Shades of green: It’s not easy to be eco
It’s not that easy bein’ green, even if you’re not an ambitious amphibian being sexually harassed by an overbearing workplace bully. (Miss Piggy, the #metoo movement is coming for you.)
Even when you’re green-fingered, it’s not that easy bein’ green. Last weekend, my aunt and I had a polite standoff over a single-use plastic shopping bag. A dedicated recycler, she was down to her last one and was loath to hand it over so I could wrap it around the soggy clutch of elderberry cuttings I’d just hacked off a bush in her Mangawhai garden.
We’re running low on plastic bags in our house, too. We get our groceries delivered, and as those food parcels now come neatly packaged in brown paper bags, I’ve taken to stockpiling plastic bread bags. I’ll need something to pick up the dog poo at the beach this summer.
Speaking of summer, it’s not that easy bein’ green when you’re sprawled in a sun lounger with a good book and a better cocktail. I don’t care if it looks uncouth, but I’m virtue-signalling now that I’d rather gluttonously gulp down my luscious libations than sip them through a soggy paper straw.
It’s not that easy bein’ green, but you can at least make a meal of it. I recently interviewed Suzy Amis Cameron – actor, environmentalist, part-time Kiwi and wife of Titanic and Avatar film director James Cameron – about her new book OMD: The simple, plant-based program to save your health and save the planet (Murdoch Books, $36.99). Her motto? You can change the world simply by going vegan for ‘‘One Meal a Day’’.
Cameron argues that simply by switching from one meat- or dairy-based meal to one plant-based meal a day, we can slash our water and carbon footprint by as much as 25 per cent, while also losing weight, looking more radiant (she certainly does), saving money, reducing medical bills, eating delicious food, heating up our sex lives and, ‘‘oh yeah – saving the planet’’.
Best of all, you can do all that while stuffing your face – ecoconsciously of course – with chocolate lamingtons so good they’ve been officially sanctioned by Her
Majesty The Queen (or at least her constitutional proxy).
Our Governor General, Dame Patsy Reddy, has been a vegan for five years and, whenever possible, she offers a plant-based menu option to guests and visiting dignitaries at Government House. According to OMD, around 40 per cent of her guests take the vegan option.
In OMD, Dame Pasty puts on her pinny and shares a three-course menu with an heirloom tomato consomme entree, a main course of parsnip, hazelnut and pear pithivier (that’s a posh veggie pie), and dark chocolate lamingtons with whipped coconut cream and blackberry sorbet for pud.
There’s no denying that growing – and eating – more vegetables is a small and achievement step towards sustainability. Or is it? According to an opinion piece by Happy Cow Milk Company founder Glen Herud on Stuff this week, growing peas for Impossible Burgers is apparently worse for our waterways than intensive dairying.
‘‘Many people will be surprised to know that market gardening leaches three times more nitrogen than dairy farming,’’ he wrote.
Though Herud’s sources were vague – from ‘‘studies I have read’’ to ‘‘papers out there’’ – he claimed that while dairy farms populated with peeing bovines leach an average of 60kg nitrogen per hectare, cropping can leach as much as 170kg per hectare.
Fair cop, say some horticulturists, though they are at least cognisant that change is coming. The customer is always right, and if enough of us want sustainably-produced, high-welfare, low-pollution, pesticide-free, carbonneutral food, then that’s what growers and farmers will have to supply.
But it’s not that easy bein’ green. Just ask boutique Clevedon commercial tomato growers Anthony and Angela Tringham, who have unwittingly put the planet ahead of profits with their agroecology initiative.
As the Curious Croppers, the couple supply vine-ripened, bumblebeepollinated heirloom tomatoes to highend restaurants. They’re also obsessed with beneficial insects. (I’m not kidding; Anthony showed up at my garden last year with a plastic vial of teeny-tiny Tamarixia trioaze to let loose. This wee parasitic wasp is a biological enemy of the tomato-potato psyllid, a pest that breached our borders a decade ago and makes growing organic potatoes and tomatoes nigh impossible in New Zealand.)
The Tringhams are determined to find eco-friendly alternatives to insecticides so, earlier this year, they surrounded their hothouses with blooming borders of purple tansy and buckwheat to create biodiverse habitats for humanity.
Guess what happened? Instead of doing their jobs, all the bumblebees they bring in to pollinate their tomatoes buggered off from their hothouse hives in favour of an orgy in the flower garden. Their yields are dramatically down, even if their share of warm fuzzies is up.
It’s not easy bein’ green, even when you try.