Oh, to be Michael Pollan. Great writer, and whether I agree with him or not, I feel compelled to respond. It would save me a lot of time if I actually were Michael Pollan, because then I wouldn’t be spending an hour and a pot of tea writing about his column in today’s New York Times Magazine.
The column is about climate change. Why bother changing your personal behavior, when it seems so futile? Pollan wrings his hands, and eventually counsels the concerned reader to plant a garden.
> 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.
My response to this is visceral, knee-jerk disgust. I’m not anti-gardening, although it’s about to sound like I am, but I want to think through the consequences of what he is suggesting.
Who’s in the best position to act on Pollan’s advice? People who take up a lot of space, who, as Pollan puts it, take “too many drives to the garden center.” And his suggestion to look into a community garden is specious. There’s a beautiful community garden plot five blocks from where we live, and the waiting list is enormous.
The historical echo I’m hearing in Pollan’s words is “Garden City.” Popularized by Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the 20th century, the Garden City was a design for a utopian town where families could live in relative leisure and peace, with all the benefits of urban and rural life and the drawbacks of neither. It makes for a beautiful image on the page or in the imagination. In real life, Garden Cities require lots and lots of cars. I have no argument with people who want to live in such a place, but no one would argue that they’re a model of environmental virtue.
The other modern architectural idea that would give every person access to a garden is the tower in a park. House people in elevator high-rises, but surround each building by a beautiful lawn, with a playground and community garden. There are hundreds of such developments in the US, and if you asked people what kind of place they’d like to live in, these would come in dead last: the Projects.
What does Pollan’s imaginary gardening community look like? A mix of Garden City and housing project? Subdivisions with eggplants coming out of the lawn? Pardon me if I’m not inspired by this.
I have a different vision: a place where people take up so little space that few of them have the opportunity to grow a garden, but they produce little waste and burn little fuel. With modern transportation and waste disposal, you could comfortably fit, say, 8 million people into this community and have farmers truck in organic food from nearby farms much more efficiently than if everyone had a garden. This community would be “more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.”
I’m joking, of course. The utopian community is called New York City, and no other place in America comes close to the tiny per-capita carbon footprint of New York. Every environmentalist should read David Owen’s 2004 New Yorker article Green Manhattan:
> The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T.
Perhaps all Pollan means to suggest is that if you are concerned about the environment, have the means to grow a garden, and are not already doing so, it’s time to take the plunge. I’d suggest something different. If you are concerned about the environment and have the means to grow a garden, consider moving to a neighborhood where you have too little space to grow one.
Meanwhile, Iris and I planted two pots of cilantro last week and are eagerly waiting green sprouts. I’ll keep you posted.
Hear, hear. Isn’t it environmentally wiser for me to live in an apartment within walking distance of a grocery store, than in a house with a yard that grows 20 tomatoes and 10 cups of basil a year (for which I’d probably drive to the store to buy imported mozzarella and olive oil?)
Sure. Here’s another part of the Owen article that I wanted to quote:
This is certainly what I picture, and so the obvious next step is to imagine a community with quaint houses tucked into the landscape like follies in an English garden, even though this type of community is calamitous in terms of its carbon footprint.
considering people are not going to move, isn’t it a good idea for them to plant a garden?
Sure, Rex. But, to be totally reductive and manichean about it, casting the garden people as the enviro-heroes and the non-garden people as the villains is exactly backwards. Along with planting gardens, I think people who live on large tracts of land should also use compact fluorescent lightbulbs and turn the water heater down to 120. Okay?
Garden – nice if you can do it. But the single largest greenhouse gasimpact that householders can have is….Get this….Use less water. Yup. The energy involved in capturing water depends upon where you live, but in most US communities, capturing the water, pumping the water, losing the water to inefficient storage and transportation systems, followed by using it once, then running it down the drain…all that takes massive energy. Grow garden if you like, but along the way, use a little conservation with your water.
Groan…as I plant my garden…I need to go re-read Jane Jacobs.
The point I think you missed is that growing your own food makes you less dependent on the Chinese rice farmer and the conglomerate trucking companies and OPEC when stocking your pantry. Sure, you’re not likely to grow your own rice, but you may end up eating a completely different, healthier variety of food as a result of the abundance of food you’ve grown in pots on your urban balcony. And when your neighbor offers you eggplant in exchange for your surplus tomatoes, you’ve expanded your diet and your community that much more, while further reducing your dependence on others to stock your pantry. You don’t need an acre of land and trips to the overpriced garden center every weekend to grow some lettuce and tomatoes and peas and eggplant and peppers. You don’t even need a yard.
Not everyone can afford to shop at the farmer’s market and Whole Foods and Uwajimaya for all their grocery needs. A little urban gardening can ease the ever-increasing burden of grocery costs by providing nearly-free (seeds, sun, and dirt!), organic, fabulous-tasting produce during the growing season. And if your balcony or back deck or front yard is just a little bigger, or you’ve gotten to the top of the p-patch list, you may can and dry and freeze that produce to get your family through much of the winter as well. Then, maybe you can spend what grocery dollars you have available to support local organic farmers, artisan cheese makers, and fabulous bakeries.
Okay, I’ve been thinking about this all morning, and I have a question (or three): How many of us could afford to live in New York? Do the environmental benefits make it worth the cost? Or, is it like organic food — if we had more New York Cities, would the cost of living come down?
And Susan has good points as well.
Kathleen, sorry to make you spend your morning thinking about my deliberately provocative blog post, and thanks to you (and Susan) for the great points.
The point I was trying to make is: to Pollan, and I think to most people, having more gardens is an obvious environmental win. To me, that’s not obvious at all. To me, environmentalism looks like a high-rise.
But that’s easy for me to say. In answer to your question, Kathleen, about whether the environmental benefits of high-density living make it worth the cost, I should admit that for me, the environmental benefits aren’t part of the calculus at all. I enjoy apartment living, which sure makes it easy to prescribe to everyone else.
That’s where I see Pollan coming from, too. We know he likes to garden. He’s written a whole book on the topic. Any time I find the universe seeming to align in favor of my habits, I should check myself for hubris. (Would any of my readers disagree? Didn’t think so.) I’m now imagining a parody of the Pollan column about how everyone should learn to build wooden boats, because the sea is going to rise.
I have approximately zero interest in gardening. I think it’s possible to be a good cook, a contributing member of society, an environmentalist, and a nice guy without being a gardener.
I had a coworker once who lived in a loft in the Pearl District, from which she observed her neighbor drive his Hummer 2 blocks to the gym. To me, the issue isn’t where you live, but how you live. New Yorkers and other city dwellers may use less gasoline because they can more easily walk to their destinations or access mass transit, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t overheat their homes, leave all the lights on, waste water, buy lamb and apples from New Zealand, buy clothing made in sweat shops halfway around the world and/or fail to recycle. Not every person living in a single family home is an energy eating monster either. Portland isn’t known for a lot of apartment living, but you can’t turn around in this city without running into someone who commutes by bike, buys local, recycles, composts, has a rain barrel or a hybrid car – or all of the above.
And the cost of living issue is huge. I’d greatly prefer to live closer to the city center, but cannot afford to. Farmers’ Markets are indeed expensive – though we do shop at them (we have a CSA, actually). Sure, there are ways to shop with savvy, but let’s not even begin to discuss how poverty is about so much more than a lack of money.
Actually, Natalie, that sounds like a great discussion, but I suppose that would be better done elsewhere. :-)
I really did go check out a Jane Jacobs book from the library today. I couldn’t help it.
Matthew, I think your points about apartment living/dense cities are good ones, even if they do come from a love of apartment living.
I just read this article by Tea about gardening in San Francisco:
http://ediblesanfrancisco.com/index.php/2008011251/Winter-2008/Winter-2008/ENVISIONING-VICTORY.html
Subsidies and support for urban gardeners sound good.
Michael Pollan is known these days as the Food Reformer, but back before he got famous, he wrote a heckuva lot about gardening. In other words, he was a Garden Guy before he was a Food Guy. He’s naturally biased in favor of growing your own.
Fritz Haeg’s new Edible Estates book includes an essay from Pollan’s book Second Nature. Even if you’re not into gardening, the book is an entertaining read — and if you hate to garden, the essay (also in Haeg’s book) featuring Pollan’s dad refusing to mow his lawn is pretty great.
This is why you should be growing your own food…
http://sharonastyk.com/2008/04/22/we-regret-to-inform-you/
I now live in a 28 story building in Seattle. Previously, I have always had a house with a vegetable garden and an ornamental garden.
Now that my gardening space is limited to a 8’x6’deck, I decided to focus on edible plants(I really hate spending $2 on those tiny packets of herbs).
Besides planning to grow the obvious tomatoes and basil, a friend gave me a fig plant! And also I want to track down an Meyer Lemon tree.
I think it is so funny that you end your post by writing that you planted seeds. I think that is exactly what Pollen was advocating.
The superior taste and the recognition of the work it takes to grow food using fewer resources – these all will make us more aware of what is at stake.
Oh, and sticking it to the man (insert evil agri-corporation name here)is always fun.