Readings

Michael Pollan: Why Bother, from the NY Times Magazine's Green Issue (on a lighter note, I also loved the interview with Bill Nye about his efforts to live an eco-friendly lifestyle). A quote from Pollan, whose article ends with a call for readers to plant a vegetable garden: "Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it's one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren't great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will."

Wendell Berry: Faustian Economics, in the May issue of Harper's (subscribers only), about peak oil and the culture of "limitlessness." Berry writes: "We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard to make the most of one life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either. Or as one of my best teachers said of people in general: 'They'll never be worth a damn as long as they've got two choices.'"

Nathanael Johnson: The Revolution Will Not Be Pastuerized, in the April issue of Harper's, about the controversy over the raw milk underground. Coincidentally, there's a piece on Culinate by someone who got sick drinking raw milk.