sacbee.com

Roger Doiron, who is credited to having help inspired Michelle Obama to plant the White House kitchen garden, gives a TEDx presentation on the bigger picture of what he is trying to accomplish, and the Sacramento Bee follows up with the story:

White House Garden Activist Calls for National Garden Strategy

[…] In a newly released TEDx video, Doiron looks beyond the success of the White House garden to what needs to be done next to help the country’s food garden movement grow.

“Although a kitchen garden revolution has started, we’re still scratching at the surface of what gardens can do and will need to do in an increasingly hot, crowded and malnourished world,” says Doiron who is Founding Director of the nonprofit Kitchen Gardeners International. Citing statistics about obesity, hunger, projected population growth and peak oil production, Doiron makes a strong case for investing more heavily in food garden education and promotion as part of the solution to the world’s health, economic and environmental challenges.

Certainly those four issues (obesity, hunger, population growth, and peak oil) are worthy of being addressed, and our society (or societies, acknowledging the work done outside of the US culture) is trying to address them more or less (often less.) Peak Oil and Obesity are too complex of topics to do justice in this short space, but let’s just assume that both are indeed pressing national issues. Population growth and hunger are more obviously linked, as it is clear that the human population on this planet continues to grow quickly and also that hunger still persists around the world.

Yet besides the obvious connection with Michelle Obama, why might yellow journalists (like Breitbart, Fox and Friends, and the rest of the Outrage-du-jour right wing) be ready to pounce on Doiron and his proposals? Well, Breitbart hasn’t yet (as far as I can tell from his websites) tackled Doiron directly, but certainly First Lady Obama has been under attack for her campaign to get America to eat more healthily. And Doiron is putting forward (relative to American Presidential politics of recent times) a radical agenda:

Among his proposals are the following:

- Creating a long-term National Food Garden Strategy designed to increase the number of new food gardens and their productivity. […]

- Financing this new strategy via the next Farm Bill by reallocating taxpayer dollars away from commodity crops subsidies and reinvesting them in community-based food production.

Getting money away from commodity crops is going to be very difficult. The senators from the big commodity farm states tend to protect their interests as a group very well. And when one of the worlds largest private firms, Cargill (see Cargill: Inside the quiet giant that rules the food business), gets together with the other food business giants (ADM, Monsanto, etc.) the lobby is about as strong as possible in American politics.

Continuing with Doiron’s ideas:

- Using the federal tax code to promote gardening through a $1000/household garden stimulus package.

- Updating town and city codes and neighborhood association bylaws to allow people to grow food in front yards and in vacant urban spaces [ed. - YES!]

- Encouraging garden entrepreneurship through the passage of local food sovereignty laws like the ones passed in several Maine towns this past year. [ed. - YES!]

- Brainstorming new ideas to encourage more men to join the country’s kitchen garden movement, a movement that is currently nearly 75% female.

- Developing new local networks or “suburban granges” capable of bringing gardeners together online and off.

Doiron concludes his presentation by urging more people to grow their own “subversive plots” citing gardening’s ability to redistribute power away from the corporations that are currently putting food on America’s tables and back into the hands of the people. “Gardening is a sort of healthy gateway drug to other forms of food freedom.” says Doiron. “It’s not long after planting a garden that people become interested in home cooking, preserving food and locating their local farmers’ market.”

Wait for it…

SUBVERSION!! This communist clearly admits to subversion, and he has a direct line to the White House!

Overall I support Doiron in his intentions, though I suspect his idealism has clouded his assessment of the political difficulties of some of his proposals.

Civilization is directly linked to the discovery and development of horticulture. In a profound sense, to be human means to be a gardener - the old days of when the Homo genus were a hunter-gathering collection of subspecies is long gone. It is not an overstatement to say that we exist because of our ability to grow plants.

And while the American right-wing political landscape may poo-poo ideas like climate change, resource scarcity, and the existence of poor nutrition in the US these are indeed real issues that affect real people, so I wish Doiron well in effecting positive changes to the American landscape.

Here is the TEDx presentation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezuz_-eZTMI