More on climate change and gardens

The issues of climate change and growing your own garden seem inexorably linked. Here, speaking to the issue of climate change and "what we should do," is the recent opinion piece "Why bother?" by Micheal Pollan. Putting the weight of the world's future on what individuals do or don't do with a vegetable patch is a heavy burden. But Pollan argues for the collateral benefits as well:

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.

TK: We will all have gardens if it means we can avoid having a big climate change tax imposed on us. I rather think Pollan's quaint solution is preferable to the big government response.