Update: White House Vegetable Garden

According to a release by Slow Food USA, Michelle Obama has broken ground on the new vegetable garden at the White House.

She worked with a group of 26 area fifth graders on Saturday, March 21 (the first day of spring) to remove sod from the area they are planting.

White House lawn may soon become edible

According to an article in the Telegraph over 85,000 people have signed a petition encouraging the Obama's to start an organic vegetable garden on the White House grounds.

The petition is led by Roger Doiron, the founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International. Doiron is working to localize food systems and his non-profit spans 100 countries with 10,000 members. He has also written articles appearing in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune and the Washington Post.

Doiron intends the garden to be a large project, big enough to fulfill the vegetable needs for the entire White House, with any surplus going to local food pantries. There is a history of raising food in the White House grounds, though the last vegetable garden was Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden during World War II.

The petition is available to sign online at www.eattheview.org. It will be delivered with a package of heirloom seeds, ready for planting.

Full text of petition below:

We, the undersigned, are petitioning President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama to plant a large organic food garden or Victory Garden on the First Lawn with the produce going to the White House kitchen and local food pantries. The White House is "America's House" and should serve as a model at a time of economic and environmental crisis. In planting this garden, the Obamas would not be breaking with tradition, but returning to it (the White House has had food gardens before) and leading by personal example on global challenges such as economic security, food security, climate change, healthcare policy and energy independence.

Senate to look at global warming

Harry Reid announced last night that the Senate will be looking at energy and climate change this year. He expects that they will begin talks on the energy bill in the next several weeks and hopes that they will take on climate change this summer.

The energy bill is headed by Jeff Bingaman (D. New Mexico), the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. If passed, utilities will be required to source 4% of their energy from renewable sources by 2011. That number will increase to 20% over the next decade.

There are not currently many details about how the Senate plans to take on climate change, but we hope they will take a comprehensive look at the situation and discuss ways to reduce not only carbon emissions, but methane and other chemical emissions as well. Specifically, we would like to see attention paid to user emissions (automobiles, aerosols, etc.), power plant emissions, methane emissions from dairy and meat production, and the energy cost of new building.