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.
