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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Why Bother? (some excerpts) By MICHAEL POLLAN
  • Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:29:58 -0600


Why Bother? (some excerpts) By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most
recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

... for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long
after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing
case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by
climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits,
when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really
depressing.

Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes,
to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking —
passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get
us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort
of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward
a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the
environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what
we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a
crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at
home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to
environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in
their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets
to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos.

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing)
at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and
then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and
desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to
agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment
to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political
action to the politician.

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters
precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own
lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer
imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law,
solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he
probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say,
growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is
probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of
ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old
cars and houses and lives.

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.

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.

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.
















  • [Livingontheland] Why Bother? (some excerpts) By MICHAEL POLLAN, Tradingpost, 04/21/2008

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