Tear Up Your Lawn & Grow Food

It’s an act of resistance to climate change & gives me hope.

This has been a freakin’ depressing week.

First, the latest UN Climate Report came out. Then this afternoon Central Texas reported there were only two ICU beds left for a population of 2.4 million people which did not inspire confidence that humankind would pay attention to the climate report.

I spent all afternoon reading reports and pouring over statistics. Is it absolutely too late to keep the earth’s temperature from rising two degrees within 20 to 30 years? If life as we know it is fated to be destroyed, how do we have hope? And without hope, how do we go on?

Yes, Greta Thunberg said, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to feel panic.

But, I’ve never been very functional in a panicked condition.

This pervasive sense of creeping despair is a recurring problem. Vox even had an article titled How to Fight Climate Despair this week. Yes, I read it.

My teenage grandchildren identify climate change as the greatest problem facing society. They also say they’re unwilling to have children who will live on a barely habitable planet, a choice based on hopelessness.

Previously, I convinced myself to have a bit of hope, comparing humanity to pigweed, which survives anything. But today, even that seemed impossible.

However, I’m pigheadedly optimistic; perhaps I’ve lived too close to nature for too many years. Nature is damned reluctant to concede. So, stretching for solutions, I spent the afternoon searching for inspiration.

Always, always, I come back to gardening.

Every time we put a seed in the soil or dig a hole and plant a tree, we hope for the future. So how do I believe growing food can help?

1. Gardening builds community. Community gardens? Even better.

Growing food is a skill we should all have, and one far too few has a chance to learn, it seems. Sharing gardening skills is the natural and best way to learn, as many folks who try to garden via YouTube videos will verify.

When I teach people how to garden, I urge them to put their hands in the soil, identify the feel of healthy soil. Then, lift it to smell the aroma of soil rich with helpful decomposers converting waste into food for microorganisms, and you’ll remember. But, if I tell you, it’s the smell of actinomycetes, a type of filamentous bacteria, that grow damp, warm soil? Not so much.

A stronger, younger person can fill wheelbarrows with compost faster than I can, so the community functions better together.

2. Growing and consuming food locally uses less fossil fuel.

And if you’re using human muscles for tilling the soil, I’ll bet it’s even less. A typical estimate is that the food industry uses10% of all fossil fuels in the United States. Only about 20% goes towards production; the remaining 80% is associated with processing, transport, home refrigeration, and preparation.

It’s estimated that produce travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our table.

3. Recycle your food waste, cardboard, and paper.

None of your carbon-based waste needs to go to a landfill. It all decomposes quickly, especially if you vermicompost or use earthworms to speed up the process. Turn all this waste into nutrient-rich compost, and you will need little additional fertilizer.

4. You don’t have to mow your vegetable garden.

Of course, you’ll also better understand the natural world, get fresh air and exercise, which will improve your health, and so much more!

I’m not discounting the Herculean task that we face. But I do believe gardening helps to change us in many ways, all of them good.

Appreciating the work that’s required to produce food will help us all be less wasteful. And that attitude can help us buy less, stop chasing wealth, live smaller, and so much more. These changes need to be reflected in all our daily decisions, from how often we use our cars to who we vote for.

So pick up a shovel and plant a garden.

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, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals