why bother?

Pradip Malde, the photography professor who lives next to the garden on Old Farm, has an excellent blog over at malde.sewanee.edu. He clearly shares many of our concerns in a post entitled question everything: why bother.

I teach in a small college town, where the administration of the university has taken some sustainability initiatives (like changing lightbulbs - the same thing that Pollan finds so alarming), but they are mostly on paper. It does not, for instance, have an effective municipal recycling program in place, spends thousands of dollars a month on cosmetic grounds keeping, and just this last weekend, served up over a thousand meals in cardboard and plastic, which as far as I know, were then trashed. On the other hand, community and students are doing some extraordinary things by establishing organic community farms, starting up small recycling programs, and establishing ‘eco’-houses, among many small efforts. Why bother? Read Pollan’s article.

The article Pradip references by Michael Pollan (author of Omnivore's Deliemna) can be found over at the NYT