The recent spike in interest in backyard gardening, carbon footprints, local food, biking to work, etc. is a sign of an important, if still incomplete, change in consciousness, even if it took $4 gasoline to jump start it. Yet there is something I find obnoxious about the proliferation of articles and books on how to green your lifestyle (admission: our collection of “green living” books takes up more a shelf). A too-easy example is a recent NY Times article about the green honeymoon trend, but like a lot of this stuff it seems to be mostly about letting people feel not only less guilty but even self-righteous about consuming. There is clearly a huge market out there for this stuff. And some of it put out by the same people who brought you ag-as-usual, like Monsanto-owned Seminis, which sells seeds to retailers like Burpee, Jung, and Johnny’s (not to mention to the nurseries whose starts we can pick up at the farmer’s market) for us to plant in our sustainable backyard gardens.

Cox clearly favors a quantitative critique in the article, but I am also somewhat cautious about the cultural imaginaries I am mobilizing in my fascination with backyard gardening. The rhetoric of self-sufficiency is has culturally deep roots, and they aren’t particularly progressive. I know I’ve talked about this with Bonnie before, but I perceive a link between the peak oil movement and a millennial-survivalist Americanism that goes back at least to the 1740s (and whose history is fascinating and not just “good” or “bad”). Even the use of the term “urban homestead” is weird – homestead is largely defined in this country by the congressional act that privatized public, formerly Indian lands and, currently, by the rule that allows you to pay less property tax for a house you live in. That settler imaginaries are powerful, even to people who should know better, is illustrated by the Iowa City New Pioneer Co-op’s line of “Be a Pioneer” t-shirts, on sale less than 75 miles from the state’s only recognized Indian nation. My point is not to dismiss backyard gardening as neo-colonial but to think through and be critical about the various reasons why I find it so compelling.

I completely agree with Claire’s point that growing your own food is a potentially transformative experience, one that allows points of entry into many interrelated parts of the environmental & social catastrophe. One starting point for activism that reaches out from the garden might be to pressure Burpee, Jung, Johnny, and others to do what Fedco did and drop Seminis seed, rather than personally choose not to purchase from them. I find myself wishing that Cox had titled his article “Turning Your Lawn into a Garden Won’t Save Us” because that gets to the heart of the question – how to connect the absolutely necessary personal transformation to a project of broader cultural, social, infrastructural, and economic change.