Lawns?

In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan suggests that the best way to personally reduce your carbon footprint is to rip up your lawn and plant a garden there instead. It clears up any worry about which produce is the best purchase in terms of carbon footprints. And it also addresses concerns about whether "carbon saving" acts such as biking are negated by the carbon necessary to sustain our resulting increased food intake (This issue was also recently discussed in this post from http://benjacat.blogspot.com/). You don't have to worry about the energy expenditure of gardening causing you to eat more, because the food is right in front of you.

Pollan also argues that our lives and careers are so specialized these days that we're disturbingly removed from the origins of the food and energy that sustains us. Intensive gardening reconnects us with this.

Of course, one might quickly become the pariah of one's neighborhood for ripping up one's lawn. And this project would also require a lot of work. But wouldn't it also save a lot of trips to the grocery store? And don't we mow, water and even till our lawns anyway? And wouldn't the produce be the freshest you could possibly find?

Ripping up one's lawn might at first be seen as shameful, but eventually the waste of land and soil required for a lawn could be seen as the real shame.