Inner City Farmer

I took my son Zephyr to see Wall-E this weekend. Like most kids his age, he concentrated most of his attention on the central love story; the greater message was a bit over his head. But what a message it was: the world is effectively going to hell in a handbasket!

I think I deserve a gold star because my favorite part of the movie also happened to be the most important: the discovery of the plant inside the refrigerator. That simple splash of color introduced into such a bleak landscape came at just the right moment. If I had to stare at those brown mountains of trash any longer, I may have given into Zephyr’s request that I let him run up and down the stairs inside the theater.

For all the power of the movie’s message, I doubt it’s going to change our society’s twisted view of the environment all that much. At the latest G-8 Summit in Japan, the world’s most powerful nations devised an incredibly weak response to the increasingly urgent problem of global warming, establishing a goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050.

“At this rate, by 2050 the world will be cooked and the G-8 leaders will be long forgotten,” said Antonio Hill, spokesman for Oxfam International. “The G-8’s endorsement of a tepid 50 by 50 climate goal leaves us with a 50-50 chance of a climate meltdown. Rather than a breakthrough, the G-8’s announcement on 2050 is another stalling tactic.”

Perhaps instead of sitting around sipping bottled water and patting each other on the back, these so-called world leaders should have spent the afternoon watching a kid’s movie. They might have learned something.

Here’s the toughest part about trying to create a completely sustainable environment in an urban setting: I have neighbors on all four sides of me, and not all of them think the way I do. My neighbor directly to the west of me has caused me the most grief. For a while there we maintained a civil neighborly relationship. We borrowed things from each other. We talked over the fence. We even drank beer together on occasion. But from the outset there were signs that our connection would not grow any deeper.

We simply don’t see the world in the same way. First, he dropped off a container of toxic chemicals on my front porch and suggested I nuke my backyard with it in to get rid of the mosquitoes that plagued us last summer. Then he asked to borrow a piece of particle board to use as a backstop so that he could shoot the opossum that lives in our neighborhood. But the last straw came the night he laughed at me for believing in global warming. I fled his house in horror, but he wouldn’t let it go, emailing me the following morning. “If you have any facts to backup [sic] your ridiculous position, I’m all ears. I know you haven’t a clue, so I’ll respect that and leave it where it is. And now I’ll leave you with a simple thought… the polar ice caps on Mars are melting at the same rate as on earth, yet no CO2 emissions, SUV’s, evil rich, or coal-fired power plants exist on that planet. Ask one of your egghead experts about that one.”

Curious to discover what the hell he was talking about, I researched the matter and found that he was quoting from a story in National Geographic about Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, who attributed the simultaneous warming of Earth and Mars to changes in the sun’s heat output. What my neighbor didn’t mention was that Abdussamatov’s radical theory was quickly refuted by every leading climate scientist in the world, including Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University. “His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” Wilson said. “And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.” I didn’t speak to this neighbor for six months.

We have since reestablished a neighborly relationship, but every time I smile at him across the fence it’s through clenched teeth. We not only see the world differently, evidently we speak different languages too. Last week, he told me he wanted to chop down a tree that was on his property but hung between our houses. His reasoning was that the opossum used the tree to climb on to his roof. I told him I didn’t think he should do it, that I wasn’t an advocate of cutting down any trees, and certainly not one as beautiful as this one. It was a Texas redbud, which sports beautiful pink flowers each spring. I used to enjoy staring at it from my kitchen window, but I won’t be doing that any longer. Yesterday at 6:30 in the morning, my neighbor destroyed it with a chain saw.