Potato Vines and Other Things that Don't Grow in Paradise
(Page 3 of 3)
October 2005
By Elizabeth Dwoskin, Utne.com
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It is easier to criticize what is present than to imagine what is absent. And what was absent was not what is both largely absent and taken for granted as such in New York -- the color green -- but a certain attitude that relegates that color as merely decorative. People in Florida like to say, "I love the weather," because that is what the word environment means for most of us: nice weather and sunlight year-round. We can love the weather, and even the green, but it does not stop us from draining or bulldozing or cutting it away as the population grows.
I think invisibility is a consequence of reckless suburban development -- which causes most people to stay in air-conditioned cars and houses in the clement weather, and progressives like myself to give up on Florida as a wasteland rather than seeing it, as I do now, as a piece of scorched earth needing attention and care. Gardening in Minnesota, smelling dirt and fresh air and learning the names of plants, restored, perhaps for the first time, a kind of sensuous visibility in me. In all my years at an Ivy League university in New York City, with its talk of justice and other abstractions, it was that visceral feeling of gardening that caused me to look homeward, empathetically.
In spite of concerns over increasing homogenization in American culture, there is a persistent regionalism that is far more subtle, but not less real. For how do all these impressions conspire to influence, even inspire, newcomers and those that grow up in cities like Minneapolis to make conscious choices to live more environmentally conscious lifestyles? For me, that inspiration is as simple and as complicated as being joyfully surprised at the number of gardens in town. Without it, one is left with a limited imaginary space, choosing between nice or boring weather, between pesticide-filled lawns and weeds.
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