{ Part 2 : Winter }

Our project met with two predators within three months. First were joggers engaging in accepted 'public' acts. Moving too fast to read the sign, and unprepared to imagine another use for this land, the joggers reduced the number of plants by half in the first month. Trampled and torn, by the new year the remaining ten nonetheless grew to a hefty three feet.

The second predator showed up in January as scrawls on the corner of our sign:

Dear Diggers, Sorry, I’ve been instructed to remove papaya plants by March 2004. Please transplant.

We were intrigued by the tension revealed in the message - the apologetic tone, the writer’s attempt to distance her/himself from her/his boss, the effort made to save the plants. We decided to utilize the writer’s empathy with the Diggers project to make more evident the power distinction between those who determine land usage and those who are charged with carrying it out. We put up a second sign:

Thanks for the notice but we can’t think of any other place better than here where everyone has easy access to the free papayas. If your bosses have a better use for this spot I guess they will have to kill the plants. We are anxious to see what they have planned. The Diggers