Pollan in the NYT

NYT Article by Pollan

This article in Sunday's New York Times was written by none other than Michael Pollan, on, you guessed it, gardening. Kind of a strange coincidence that it should be published right when we're covering Second Nature in class.

The article itself is about global warming, probably the single greatest environmental problem we face today. His name caught my eye in the by-line, and I couldn't help but smile when a few paragraphs down I read his prescribed palliative measure: gardening. A lot of what he says in this article seems to come straight from the ethic he espoused in Second Nature. He condenses a lot of his developed arguments into concise sentences, like talking about the satisfaction of giving away your vegetables to your neighbors and getting your hands dirty. He even talks about compost, another point at which I couldn't help but smile.

That everyone should garden is a sort of if-everyone-does-a-little-bit-it'll-turn-into-a-lot argument, which is basically the measure that everyone takes to persuade people to combat global warming. But it makes sense in the same way that his book is "the most important
ecological book of the last twenty years;" it's relevant to most people, and it bridges the gap between what is effective and what is feasible a large amount of people might actually do.