"When green got silly" and "The Kitchen Gardener"

I'm referring here to Lynette Evans column in the today's San Francisco Home and Garden Section. Evans compares eco-bloggers and the new green consumers hot for now popular expensive green items to Marie Antoinette, who had her own "faux peasant village so she and her courtiers could pretend to be peasants without hunger, pestilence and hard labor." Evans goes on to argue that we can't assume easy answers to envionmental crises and that it's more important to use critical thinking than Stella MacCartney's organic shopping bag ($495) when it comes to conscious living. It's a good article even it is just to introduce her colleague's new column "Your Ecological House." I like the way she is stretching the concept of sustainability to its rightful shape: without a consciousness of poverty, pestilence and exploited labor elsewhere, there is nothing sustainable about designer eco-products.

Another notable piece in the same section today:"The Kitchen Gardener" by Anne Raver of the New York Times. She describes how to make a salad garden in a kind of large portable planting box that can be put on wheels or sawhorses. (Directions for the self-watering container can be found at hgic.umd.edu, under online publications, on container vegetable gardening.) A friend and I are contemplating a large educational project called the Edible Truck, a truck that runs on biofuel that holds portable planting boxes filled with edible plants. My dream would be to install a camping stove, a worm and food compost in different compartments of the truck and make it into an art car that visits local schools that don't have edible schoolyards. An even bigger dream (just hatched) is to become a partner in our local Biodiesel Oasis, a woman run cooperative that is the first to sell biodiesel in the East Bay. Then the Edible Truck can live at the Oasis!