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Spring is in the air and I am already excited for the sweet and juicy tomatoes that summer will bring.  Now that we are getting settled into our new home, I can make some time to wander through our yard, seeking patches of earth that receive abundant sunlight.  I hope that I can turn these spaces into a productive vegetable garden with my kids.  While I love to consume fresh produce, I haven’t been very successful in the garden.  That’s perhaps the understatement of the year.  I think I truly have a black thumb.  Maybe my kids will be a good influence – maybe one of them has a green thumb that will rub off on me.

I recently learned about an incredible article by Michael Pollan, in which he discusses Global Warming and how even though trying to solve this problem seems overwhelming, we should each try to do our part.  A large portion of his article describes the impact that growing our own food has on the planet…and on ourselves and those near us.

Why bother to try to stop Global Warming?  Here is some of what he had to say…

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will… The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards.

(About gardening…)
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.

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.

For the entire article, please visit:  http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_read.asp?id=438384202008