I used to be one of those people who would weed and weed and weed. I liked there to be so much space between plants that you could easily see how hard I had worked on that weeding! I liked the look of the piles and piles of mulch that I had spent hours spreading. I edged every time we mowed the lawn (with a reel mower, of course).

Totally anal, you know?

But I have grown a lot as a gardener and now I can even say that my laziness is totally good for the planet and its inhabitants.

Right now if you walked behind my house, you might notice that the persons who tend this yard aren’t anal … at all.

When I sit and have a glass of wine with friends in the evening, I have to resist getting up and chopping things down. Though, as time goes by, my resistance takes a whole lot less effort.

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Ask me where I am from, and more than likely, I will say Lake Erie. Or the Great Lakes. I love Pennsylvania, for sure, but I feel I have more in common with someone from Toronto or Chicago than someone from Philadelphia (though I love that city and lived there many years of my youth).

I also love central Pennsylvania, being a Penn State girl.  But the hills and valleys feel somehow wrong to me. My eyes crave the flat land, as it reaches toward a low and long horizon.

And I truly feel starved for the horizon that is a Great Lake. For those of you who have never seen a Great Lake, it is no simple lake. It would look like the ocean to you. No land in sight. Rolling waves.

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Somebody pointed out something that at first seemed very obvious to me today, and it’s something that most environmentalists miss — something very important to the whole “green” movement.

She pointed out that people aren’t going to change if they don’t have good jobs, access to health care, and enough to eat.

But then I thought of all the wealthy people in the world who aren’t about to change either and her point — though a great one — started to lose its ability to hold water.

I wonder: what is the difference between people willing to sacrifice a little to do their part in terms of climate change and those who refuse to believe there is even a problem, much less one worth doing anything about?

That leads me to wonder about the people I know who claim to be environmentalists and still drive a car to work…two miles away…by themselves.

The disconnect is utterly breathtaking: where does it come from?

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