Letters to the Editor
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There's one thing to learn from conservatives
I'm a fan of Pollan, and certainly there's no harm done in planting a garden. But I think at this point, we need to be more serious than that. Planting a garden is a very yuppie, feel-good thing to do that has little actual impact. For all I despise economic conservatives, I'll give 'em this: scale make things efficient, and while they like that because it puts more money in their pocket, efficiency is also what we need to build a sustainable future. It's a different kind of efficiency, to be sure: the variables are different. No longer is the only parameter the dollar; there's the pound of C02, the acre of forest, the elimination of a species, the particle of pollutant. But the strategy is the same: having a (for example) physicist who would be spending his time researching better solar power toiling in the garden ten hours a week to produce seven tomatoes at the end of the summer isn't our way out of this.