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  •  I hear you there (7+ / 0-)

    At this end -- Romas and heirloom 'maters, lettuce, red cabbage, bell and hot peppers, cilantro, parsley, dill, basil, oregano, raspberries, grapes -- with cukes, squash, onions and other stuff yet to go in.

    Did you see Michael Pollan's "Why Bother?' in the NYT Mag recently?

    Snippet:

    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....

    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.

    See you tomorrow morning at Frankenoid's garden diary?

    IGTNT: Our war dead. Their stories. Read "I Got the News Today."

    by monkeybiz on Fri May 16, 2008 at 06:31:51 AM PDT

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