Our cold, wet spring in the Pacific Northwest has taken a turn towards warmer days and I have finally had some time in my garden. I drew on my week of planting and deciding what to grow for this writing exercise.
What are you growing?
Take some time to think about what you are growing in your life, literally or figuratively. Maybe start by writing a list or taking inventory on what new plants are growing along your daily walk? Maybe you have a large garden or are growing some cherry tomatoes on the porch? Start writing and see what happens.
Camille Dungy’s new book SOIL: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden came out this week and I am so excited to read it.
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.
Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
Finally, in our conversation I shared this recent article by the Washington Post Climate Coach, Michael Coren. In this post he responds to the question, “Does living a vegan lifestyle make any difference at all, especially since few people live this way?” We haven’t touched too much on food and farming yet in Environmentalists Anonymous and in our meeting we talked about the ways that diet can represent our values and possibly influence our individual contributions to climate change through dietary emissions.
Coren’s conclusion was fairly neutral and doable. “To zoom out, if you think there’s not much positive climate impact without a vegan or vegetarian diet, it isn’t true. What’s more accurate is thinking about the small changes you can make to have substantial impact.” Based on recent research, Coren suggests:
Substituting just 10 percent of daily caloric intake from beef and processed meats with fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes or even seafood had more than just profound health effects. It also slashed the carbon footprint of the average American by about one-third.
For our final writing prompt, we dove into this highly personal question of what and how we choose to eat. How do we write about food and climate change in a creative way? Do you follow a specific type of diet (vegan, paleo, etc.) and what does that label mean to you?
Our next session is May 24th from 12-1 pm.
Environmentalist Anonymous meets the 2nd and 4th Wednesday at Village Books from 12-1 pm. This is free and open to the public. I will email a synopsis of our gathering and post on my substack page, Her Deepest Ecologies, for easier access (no subscription required to see writing group updates).