galaward Apr 25, 2008 13:29 pm

We had a wonderful Earth Day at Coldbrook School, and generated a great deal of interest in a community garden. We partnered with apple producers' co-operative Scotian Gold to offer kids who brought a litterless lunch a coupon for a litterless ice cream cone. Scotian Gold will give us garden space on their property so it can be tended regularly through the summer. It'll be organic, and produce will go to the cafeteria in the fall. In a skit, we got a class of Gr. 3 kids to dress up like C02 molecules - they brought black baseball caps to school for the carbon atom, and we pulled two red balloons through the holes for the oxygen atoms. Then they did the C02ie dance every time the evil Vol*de*mart got people to buy bottled water or apples from California. But Harry Walker, the boy who shopped, and recycled, the wizard with the Mobius loop scar, faced Vol*de*Mart down, and told him "cheap oil is running out, Vol*de*Mart, and when it does, we'll be ready." Then we showed the video at www.storyofstuff.com . We got coverage in the local and provincial newspaper. One of the reporters was playing devil's advocate and asked, "Why bother?" A very interesting article was forwarded to me the next day, which raisesd that question, and attempted to answer it. The answer is actually buried toward the bottom of the article, it takes him so long to vent. So I've excerpted it.

You can read the whole article at the link.

Why Bother? By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 20, 2008 New York Times - United States
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

But the act I want to talk about is growing some - even just a little - of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don't - if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade - look into getting a plot in a community garden. *Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind. A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It's estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible. Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch - CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we're counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you're getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment. You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems - the way "solutions" like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do - actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself - that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we're all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate. But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can't do much of anything that doesn't involve division or subtraction. The garden's season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit - will you get a load of that zucchini?! - suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

*Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto."