Woman Faces Jail Time for Planting Organic Vegetable Garden

By Brad Tuttle
A Michigan woman is being charged with a misdemeanor offense and is facing up to 93 days in jail. Her crime? Planting a vegetable garden-in her own yard. Her front yard, that is.

Like many consumers today, Julie Bass, of Oak Park, Mich., appreciates the taste and healthfulness of organic vegetables, but isn't much of a fan of how much going organic costs at the store. So, like many health-minded consumers, she planted a vegetable garden on her property.

But Bass chose to take the unusual step of installing neatly arranged raised beds of vegetables in her front, rather than back, yard. Bass explained her unorthodox garden location (and showed off how neat and organized it is, for those curious) to a local TV station:

 "We thought it'd be really cool to do it so the neighbors could see. The kids love it. The kids from the neighborhood all come and help," she said.

Front yard or back, it's her property, and she's allowed to do with it what she pleases, right? Wrong, say the local authorities, citing local codes that require front yards to have only "suitable" live plant material. City planners say that vegetables, for some reason, don't qualify for the standard, even though they are certainly alive, and certainly are planted. To some, this sort of code enforcement makes the restrictions against drying clothes on a clothesline seem reasonable.

View the Original article

America's Environmental Garden Spot: Would You Believe Manhattan?

What's the greenest place in America? If you answered something like the granola-crunchy, Rocky Mountain-high town of Boulder, you'd be wrong. If you guessed the sea breezes and warm sunlight of Santa Barbara, you'd be wrong again. The greenest place in America is almost devoid of nature - the buildings outnumber the trees - and the air isn't all that great. But what it has is density and efficiency - the twin qualities that ultimately define green in the global warming era. Applying those standards, the greenest place in America is New York City - specifically, the overcrowded, overpriced and sometimes overwrought island of Manhattan, which has a per-capita greenhouse gas footprint less than 30% that of the national average.

It's that density - the sheer number of people living in such a small area, often literally on top of each other - that makes Manhattan, and New York City as a whole, so green. Manhattan's population density is 800 times the national average. Density comes with negatives, certainly - small living spaces, air pollution, lots and lots of concrete - but it also enables amazing efficiencies. More than 80% of Manhattanites travel to work by public transit, by bike or on foot - compared to an average of about 8% everywhere else in the country. The vertical apartment buildings that Manhattanites live in are far more energy-efficient than single-dwelling housing in the suburbs. "Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams," wrote David Owen in his 2009 book Green Metropolis. "But in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility."

View the Original article