There is one thing no gardener wants to hear: “Don’t plant this spring.” But that’s the word Angela Stanbery-Ebner received in February while plotting out the year’s crops at her garden in urban Cincinnati. No tomatoes this year, no chard, no selling at the farmers market, no community-supported agriculture operation run by neighborhood youth for low-income families.

Stanbery-Ebner’s garden, known as the Eco Garden, isn’t your standard backyard fare. It’s an agricultural oasis in a Cincinnati neighborhood better known for its crime than its heirloom carrots. Unfortunately for the Eco Garden, it doesn’t own the land on which it sits, the city does. This year, as part of its initiative to encourage urban development -- known as CitiRama -- the city started eyeing it for housing.

When the gardeners got the news, “we were basically devastated,” Stanbery-Ebner says. Out went the emails, an online petition, and calls to the city council in an effort to save one of the most vibrant corners of a rough-around-the-edges neighborhood.

The Eco Garden had been operating since 1998 in a neighborhood called Over the Rhine -- the Rhine being a nickname for the canal separating the neighborhood from downtown Cincinnati. The area is home to historic buildings, a farmers market, breweries, and in 2006 boasted the highest crime rate in the city, according to city council documents. In the garden, local kids learned to grow food, manage a community-supported agriculture operation, and handle customer accounts.

Angela Stanbery-Ebner and her husband Luke got involved the educational programs in 2004, fresh out of art school at the University of Cincinnati. Six years later, when the nonprofit managing the garden folded, the couple took over, rolling it into their own nonprofit called Permaganic in a nearly seamless transition. “We were basically able to shut down operations for the month of August, then some of the kids came right back to the program again,” Stanbery-Ebner says triumphantly.

Imagine looking out over your city and instead of seeing a sea of brown and grey rooftops, you’re looking at reflective black, all the way to the horizon.

That’s the view Sanders Moore is trying to bring to Albuquerque. Moore is the 31-year-old state director at Environment New Mexico, an advocacy group (and part of the Environment America network) that works to get citizens to demand better environmental policy from their elected leaders. “Our goal is to get 100,000 roofs covered in solar panels by 2020,” she explains.

Here’s how a woman from Atlanta landed in the high, Southwestern desert with dreams of getting an entire state off oil and powered by the sun.

Guess how many beads a “super krewe” throws out in a single city block? (“Krewes” are the groups that put on New Orleans Mardi Gras parades -- the super krewes first appeared in the '70s, upping the ante with more floats, celebrities, and presumably a big jump in bead volume.)

10 pounds?

100 pounds?

Try 15 tons. That’s some $56,000 in little plastic balls, hitting sky, then streets, then gutters, then the Louisiana coastline, for every single block of the parades. That’s what New Orleans residents Holly and Kirk Groh estimate, based on parade attendance figures and a Tulane study [PDF].

Sitting on the sidewalk for the parades in 2011, the Grohs watched the cascading plastic beads and all Holly could think about was all the waste.

Most of those strands of beads tossed out to paradegoers (extra if you show some skin) are made of petroleum products. For a city that is still recovering from the Deepwater Horizon explosion that leaked oil all over the Louisiana coastline, that struck her as especially tragic. “I think this is in other people’s hearts that it doesn’t quite feel right,” Holly Groh says. “But I think, as a group, we haven’t quite known what to do.”

The way Groh figured it, you can’t fight Mardi Gras -- you have to change it.

Who are those other guys? Krist Novoselic, left, in Nirvana's heyday.

If you were an angsty adolescent during the late 90s, you probably had an intimate relationship with Krist Novoselic in your black-décored bedroom. The name might not ring a bell at first, but the man on bass below Kurt Cobain’s guitar and vocals on the Nirvana records you listened into the ground? That’s Novoselic.

Unlike other rock stars past, Novoselic isn’t spending his post-headlining days lying around a mansion with an army of un-housebroken dogs (nice goin’, Ozzie) or out trying to recapture glory during the current grunge revival (howdy, Chris Cornell!). Instead, he’s trying to change the way we do democracy in the United States by convincing people to adopt an obscure (by U.S. standards) election system known as ranked choice voting (RCV).

It's a long shot. But success could mean a huge leap forward in broadening campaign dialogue, civilizing partisan warfare, and giving oft-marginalized environmental issues serious political clout.