{"id":852,"date":"2018-04-16T03:58:20","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T03:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/?p=852"},"modified":"2018-04-16T03:58:20","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T03:58:20","slug":"is-condemning-planting-trees-as-counterproductive-as-driving-your-prius-to-plant-a-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/2018\/04\/16\/is-condemning-planting-trees-as-counterproductive-as-driving-your-prius-to-plant-a-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Condemning Planting Trees as Counterproductive as Driving Your Prius to Plant a Tree?"},"content":{"rendered":"

My mother and I would yell about the compost while I was growing up, quite literally scream at each other over an apple core. \u00a0But before that apple was bit into, eaten, and mistakenly sent to the landfill rather than our compost bin, the question was had I washed it or not? \u00a0Because \u201cYes Willa I always buy organic apples, but we can\u2019t ensure there isn\u2019t residue from the plastic packaging, that a few trace chemicals hadn\u2019t found their way onto that apple.\u201d As I was reading Pollan I imagined that this was the closest thing to my mother’s handbook I might ever find, little did I know that my mother was an avid Pollan fan. \u00a0When I read Maniantes my fifteen year old self resonated deeply with the confusion around why an individual’s actions really mattered much at all. So I told my mom about this idea. I told her that nothing each of us did on our own would alter the global landscape, that it wouldn\u2019t change anything. What I could not provide was an answer, what was going to change something enough to matter? \u00a0And in that moment I realized, as I did not appreciate Pollan\u2019s oversimplification of the ease of eating healthy, I also was not partial to how Maniantes examines the modern crisis of individualization. <\/span><\/p>\n

Both Pollan and Maniantes harp on a population that has been taught to care about the wrong things. \u00a0Criticizing people for caring more about nutrients than whole food is not so different from trying to prove that green consumer culture is perpetrating the problem it appears to solve. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So you think that planting a tree will fail to mount the wall that is a global climate crisis, well I am with you there, but what would you like to do about it? Pollan, do you have an answer to single moms working overtime to put food on the table? \u00a0Would you like to look one of them in the eye and tell her she’s not feeding her kids well enough? Telling my mom that her adamant recycling is fruitless may make her defensive, it may drive a wedge between us, but it won\u2019t coalesce us towards a common goal. \u00a0Neither Pollan nor Maniantes make the necessary headway in their writing. <\/span><\/p>\n

We will either come together, make a new plan, and enact, or we will spend the remainder of our time on this earth breaking each other down for choosing the wrong solution. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mother and I would yell about the compost while I was growing up, quite literally scream at each other over an apple core. \u00a0But before that apple was bit into, eaten, and mistakenly sent to the landfill rather than our compost bin, the question was had I washed it or not? \u00a0Because \u201cYes Willa I always buy organic apples,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,16,12,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-food-waste","category-industrialized-food","category-movements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":853,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions\/853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}