Genius Sightings

Sometimes even an extreme gardener like myself gets excited about something else, ya know, and might like to pass it on.  And I pay the rent here, so I can write about the World Cup if I want and who’s to stop me?  Or I can tell you about the rush I’ve gotten lately just hearing from some really smart thinkers.

I do thank the gods for Bill Moyers and wish there were more of him.  His "Faith and Reason" series is brilliant, I tell you.  They’re all here, transcripts and possibly videos, too, but my favorite is Margaret Atwood explaining the heresy of believing in the elected and the not elected, and lots more in a mental and verbal communion with Moyers that’s pretty trippy.  In the same episode Martin Amis takes us inside the mind of Muhammed Atta and Islamism itself.

Marion Nestle was introduced to me by "The Charlie Rose Show", which I tape religiously and watch when I’m on the treadmill.  Hey, whatever works.  Anyway, Nestle is a scholar in the field of nutrition who’s studied food politics, food safety, and the effects of food marketing on health.  Her new book is What to Eat and I want to read it because she’s an academic who knows how to write for the public, and because she’s so sensible.  Sensible people don’t make very good television, ya know.

But there’s more.

And another guest of Charlie’s was a new name to me, Peter Beinart. His resume is really wonky but he was an awfully exciting speaker. Maybe that’s because the subject of his book is near and dear to my heart: The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.  Whew!  If ever a title could stand on its own, that’s it, so I’ll just say I wanted every Democrat in the U.S. to hear what he was saying.

These recent encounters with really smart and thoughtful folks remind me of others in that tiny group, like the garden/botany/food writer Michael Pollan.  Second Nature is clearly a favorite among gardening bloggers, and I also recommend his Botany of Desire.  Reading him always gives me those "aha" moments, so I keep coming back for more and I’ve already reserved his latest at the library – Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  I especially like it when Pollan forces us liberals to rethink our assumptions. Well, I don’t like it at the time, but usually after I’ve calmed down.  In Omnivore it’s the unthinking way we buy organic foods, thinking they’re necessarily "green".

The other writer I’m reminded of is Jared Diamond for his Guns, Germs and Steel and then Collapse.  Lordy, imagine if history lessons included why societies have failed. Instead of memorizing dates of battles and regime changes, we’d learn to watch out for environmental degradation, since it’s the most frequent cause of downfall.  Collapse is actually pretty scary reading, like seeing "An Inconvenient Truth."

Ooh, what a downer to end on -  I’d better get back out there in the garden.  Not today, mind you – at 100 degrees – but soon, sometime before fall, I’m sure.

Oh, wait.  Here’s a better ending.  Has anything outside your garden juiced you up lately that you want to tell us about?  Just keep it clean, you guys.