Agnes Denes

In the summer of 1982 Denes and volunteers cleared rubble and planted two acres of wheat on the Battery Park City landfill in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street, then harvested nearly 1,000 pounds of grain in August. Wheatfield, A Confrontation made a building site into a farm that office workers walked through, and asked what land in the world's costliest city is for. Her later Tree Mountain in Finland, 11,000 trees planted by 11,000 people on a man-made hill, is meant to last 400 years.