steel plant. One day he was at the neighborhood playground when word went around that “men in spacesuits” were collecting the flowers. When he went to investigate, he says he saw workers in Hazmat gear harvesting the plants, having surrounded the area with caution tape. Many years later, Ross learned that sunflowers are used in phytoremediation projects to pull lead from the soil. (Trail mix, anyone?)

These days, the site — now a vast sorting facility for construction debris — is one stop on Ross’ Toxic Tour, a rollicking bus ride through the contaminated wonderland that is inner-city Baltimore. A self-described “urban environmentalist,” Ross leads dozens of tours a year, primarily for college students from Johns Hopkins University’s schools of medicine, nursing, and (wait for it) public health, which are located nearby. The tours take in brownfields, rat infestations, truck traffic, illegal dumping sites, vacant buildings, and other environmental hazards in Baltimore’s poor, predominantly black communities.

Ross, who has been leading them for nearly a decade, makes sure the bus windows are open for these warm-weather outings. “I put it right up in their face – they’ve got to smell it, taste it, the whole nine yards,” he says. “And at the end of the tour, they get it.”

“It,” says Ross, is nothing less than environmental racism. “These things only happen in poor urban communities, neighborhoods where there’s poor political representation.”

Ross has attacked his city’s glaring public health disparities from many angles. He’s been president of his neighborhood community association for nearly 20 years, has sat on boards and rubbed elbows with drug dealers, badgered and cajoled local politicians, sweet-talked nonprofits, and consulted for universities.

And after 40-some years of activism, he says he’s seen some small signs of progress. On his tours, he used to stop at an area along a set of railroad tracks where swathes of black fluid dripped down the walls and ultimately into the storm drains. These, he suspects, were not only locomotive fluids, but also toxic PCBs, used for insulating purposes. Now those walls are scrubbed clean. Students on his tours often take photographs along the way, and Ross attributes the improvements to the paparazzi effect.

Other changes? Ross’ neighborhood of McElderry Park will soon be home to 800 new street trees. His tours are starting to attract universities from outside the city and even the state, and in 2005, Hopkins’ aforementioned health schools set up a student outreach center to promote volunteerism in the communities they border. (Ross is the center’s “community consultant.”)

But residents of these communities still suffer disproportionately from a huge range of maladies, from asthma to cancer to lead poisoning (not to mention homicide). A recent city health department study found that the average resident’s life expectancy differs by as much as 20 years depending on the neighborhood they live in. In McElderry Park, it is less than 65 years.

So Ross has some friendly advice for well-meaning white environmentalists, several of whom have complained to him about their lack of success in urban areas: If you’re trying to win over poor, black folk from the inner city, spare them the plight of the baby seal.

“When you talk about the environment, you talk about the white snow-capped mountains, the salmon, the wildlife, kayaking,” he says, delivering a pregnant pause. “We don’t kayak.”

Instead, Ross says, environmental activists should focus on topics closer to home, like how local demolition is conducted, why it’s important to plant more trees, what’s causing kids to develop asthma, and where litter goes once it’s washed down the storm drain.

But as much as Ross enjoys schooling treehugging salmon-smoochers, they are not his target audience. “We’re the ones that’s living in this, we’re the ones that need to be educated about why our health is this way,” Ross says. “You know, Why’s my child’s asthma so bad? These are the people who need to know.”