NOTE PAD WRITING THAT HAD A MIND OF ITS OWN.

Looks like my stuff, and I don't know how it opened on my desktop. 10/31/17

"Laggards are what you are largely going to have to work with..."

I see it that way too. I share many of their characteristics--lazy, incurious, ignorant, poor--and I try to adapt my practice to account for this.

At some point, nurturing food plants must be like nurturing biological beings. Maybe it's somewhat like sex. Generally speaking, one isn't taught how to do it. Some do it better than others. But what I want is for people to do it...with no one standing over them to insist on HOW they should do it. So I'm an anarchist gardner. I have to trust my instincts. I'm a part of nature, and what gives me joy might well make plants happy too. My strategy is not to learn more from others (although I'm very open to what anyone VOLUNTEERS to teach me) but to get more in touch with my own enjoyment.

I've been gardening more or less steadily for around 30 years. I still know next to nothing about how to garden "correctly" along any of the relatively correct alternative lines. I have experienced the occasional flash in the pan success, but my persistent failures seem more due to repressing my drives than to anything else. For some reason, I feel a little better about this year's process than ever before. It seems that no-till, based on constant layering of food scraps (absolutely easy) with manure (from nearby horse pasture), the occasional bag of *anything*--compost, topsoil, yard dirt, whatever that plants can grow in, urine, rooted-out weeds with the dirt clods facing upwards--might have a reasonable chance "success." Prayers due. It is more like art than science for me (if one can even separate them).

So I got a bit carried away writing this. What I'm suggesting is that, when it come to gardening, the perfect is the enemy of the good-enough. Let people attempt to grow food any which way they choose. Mandate gray water outlets for every household. Mandate water catchment for every household. Sort of. Provide tax credits for those who comply, but don't punish those who don't or can't. That would be a very good role for government, and something within the realm of the doable. Provide food-growing classes for those who are inclined to learn that way. Do whatever is feasible and inexpensive in that regard...like nudging those already doing this to do more.

For something like BAU to continue longer than it might, I suggest universal volunteerism. It's not hard. Everybody will do a little cleaning and tidying of the public space, including malls. Don't punish the ones who don't; just encourage and thank the ones who do. There is much, much more that can be done that is likely to be enjoyed by a lot of people, many of them so-called laggards. There simply needs to be some vision and leadership to replace the absence of it now prevailing.

Certainly, a great upsurge of self-reliance among the many won't be good enough to keep everybody alive, but that's where the business world (whatever is used for money), as long as it learns to function within the limits of the available, could do some good. At least, in the short run.