True Conservation

I'm overwhelmed. I knew that the "war effort" was different in the World War II era, but I had no idea that it was like this.

Shouldn't we be doing these types of things NOW?

Money quote:

The most famous symbol of this wartime conservation ethos was the victory garden. Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national "Food Fights for Freedom" campaign.

By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation's vegetables--freeing the nation's farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia. In The Garden Is Political, a 1942 volume of popular verse, poet John Malcolm Brinnin acclaimed these "acres of internationalism" taking root in U.S. cities. Although suburban and rural gardens were larger and usually more productive, some of the most dedicated gardeners were inner-city children. With the participation of the Boy Scouts, trade unions, and settlement houses, thousands of ugly, trash-strewn vacant lots in major industrial cities were turned into neighborhood gardens that gave tenement kids the pride of being self-sufficient urban farmers. In Chicago, 400,000 schoolchildren enlisted in the "Clean Up for Victory" campaign, which salvaged scrap for industry and cleared lots for gardens.

It seems to me that when people - on BOTH sides of the proverbial aisle - talk about supporting the troops, and then drive away in a mammoth SUV that guzzles fossil fuels, isn't that being a bit hypocritical? After September 11, 2001, when president Bush told Americans to continue to go about our lives normally, I think he did the military - and our country in general - a great disservice. Americans SHOULD be sacrificing more than the lives of our men and women in uniform.

We should be planting victory gardens. We should be carpooling. We should be recycling anything and everything that we can. We should be trading in those obnoxious SUVs for smaller more fuel-efficient vehicles - or better yet riding a bike.

If you hate Al Gore and hated An Inconvenient Truth even more then don't think of doing these things as saving Mother Earth. Think of it as saving the life of a person who is stationed in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Hell - just take a moment and THINK.

Head Nod: Andrew Sullivan

filed in: Afghanistan, Environment, Gasoline, Iraqshare: