Jeremy Irons has played some serious douchebags: Scar, Claus von Bülow, Simon Gruber, the ultimate caricature of the 1% in Margin Call, the cauldron in Once Upon a Halloween (oh, did you miss that one?). The point is, it’s a little disconcerting to see him tromping around a Lebanese dump in rubber boots and a sad little straw hat, empathizing with a Palestinian refugee who picks trash for a living. But just because he’s so good at being villainous onscreen doesn’t mean that he can’t have his concerned celebrity cause movie. And the cause Irons chose is garbage.

Trashed, a documentary directed by Candida Brady and executive-produced by and starring Irons (with a score by Vangelis), looks at the toxic effects an endless worldwide buildup of waste has on our health and environment. To be honest, I kind of wish such a powerhouse of film-industry talent had tackled a slightly more cutting-edge or original issue -- I mean, Jeremy Irons’ voice over a Vangelis theme is a surefire way to lend gravity to any situation, and it just seems a bit of a waste (ahem) to use such drama to approach what I see as a pretty broad, old-school environmental issue: We throw too much shit away! We should recycle instead! Yeah, and did you know there’s a hole in the ozone layer?

Petaluma Avenue Homes, an affordable cohousing community in Sebastopol, Calif. (Photo by Schemata Workshop.)

Back in the good old days, I’m told, people lived in neighborhoods where they looked out for each other. They had potlucks, kept an eye on each other’s kids, loaned out lawnmowers and cups of sugar. Each home was its family’s castle, but the instinct to participate in a caring community transcended the temptation to isolate in private houses.

Apparently we’ve strayed so far from that norm over the last half-century or so that it now takes a conscious effort to recreate it. That’s one way to view cohousing, a collaborative housing model imported to the United States from Denmark in the 1970s, in which “residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods.” In the approximately 125 cohousing communities in the U.S., residents share chores and responsibilities, come together for meals and other activities in a common house, and make decisions based on consensus. It’s a conscious way of living designed to encourage social interaction and investment in the greater good.

Sounds nice, right? A little crunch-tastic, maybe, but nice. And the opportunities for making this type of housing eco-friendly are many. But there’s one problem: What sounds at first like a good way to save money -- sharing play space, a group kitchen, etc. -- is every bit as expensive as traditional housing, meaning that it's out of reach for many people who could benefit from it.

At Plantation Farm Camp in Sonoma County, Calif., kids help with farm chores alongside traditional camp activities.

Ah, summer camp. Hiking, canoeing, and capture-the-flag, followed by meals of beans and franks or overcooked spaghetti -- it’s the stuff childhood memories are made of. But at some camps around the country, weeding, composting, and looking after livestock supplement the usual arts, crafts, and games, and dinner is braised lamb shank, polenta, and grilled vegetables.

Every year, parents sink thousands of dollars into intensive music, sports, or academic summer programs in the hopes of sculpting their children into perfect Ivy League candidates. Farm-based summer camps offer specialization of a different stripe, getting kids outside and down in the dirt to experience the meaning of “farm to table” firsthand -- and perhaps cultivating a few future farmers in the process.

“It seems to fill a need people see in their kids’ education,” says Meghan Ryan, education programs manager at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. “Kids are so scheduled, but this is something very different and special.”

Dennis Derryck, founder of Corbin Hill Farm.

The same week I interviewed an author who dismissed local food as nothing but “a niche product for upper-crust consumers,” I learned about a project in New York City that directly challenges that assumption. The folks behind Harlem-based Corbin Hill Farm don’t see sustainably grown local produce as a passing craze for the foodie elite; on the contrary, they’re figuring out a way to make it accessible to low-income communities on a large scale.

Founder and longtime Harlem resident Dennis Derryck has long been aware that people in his community and the nearby South Bronx don’t have much access to good, fresh food. But when it came to solutions, as he saw it, “all these small and beautiful things had very little impact. School gardens, rooftop gardens, educational programs -- at the end of the program, where was the parent or the kid supposed to go?”

Derryck saw promise of more lasting change in the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model. But a traditional CSA design -- in which members essentially invest in a local farm by paying a large share at the beginning of the season -- wouldn’t work for neighborhoods where many residents live on food stamps and struggle to make rent on time. So Derryck tweaked the model to make sense for low-income consumers: Corbin Hill shareholders pay only a week in advance, can put their shares on hold at any time, and can use any form of payment -- including food stamps. The program caters to neighborhood cultural tastes by including items like cilantro, tomatillos, and collard greens whenever possible, and every box comes with recipes written in both Spanish and English.

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu.

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu say they know what’s wrong with the food system: local food purists. In their new book, The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet, the husband-and-wife team (a University of Toronto geography professor and an economist) argue that the excitement over this movement is misguided to the point of having “utterly disastrous” effects. “If widely adopted,” they write, “either voluntarily or through political mandates, locavorism can only result in higher costs and increased poverty, greater food insecurity, less food safety and much more significant environmental damage than is presently the case” [emphasis theirs].

Desrochers and Shimizu are not the first vocal critics of the local food movement. James McWilliams is well known for his early contrarian views on local food (and a resulting book about it), as is Stephen Budiansky, whose 2010 New York Times article prompted an in-depth debate here at Grist. Like these folks -- and a whole array of others -- the authors of Locavore’s Dilemma argue mainly that food miles are a misleading and often incorrect gauge of the sustainability of one’s food.

We don’t entirely disagree. A dogmatic approach is rarely a good idea, and questions about where food should be grown and why are indeed complex. But does that mean things are great the way they are?

Most of us eat local food for a combination of reasons -- from taste, to personal health, to food-chain transparency, to concern for workers, to a desire to see a stop to industrial farming practices that damage soil health and biodiversity, to an interest in keeping small farmers in business. And, realistically, most of us compromise for reasons of cost or convenience. Yes, there are Portlandia-level locavores out there who take it a little too seriously, but the vast majority of us see local food as one piece of a much larger shift. Maybe it is unrealistic to believe small, local producers can literally feed the world -- but does that mean we shouldn’t support their efforts at all?

I sat down with Desrochers when he was in town last week to see if there was something to the anti-locavore argument. As you might guess, there's a lot he and I don't agree on. But at Grist we try, when we can, to challenge our views.

Nick Maravell has been farming organically and cultivating heirloom seeds on a leased 20-acre plot of land in Potomac, Md., for over three decades.

Nick’s Organic Farm is an anomaly in wealthy, suburban Potomac, where McMansions dominate the landscape, and its location has made it possible for Maravell to cultivate heirloom breeds of organic soy and corn seeds native to the Chesapeake Bay region. Corn seed is wind-pollinated, meaning organic varieties are easily contaminated by genetically modified pollen if grown anywhere near conventional farms. But Maravell’s farm is isolated, protected by a buffer of suburbia -- an ideally situated piece of land that would be difficult to replace.

All this might explain why, when it became clear that Maravell would lose his lease, the surrounding community didn’t take it lightly. His landlord, the Montgomery County Board of Education, transferred the lease to the county, which then awarded a contract to a private developer to build soccer fields. The announcement -- and subsequent findings that the county had violated the Open Meetings Act in handing the land over to developers without first soliciting public input -- caused an uproar.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph. (Photo by YBCA.)

If you live in a community plagued by violence, poverty, and health problems, it can be hard to see our collective ecological crisis as more pressing than the everyday crisis of survival. That’s the problem artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, founder of the national Youth Speaks poetry program, set out to tackle with his Life is Living festivals, which he describes as an effort to “green the ghetto” by asking first, “What sustains life in your community?” The festivals have been held in Chicago, New York, and Houston, and happen every year in Oakland, where Joseph lives. They bring together artists, philanthropists, environmentalists, community organizers, social service organizations -- “folks who share values but have different modalities -- around this one value, which is life.”

Joseph created a work of performance art based on the Life is Living festivals called red, black, and GREEN: a blues that’ll be performed in different cities over the next year. Incorporating song, dance, spoken word, monologue, and multimedia visuals, the piece tells the stories of people Joseph met who fight every day to sustain life around them -- a Chicago mother coping with the loss of her son to gang violence, folks cultivating a garden built on an old junkyard in Houston’s Fifth Ward, Joseph’s own struggle to explain the Black Panthers’ legacy to his young son. The heavy material is buoyed by moments of humor, like the depiction of hard-core enviros’ holier-than-thou approach to green living (“Are you eatin’ local, organic, non-packaged, and fresh? Are you a vegan, eatin’ in season, freezin’ what’s left?”) that made a diverse Seattle audience laugh in recognition.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (center) at the Life is Living festival in Chicago. (Photo by Bethanie Hines.)

The show doesn’t offer an easy answer to the question of how to transform the environmental movement into a universally inclusive one. Instead, it interprets the movement from the perspective of communities where sustaining life is about a lot more than changing light bulbs -- a perspective too often missing from mainstream conversations about sustainability.

I talked to Joseph before I saw the show.

Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger and LifeEdited. (Photo by kris krüg.)

Among the jet-setting elite, is downsizing the new Lake Como vacation house? That’s what Graham Hill, founder of TreeHugger, is banking on with LifeEdited, his nascent company catering to those striving for a life of “more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy,” as its manifesto reads. LifeEdited’s splashy first prototype is a 420-square-foot Manhattan tenement, renovated -- to the tune of over $400,000 -- to be a model of slick, hyper-functional, scaled-down living.

Overall, I’m in favor of the whole simplicity trend. U.S. homes are gigantic compared to their counterparts around the world, so I cheer the apparent decline of the McMansion if it means we’re becoming a little more like all those other countries where a huge-ass house is not the ultimate signifier of prosperity. I’ve always thought that if I ever struck it rich, I’d rather live in a normal house and spend my money on travel and fine dining and an abundant supply of Smartwool socks. (We stoic Seattleites tend to find blatant displays of wealth a bit uncouth; we prefer our millionaires clothed in Gortex, not Gucci.) So I totally respect and identify with rich people who don’t want to live in mansions.

But reading about Hill’s minimalist version of high-end living (or high-end version of minimalist living, depending on how you look at it) just makes me think that anyone who would pay $400,000 to create the 420-square-foot apartment of their dreams has probably never lived in a normal apartment that small before. It looks pretty neat in its spare demonstration form, but a little clutter and grime go a long way in a few hundred square feet.

Robyn Jasko started her blog Grow Indie as a way to offer a guide to easy, DIY garden and cooking projects. (It’s part of the goindie.com network, which she and her husband created to encourage the support of local, independent businesses.) Now, Jasko has put together a book, inspired by information on her website, called Homesweet Homegrown: How to Grow, Make and Store Food, No Matter Where You Live. A slim paperback sweetly illustrated by Jennifer Biggs’ drawings of vegetables and raised beds, Homesweet Homegrown gives instructions so straightforward they made even this brown-thumbed author feel a little less daunted -- excited, even -- by the concept of growing some legit food.

The book is neatly divided into chapters titled “Know,” “Start,” “Grow,” “Plant,” “Plan,” “Make,” “Eat,” and “Store,” with growing tips and recipes organized in alphabetical lists of vegetables. It also includes easy-to-decipher charts of seed germination times and companion plants. We caught up with Jasko recently to hear more about the book.

Q. Why did you decide to write Homesweet Homegrown?

A. I’ve always been a gardener, whether I’ve lived in the city, the country, or the 'burbs. Even on my fire escape in Philadelphia I had a tomato garden. Every year when I garden I have about 20 different books that I use and pull different things from. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if all that information was in one book? I was also inspired by all the questions I get. So I created what I wished existed. It’s a pocket manual that covers all the basics of growing your own food, with recipes, food storage tips, garden planning, information about GMOs, organics, heirlooms, and more.

Photo by Jeremy Blanchard.

With the revitalization of American cities has come increased excitement about public parks; we may have less land to spare than in Frederick Law Olmsted’s day, but we’re finding creative ways to squeeze more open space and greenery out of brownfields, empty lots, and old train tracks. The mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., even turned his unused parking space into a mini-park.

Now, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land (TPL) has devised a system that allows you to keep tabs on your city’s progress, and compare your hometown to the burg next door. It’s called ParkScore, and it measures and ranks the park systems of the country’s 40 largest cities. It’s not like Walk Score, where you can type in your address and get a walkability rating for your immediate neighborhood, but I’m sure the data could be used the same way (and similarly co-opted as a real-estate selling point).

And the winners? San Francisco came in first, followed by Sacramento, New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Bringing up the rear is Fresno, Calif., where more than 60 percent of the population lacks easy access to public parks. Charlotte, N.C., Louisville, Ky., and Indianapolis are also at the bottom of the heap.