I'm Celebrating Earth Day!

To help commemorate Earth Day, Kitchen Gardeners International asked me to write a piece for their newsletter. I offered up the garden, kids, donut seeds, and ...me.

Earth Day is a controversial day for me. I'm glad we all celebrate in many different ways and forms, but I still feel that every day is "earth day" for gardeners -- and should be so for everyone. So I don't think we need a special day.

On the other hand, maybe we do. As I wrote for the Kitchen Gardeners International published today, Earth Day 2006, I worry about our children and their vision of the earth. Could you actually grow a donut from a seed? Many kids seem to think you could. Read my column (and see a photo of my container garden) in the Kitchen Gardeners International April 2006 Newsletter.

As our world spins faster and daily life becomes further and further removed from an agrarian life style we are losing sight of our dependence on the soil, and our other natural resources. (An exception might be that we are painfully aware, at the pump anyway, of the finite supply of gas and oil.) But we are somewhat complacent about the every day things: the air and water we all need to live, the soil where our food grows.

I do believe that in order to care about something and want to nurture or protect it in more than a very abstract way, we need to be intimately familiar with it. For example, once people understand that a clean garden without pesticides is attractive to wildlife and that a butterfly garden must be grown without harmful sprays, then we are happy to stop spraying. This is a connection made on a personal level with the butterfly in our own backyard, a small step we can understand easily -- and do easily.

Maybe this Earth Day we can all think of one or two small steps we can take right now to help our environment and preserve our planet -- one step at a time.