Growing your own

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Seeds of Strange: Beckistan Invades Kunstlerland!

Glenn Beck's latest sponsor, The Survival Seed Bank, is banking on Tea Party paranoia to sell a product it calls the "Full Acre Crisis Garden."


But hang on to your credit card! It turns out that the folks flogging the Full Acre Crisis Garden are nothing but horticultural hucksters, as Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas revealed on Tuesday.


The Survival Seed Bank claims to offer "the peace of mind knowing that if things were to get scary, that you and your family could still eat." But those vacuum-packed seeds "will be dead within the first year," according to Seed Bank Scams, because "seeds need an airtight, but not airless environment...if you take away all the air, you will kill the seeds."


By embracing the Survival Seed Bank as a sponsor, Glenn Beck is treading on peak oil prophet James Howard Kunstler's turf. Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, has been warning us to start growing our own food for years.


But Kunstler's message is anathema to the defenders of American Excess-tionalism. In his forecast for 2010, Kunstler predicts that we'll have to learn to live without "all the trappings of comfort and convenience now taken as entitlements":


...we must return to some traditional American life-ways that we abandoned for the cheap oil life of convenience, comfort, obesity, and social atomization...


...The successful people in America moving forward will be those who attach themselves to cohesive local communities, places with integral local economies and sturdy social networks, especially places that can produce a significant amount of their own food.


Note that for Kunstler, growing your own food is just one component of a revitalized local economy, a renewed civic spirit, and a renouncement of our car-based, consumption-crazed culture.


And he's right. We do urgently need to relocalize our far-flung, fossil fueled food chain. We need to reclaim our farmland, empower a new generation of gardeners and farmers, and invest the capital required to "accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration," in the words of eco-preneur Woody Tasch, founder of the Slow Money Alliance.


But you won't find the answers to these challenges in a sealed plastic pipe from a Beck-sanctioned scam artist.

Glenn would never do something as meaningful as saving seeds and growing his own crops. Unless of course it means MONEY and POWER!