wide-eyed

For The Future
by Wendell Berry

It’s time to find a piece of earth and put some roots down. Take advantage of Arbor Day on April 27th as an opportunity to make NYC and our little Earth a cleaner, greener place, by doing a few of these little things:

Find a Location
If you talk with the Parks Department (contact someone in your borough’s office), they might be willing to help you plant on school grounds or a neighborhood park! My students and I will be planting a park close to our school off the BQE to try and absorb some of those particulates that are giving our students asthma.

Get the Trees
If you join the National Arbor Day Foundation, you’ll get 10 free trees. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has a School Seedling Program and you can get free trees or shrubs from them too! Talk with the Parks Department to decide which variety is best for your location. You can request a street tree from the City, but that can take awhile.

Extend the Activity
The Arbor Day Foundation has a bunch of free materials for teachers. They also have great resources for kids. Leaf Miner is fun for any age. And “The Giving Tree” (HarperCollins) and “Miss Rumphius” (Barbara Cooney) are good lessons on victory over tribulation.

Get Famous
The NYSDEC has a National Arbor Day poster contest for fifth grade students.

Just enjoy getting your hands dirty!

The hardest working worms in town will be applauding as their favorite horticulturists gather to learn more about how to keep it green in NYC this month. Yes folks, it’s time to remember our roots and make that spring air even sweeter with a seed!

Brooklyn GreenBridge, the Community Horticulture Program of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is going to blossom early with Garden-Wise Greening: Growing Healthy Soil, Food & Community. It’s the 25th Anniversary of Making Brooklyn Bloom, and it’s being celebrated this Saturday, March 10, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Conference will feature speakers, workshops, and exhibits on “Greening Our Neighborhoods” and “Growing Local Fruits and Vegetables.” The keynote, Joan Dye Gussow, will speak on “Global Reflections on Eating from Home.” She’s author of This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, a professor, farmer, and passionate advocate of incorporating green practices into everyday life.

Plus, Green Guerillas, the folks who always show up and work gardens from the ground up, gather for their annual meeting on March 13th, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Community Church of NY, 40 East 35th Street (Madison & Park) in Manhattan. Where other people saw vacant lots in the early 70’s, Liz Christy and the original band of Green Guerillas saw community gardens and urban farms. Their vision of what urban land could become and their determination to make it happen launched a movement. Today, Green Guerillas is a vibrant nonprofit that supports community garden leaders, strengthens gardens, and engages young people as gardeners, artists, and leaders. RSVP at 718.906.100.

And if you can’t wait to get your hands on a whole lot of magic, apply now to the America the Beautiful Fund and get up to 100 to 1,000 of free seeds!

I came across this advertisement on Treehugger by Simple Shoes selling little walkers that will “reduce our environmental footprint” because they are manufactured using sustainable materials like recycled car tires, cork and bamboo while reading about German recycling programs (which rock the globe over!). Seems cool, despite a rising obsession with buying our way out of our environmental disasters - and I don’t just mean so-called earth-friendly shoes. It’s getting more and more in to buy “green” when overconsumption be it “green” or not is a problem in and of itself. That thought was secondary to a bigger font:

I’m not an environmentalist, but I care about the environment.

Hold up! Isn’t that what, in essence, an environmentalist is? Why make such a declaration? And why on treehugger? Treehugger says they’re committed to making sustainability mainstream, and if you are looking for “doom & gloom, this is not the place.” Just makes me wonder if an axe has dropped and a wedge edged between environmentalists and another crowd of those cool to care. The environmental movement has been ineffective in going mainstream, but is it because of negativity? No, Simple Shoes isn’t Treehugger, but it is the consequence of an environmental movement that can be very real, and not always concerned about being pretty.

Their shtick — simple shoes for a happy planet — doesn’t really stick. Wouldn’t polar bears, who are drowning in the Antarctic because the ice won’t hold them anymore, be a whole lot happier if they were environmentalists and it was cool to say so?