very good article

This article is about Julie Bass, you know the woman who is being harassed and having to go to court for growing veggies in her front yard; and about sustainable living in this day. It is a kinda long article but it has some very good points, the least of which is how the city which is taking Ms. Bass to court, the policy actually EXEMPTS veggie gardens...

ENJOY! I am only going to post SOME of it, so go to the site to read it all.

Sustainable Living as Civil Disobedience


The Rosa Parks of Sustainable Gardening?

Everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks, the African-American civil rights activist who on December 1, 1955, refused to give up her bus seat to accommodate a white passenger. That act of civil disobedience resulted in her arrest, and quickly became one of the defining and most memorable acts of resistance in the Civil Rights Movement.

It might be a stretch to describe Julie Bass as “the Rosa Parks of sustainable gardening”… but not by much. Bass is no activist. She’s just a homeowner living in Oak Park, Michigan, who planted a vegetable garden in her front yard — like the one Michelle Obama planted on the front lawn of the White House, she notes — and who now faces arrest and jail time if she refuses to tear it down.

Why? Because of a city ordinance which reads, “All unpaved portions of the [screening and landscaping] site shall be planted with grass ground cover, shrubbery, or other suitable live plant material.” And a complaint from a neighbor to a city councilman that the front-yard garden looked like a “New Orleans cemetery.”


(really? a "New Orleans cemetery"???? this neighbor must NEVER have seen one! lol!)