where's the outrage?

In honor of Michael Pollan, I just spent a sunny hour in my garden. It was so nice! The sun was out, the roses are starting to bloom; I chatted with a neighbor over the fence; there may even be hope for my tomatoes.

Like most people I know, I'm a big Pollan fan, inspired by how much he has single-handedly done to encourage us to eat more wisely. Still, when given the amazing platform of a front-page story in today's New York Times Magazine, I cannot imagine how he couldn't dedicate a single paragraph to highlighting how much our governments need to do to combat climate change, like yesterday. He even disparages this idea, in defense of his point, saying "to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking -- passive, delegated, dpendent for solutions on specialists -- that helped get us into this mess in the first place." Like Voltaire, instead, he urges us to tend to our gardens.

I do agree we all need to pay more attention to the way we're consuming. Yet I can't see how leaders, experts, laws, money and grand schemes aren't going to be the main priority, and, like yesterday, to give us any prayer of avoiding snowballing climate disasters. Climate change is an emergency, one that will require diplomats dealing with China, enormous investments in technology, construction crews putting up windfarms, local legislators cracking down on utilities, draconian campaign finance reform, and much, much more. And I wish Pollan hadn't used his bully pulpit to dismiss this reality.