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You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out thirty years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems—the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do—actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself—that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit—will you get a load of that zucchini?!—suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. Pollan is the author, most recently, of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. His previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Michael Pollan’s Web site is at www.michaelpollan.com.

CHAPTER TWO

A Way Forward

Letter from the Future

VICKI ROBIN

Dear Vicki,

Hello from 2030, from your eighty-five-year-old self. We just got the intertime communications system up and running, and every one of us alive gets to write one free letter to our younger self. There are so many restrictions on what we can say. I can’t tell you exactly what is happening. I can’t try to “change history.” After 2,500 words they cut me off. You can’t write me back. Rules! As you can see, the bureaucrats are still with us, but I understand their reasoning. We’ve made it into a very decent future but had to cross quite a desert to get here. Out of pure love we’d all like to spare you the suffering and change the past, but the GWC (Global Wisdom Council) says that if we eliminate the stripping-away, we might damage the peace we’ve made with living here.

Even though I can’t steer you (as if you would ever let anyone do that!), I can shine a light on the choices you are already making—sort of like, “Nudge nudge, hint hint, step there.” I can’t tell you about the stunning innovations and twists of fate that got us to a fairly decent 2030. I can only talk to you about what you already know.

If you are about to hit delete, thinking this is a hoax, please at least read this quick and dirty key to your future: less, local, and love. Use less, live locally, and love other people, because they are what see you through.

Hint One: Save—and Make—Energy

You made a good choice in 2008 to do an Airplane Fast and not fly for a year. The irony