Gardening and Climate Change

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference takes place in Copenhagen, The Gardens Project would like to take a moment to contemplate the interaction between climate change and gardening: how the simple and beautiful act of gardening helps combat the behemoth that is climate change and how, unmitigated, the behemoth will affect gardening for all of us in the future.

Climate change can seem like a daunting problem, one so big that we don’t know where to begin to address it. Here’s our big idea: the garden.

Our modern food system is one of the greatest contributors to climate change because it relies on fossil fuels and chemicals to grow, process, distribute, and dispose of food. Agriculture is responsible for 25% of CO2 emissions and 65% of methane emissions. By growing food for you and yours, you can change all this. Here are a few steps you can take, in the garden, on the long walk back towards a balanced and harmonious world:

- Grow your own food – then it won’t have to be trucked or flown in thousands of miles. Alternatively, frequent the farmers market.

- Grow organically – synthetic fertilizers require loads of fossil fuels to be created. You can get the same results with compost and mulch. You’ll feel better, and so will your grandkids.

- Compost – divert yard and food waste, like leaves and apple cores, from trucks that head to the landfill or the incinerator. Keep it local. Turn it into compost instead.

- Install a garden ornament – the clothes line! They’re beautiful, they’re quaint, they dry your clothes real good without using electricity.

- Eat less meat, more veggies – according to the UN, the production of meat leads to vast deforestation, huge energy inefficiencies compared to the production of grains, and loads of greenhouse gas emissions. Save the planet. Go veg.

If we don’t take steps like these now, climate change may drastically affect our gardening by changing weather patterns – making our specific knowledge of local horticulture less and less relevant, increasing droughts and deluges, pests and weeds, and the chances that our plants will die and we can’t do anything about it. The prospects are frightening. Don’t let it happen! Take the leap and grow a garden! If you already have one, do all those things you’ve always been meaning to. It’s good for the soil, it’s good for the soul!