"Yeah, you heard me right, ho."

I was in the garden a couple of weekends back when a Harvard student walking down the path asked me if I would be willing to answer some questions for a project of hers (yes, alas, hers) about how having a community garden influences thinking about the global environmental movement.  While it all sounded rather grand for someone digging in the dirt on a Sunday afternoon, I agreed to a phone interview later in the week.

Even when we finished, I wasn't sure exactly what she was after.  There were several questions about whether my views had changed since I started gardening, and certainly they have, although I have trouble locating these beliefs on the political spectrum.  gardening has never been primarily an act of political rebellion for me.  I told her I found the thought of global environmental issues abstract to the point of immobilizing, and that gardening for me has always felt intuitive. I didn't need a political agenda to pursue it.  You might say gardening came naturally to me.

And while I don't have anything in principle against people who approach their environmentalism from the abstract-in rather than from the actual-out, in practice I tend to shy away from them.  But, as with belief, I think it's merely a matter of temperament.    Some people are simply more comfortable coming at it from the one angle rather than the other, but I'm not gonna criticize anyone for whatever motivates them to, say, recycle, go fair-trade, or buy local.

Speaking of. One of my fellow students in the grant writing class I'm taking with MIT's David Gordon is doing some work for the Cape Ann Fresh Catch Community Supported Fishery , a great organization that hooks you up with fresh, sustainably-caught cod, yellowtail flounder, whiting, hake, pollock, and haddock from local fishermen.  For $20 a week you can get 4-6 lbs of whole fish, or for $24 2 lbs of filleted fish.  Check 'em out, ya'll.

All politics are local, and before they're politics they're matters of the heart — they are loves and livelihoods. The people you see at rallies to save their libraries and protest public transit fare hikes or at meetings of the local zoning board aren't there because they're "political activists," whatever they might be called by the press.  They're there because they care deeply about something happening in their neighborhood that impacts them directly.  Our convictions spring from ideals, it's true, but they blossom in everyday experience. 

I don't think there's anything wrong with expanding our zone of concern to faraway places, especially in this age of the Butterfly Effect.  Things we do — mostly products we buy — directly impact people on the other side of the planet.  The success of Whole Foods testifies to some level of understanding of this, with its combination of locally grown and fair trade organic from around the globe.  But shopping there may also lend a false sense of "activism" to the mere act of consumption, when our insatiable appetite and our inability to impose limits is at the heart of the problem.  Right now many self-professed greenies are having their organic, gluten-free fair-trade cake, and eating it, too.

And, again, it's understandable.  Because part of what makes us human — and part of our success as a species — is our rejection of the limits nature imposes.  The Whole Foods phenomenon is an ingenious way around the issue of appetite.  After all, it's not the appetite which can never be satisfied but the conscience which can never be quelled that stands between us and eating ourselves into oblivion.  Whole Foods' success is in finding a way to indulge both appetite and conscience.  Codependency never tasted so good.  Extra points for going organic.

One of the things that used to get to me at the Orphanage was the ones who crowed the loudest and made the most elaborate displays of their morally correct purchases were also the ones who drove their car five blocks to Whole Foods to do it.  But what made it even worse was hearing them kvetch forever after about having done it.  Oppressed not only by an evil corporate zombie culture but the burden of their awareness of their own anguished complicity in it, they seemed to revel in their helplessness.  And there was a sense of perverse indulgence in the expressions of guilt as tedious in its easy, almost ironic hypocrisy as the moralizing bumper stickers on their cars. 

For them, there's Earth Day.  

But Earth Day also reminds the rest of us that man is a victim of his own success, which is one reason environmentalism is so charged politically.  To some it seems that preserving nature actually goes against nature.  It's Tea Party logic, granted, but it does capture a modern conundrum. 

And it can be overwhleming.  

Good thing we have our gardens to ground us.