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A New Way to Celebrate Earth Day
How taking care of your land might be enough today
Nikko tucked the watermelon seedling into the dirt and announced, “We’ll call it the People’s Garden.” I thought of all the people who pass our front lawn every day — the young woman with the straight back leading her doberman pincher around the block on a short leash, the older biracial couple who joked that I probably shouldn’t bury my husband in my new raised beds, the ex-military vegans who couldn’t bear to kill resident rodents around their property and instead took them to the desert to run free, the former chaplain kindly guiding her diabetic blind dog around the block.
“Yeah,” I said, tossing some compost into the clay dirt, and hoping that this former dried grass patch called a lawn would one day feed someone. “I like that name. The People’s Garden it is.”
Today is Earth Day
In my University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) writing classes, our climate coalition is doing in a teach-in (check out this interview I did with awesome plastic pollution activist Jackie Nunez). The cross-campus UC community is participating in a rally for campuses to divorce from fossil fuels. There are Earth Day parties, protests, plantings, educational series, and more across the planet. But in real time today, I’m putting the…
