My Garden Does What?

A peek at certain climate narratives and our relationship with land.

Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

We are going to depart from topics around self-growth, family, and spell making, and turn towards our environment and soil.

How would you feel if I told you that your little home garden is now being counted among the culprits that are contributing to climate change? You would probably look at me like I was nuts. I know I would. But if you Google, “Is growing your own food bad for the environment?” This is the first response that now comes up.

“According to a 2024 study led by the University of Michigan, growing your own vegetables at home can be six times more polluting than conventional agriculture. The study found that every serving of homegrown or urban-farmed fruits and vegetables contributes nearly a pound of Earth-warming carbon dioxide to the global climate.”

captured from Google.

Now, the next result in this search immediately counters the top’s finding by saying that, “When you grow your own food, you eliminate the need for transportation and distribution, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Additionally, the carbon footprint associated with producing and transporting food is also reduced.”

So which is it?

Anyone who has ever grown a garden knows it takes time and resources to do it.

I grow herbs, flowers, and couple of cherry tomato plants each summer in containers. I get a few salads and fresh seasoning for the season and beyond from harvesting and drying them for the fall and winter. My mother, on the other hand, runs a large community garden with her husband and multiple members. They get a surplus which not only feeds all the garden members and their families, but the also often have bushels of vegetables which get donated to our local food bank.

I can’t help but for my hackles to rise when I read that now gardening is now getting the “finger pointed” at it when searching for who to blame for “climate change”.

Now, I am not a climate change denier. Weather patterns in recent years are becoming increasing more volatile and unpredictable. Temperatures are rising in some places while others, like Giza where the Great Pyramid and Sphinx reside, have received snow for the first time in over 120 years. It is undeniable that our climate is changing.

What is subject to speculation is why?

There are some components of the climate "threat" narrative that I find highly questionable.

It seems that all too often the “answers” to the climate "issue" are being relegated to us, as private citizen, living with increased restrictions, while these larger corporate "offenders" are supported in operating without any regulations.

Summit leaders like to point their fingers at cows and personal vehicle usage as being the things that are creating greenhouse gases, and driving up the the global temperature. We, as citizens and consumers, are supposed to internalize this guilt for using our cars to drive to work, pick up our kids, and run errands like purchasing exorbitantly priced (not to mention poisoned) food for our family. Meanwhile how many of these “leaders” are enjoying the use of luxury yachts and private jets? Vehicles that consume many times the fuel that your personal vehicle does. But clearly we, the peasants, are the problem.

We are also the ones who are paying for the “fixes”. Our personal taxes get increased to offset the costs of "changes" that need to be made to address climate change, meanwhile none of the industries which actually produce the most pollution even get named, let alone fined for the way they do business. Industries such as fast fashion, the logging industry, companies that produce palm oil, and manufacture seed oils. These newer factories producing substitute "meat products’ produce far more toxic waste than cows chewing cud in a field ever could.

I am not saying that big agriculture or farming is healthy for us. It is not. Keeping animals in pens most of their lives is unnatural and produces health issues amongst them that they do not get when they are “free range”. The truth of the matter is, however, that these big corporations are buying out the small industries and ranchers and they simply can’t keep up. Are there regulations enacted on these people who are essentially forming monopolies and buying up millions of acres of land? Say what, who? No. Of course not. And any land that they own or lease is subject to their “operating” procedures.

Meanwhile the amount of land that is paved over as tress and foliage are removed is the highest its ever been in our known history. Paved areas, like large cities, are on average 22 degrees hotter than forest or country areas. So, not that has nothing to do with the planet heating up, I’m sure. It’s clearly the cows fault, and now your home gardens as well. (Gasps and clutches pearls!)

Somehow we seem to have forgotten that plants, themselves, absorb CO2 and produce oxygen. And though it might seem obvious to anyone with a 4th grade science education that planting more trees would be a good way to offset carbon emissions, a certain billionaire (Bill Gates) has been cited wanting to tear down trees and bury them. Why? Well, he has a new machine that can “suck carbon dioxide out of the air”, and naturally, he’s “in bed” with big oil on this one. And it can apparently “do the work of 40 million trees”. So, we don’t need those pesky rooted beings anymore. Bill has us covered. Ugh, anyone else remember “The Lorax”? Killing trees bad. Letting tiny-pricked billionaires run the world, also bad. Putting our “faith” in inorganic solutions to problems that have been caused by an inorganic mindset… I’m starting to feel like a broken record.

So what is good?

Putting our hands in the dirt tends to feel pretty damn good! Respecting our Mamma and forming a reciprocal partnership with She Who Gives us Life…well, that feels like a pretty good idea as well.

To return to our initial point about home gardens: If all of what I shared above were not enough, the University of Michigan has now come out with a study that cites small gardening operations as having a higher carbon footprint than big agricultural operations. The "efficacy" of the larger operations is cited in the “efficient use of water and pesticides”. *Side note: in many places collecting rain water to use on your lawn or garden is illegal. And please note they were sure to include “the use of pesticides” as adding to the efficiency of large farming.

So, if you want poison free food you will soon be SOL (shit out of luck).

As deterrents for home gardening, such issues as “soil depletion” were cited as negative effects. Well, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black! Commercial farming has utterly depleted the soil of its nutrients over the last 60 years. There’s nothing left as far as nutrients go, but if we want to take a plot of land, fortify it, restore it, and load it up with life-giving organisms and bacteria—we’re the bad guys.

It seems curious to me, too, that home gardening did not come up on the climate police’s radar until post covid lockdown when it is said that as many as 1 out of 3 people began gardening, or engaged in some sort of home outdoor project starting in 2020.

Gardening not only gave people something to do, but it also gave them a little bit more happiness.” —Benjamin Campbell, College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences

Now, as people return to work, it’s unlikely that everyone who started up horticultural hobbies will be able to sustain them. However, all you have to do is look into any social media platform’s video section to see the rise in popularity of people who are homesteading, homeschooling, growing their own food, and doing all kinds of clever DIY stuff, including talking about herbs and natural remedies.

Not to be a conspiricist or anything, but could it possibly be that this rise in independent thought, and subsequent practices around food and (homegrown) medicine, is what is getting the “establishment’s” panties all in twist? “What? They don’t need us? Worse! They see through us!” (Release a long coporocratic hiss!)

Sorry dudes. We don’t need you, and we absolutely are starting to—in masses—see right through you.

For thousands of years we have been more “hands on” with our food. The soil contains microbes that have been proven to alleviate depressions. It is said that if you hold a seed under your tongue for 7 seconds when that plant grows it will have genetically adapted to provide additional nutrients for which you are deficient. That is how intimate our relationship is with growing things.

We don’t need poisonous practices, regulations, machines, and actual toxins to be part of our future when it comes to the land and our food. We need to get in touch with who we are, where we come from, and what it means to deeply be part of the land, and in conscious relationship with the planet.

Androids need not apply.

Lotsa love,

~Justice