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.

“I just love it,” says Janice Williams, a nearby resident. “When you walk past it, you see all these beautiful foods.” Williams’ grandson Robert started interning at the garden a few years ago and immediately took to it. “We call him the ‘tiller of the ground’ because he has such a knack for growing things,” she says.

Now Robert has a garden at home, too. He rises early to harvest and get produce ready to sell at the farmers market. The fresh food they have at home is a big bonus, says his grandmother, and now Robert, who is 18, is taking his 12-year-old sister, Mary, to the garden as well. She says she loves growing strawberries and kale. The only downside to gardening? “Getting dirty,” she says — “but it’s worth it.”

As the city’s development plan was originally proposed to the Ebners, all that would have been lost. You don’t just pick up 15 years of soil development — an entire miniature agricultural ecosystem — and plop it down in a new spot. Stanbery-Ebner notes that Permaganic also had grants and donations for garden improvements scheduled for 2013.

It’s not that the Ebners are opposed to urban development, Stanbery-Ebner says. But some development “doesn’t always match with the values of the existing community.”

Her flood of emails to supporters got results. She showed up at a city council committee meeting with 22 supporters and an online petition hit 292 signatures. “Really quickly, what we saw — which was pretty amazing to us, we’ve never spent time on promotions — immediately people started pulling together,” she says.

Permaganic found a champion in councilmember Laure Quinlivan. Quinlivan filed a motion with the city arguing that “as the longest-running urban agriculture program in Cincinnati, Eco Garden has substantially added to the quality of life in Over the Rhine by expanding residents’ access to fresh local produce, and providing training programs for hundreds of local teenagers.” Quinlivan’s motion required that the Eco Garden be incorporated into future development on the site and also asked the city to find an additional place where the garden might expand.

Quinlivan says that, like Stanbery-Ebner, she’s not opposed to housing development in the urban core. She just didn’t feel that the CitiRama backers were considering all the impacts of their proposal. “The smartest thing we can do is incorporate green [within city development],” she says.

On March 12, the city council’s Livable Communities committee voted with Quinlivan’s motion. And this week, Stanbery-Ebner says she received notice that the CitiRama would be held on another plot of land instead.

So planting begins this spring as planned. Stanbery-Ebner says this year’s crops include greens, herbs, several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, and a host of other fruits and veggies. The interns can return, the shoots can sprout, the tomatoes can grow — and this time, Over the Rhine is in the news for something other than its crime stats.

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.

Q. What brings an urban, southern belle to the Land of Enchantment?

A. I would say that I’ve cared about the environment as long as I can remember. There was the Save the Whales campaign in the ’80s — that really tugged on my 8-year-old heartstrings — “I want to save all the whales in the ocean.” When I got to college, I majored in political science. I didn’t realize until then how interested I was in the political process and policy and how it impacts our lives. Then I wanted to connect those two things [environmentalism and politics].

Q. So that explains your greenie bent, but why the Wild West?

A. For a pretty big part of my life, I remember always wanting to move west. After I graduated from college, I wanted to move, but it didn’t work out at that point. Then to further my career, I got a master’s in environmental law. I wouldn’t say I had my eyes set on one particular place, [but] given the opportunity for a career here, it seemed to fit perfectly — big open skies, and the green chile doesn’t hurt.

Q. And how are you saving the whales, so to speak, in New Mexico?

A. New Mexico is the second sunniest state in the country but we only get 2 percent of our energy from the sun. I don’t think it needs to be that way. I think we have the ability to really repower our state. At the state level, we want policies [that encourage] more solar development. We’re also working with cities to pass resolutions for encouraging residents to put solar panels on their houses. We’re talking to thousands of New Mexicans about the issue.

We’re also trying to get the Rio Grande del Norte and Otero Mesa designated as national monuments. [Otero Mesa, in the far southern reaches of the state] is about the state’s last untapped water source, but unfortunately it is open to natural gas [drilling] and hard-rock mining.

Q. You’re talking a lot of process, less chaining yourself to trees. What’s your angle on environmental wins?

A. I personally think the best way to attack these issues is to engage the public and get them to weigh in with the political process. Between 2011 and 2012 we talked to about 50,000 New Mexicans, getting a lot of widespread support [to ban drilling in the Otero Mesa.] Fortunately, people here care about water — we have a very limited amount of it. People don’t want to see New Mexico being destroyed for short-term gain.

Q. OK, but these are federal lands you’re trying to protect — why should someone in New York care about drilling in a desert thousands of miles away?

A. Beyond the precedent that it sets for doing the same thing in New York, if that drilling or mining impacts the water supply, I think down the road, that’s going to impact everything. When I first started trying to get a job in the environmental field, someone asked me what my biggest environmental concern was and they wanted me to pick: “Air? Water? Land?” I think that so much of it’s just connected.

Q. Let’s talk bottom line — what’s the impact to New Mexico’s famous (and ridiculously delicious) green chile if the state doesn’t get off oil and onto sun power?

A. Climate change is one of the biggest issues facing us today — a lot of that comes from our dirty energy sources, like coal and oil. There’s definitely a connection: We’re experiencing a major drought [in New Mexico] and that’s affecting the chile crop — it’s affecting all agriculture in the state.

[Editor’s note: Don’t believe her? A study by New Mexico State University found that chile farming using drought techniques impacted the flavor of at least one of the state’s famous varietals.]

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. Last year, she and her husband, along with a group of friends and volunteers, launched Verdi Gras. They help recycle that trash on the parade route, encourage the krewes to reduce the amount of non-recyclable plastic they toss, and throw their own masquerade ball featuring local food and booze.

“We wanted to show that we could do this with a spirit of fun and community and joie de vivre that’s in the spirit of New Orleans,” Groh explains.

Here’s her story:

Q. What inspired you to green up Mardi Gras?

A. We lost our home in Katrina and we watched the insides of everybody’s houses floating down the streets. We were probably sensitive to the environment, but then, to us, it really put an emphasis on the fragility of Louisiana and New Orleans. What happened then was the BP oil spill came. It was just traumatic. We shop at the farmers market and saw how it affected families who depended on the water for their living.

Then it came time for Mardi Gras that year. The trash always bothered us horrendously before, but this year in particular, we sat with a bunch of our friends and family and we all had the same reaction: There was absolutely no change. We were still surrounded by huge amounts of petroleum products — the bags the beads came in, the beads, the Mardi Gras cups; it just kind of made us sick to our stomachs. We came up with a mission that we wanted to preserve our unique cultural heritage and preserve our beautiful environment.

Q. But is it really Mardi Gras if people aren’t launching beads into throngs of people?

A. Our motto is “it’s about the show, not the throw.” The throws [aka giant bead tosses] are not part of Mardi Gras history. It showed up in the last 20-25 years. We feel like the emphasis for us is to say we can have a really great party without all this stuff. Have you ever been to Mardi Gras? It’s tremendous; there is a huge amount of stuff.

Q. How does one throw an environmentally friendly masquerade ball in full New Orleans style?

A. Our dishes were all locally prepared, with local foods — brown rice grown here, vegetables from the farmers market. We had locally crafted alcoholic drinks and non-alcoholic drinks. There were great bands — all local music and musicians. The beneficiary this year was Arc [a nonprofit devoted to helping people with intellectual disabilities]. They pick up the beads and recycle them. You can’t melt them down because they’re made of carcinogenic products. So they are cleaned off, repackaged, and sold back to the krewes to use the next year.

Q. Tell me about that gorgeous masquerade ensemble.

A. I had a dress that was recycled that a costume maker in town had. It was kind of a criss-cross thing in the front with beading along the fabric. I had a coat that looked like something Prince could have worn from a secondhand shop, and then a cone-shaped hat that [the costumer] made.

Q. Into your second year, how successful is Verdi Gras?

A. We have about 30 to 40 volunteers [to help with recycling]. The Verdi Ball was more intimate than we would have liked, about 120 or so attendees. It was smaller, but sweet. We are trying to think creatively about working with a church or a school or a neighborhood, hoping that the krewes will reduce the amount that they throw. We want people to think more about these things so that our precious New Orleans survives a few more generations.

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.

—

So how did a prince of rock nobility become a wonky election reformist? Novoselic defies almost every possible expectation you might have of a member of the band that ushered in the grunge era. He speaks to me by phone from his home in southern Washington state’s rural Wahkiakum County, where, seriously, he cuts his own wood. “I’m sitting next to my fire right now,” he observes, before he begins ruminating on the nuances of international election laws.

Novoselic appreciates that his current work in politics might be surprising, given his rocker past life in the 80s and 90s. He asks my first question for me: “This dude is a bass player — why is he involved in election reform?” he says.

But Novoselic explains that music launched his life in politics.

In the early 90s, the Washington state legislature passed a law restricting music sales to minors, and Seattle had laws keeping underage fans out of most venues. To fight the rules, Novoselic and other members of the then-exploding Seattle music scene banded together, forming J.A.M.P.A.C. — the Joint Artists and Music Promotions Political Action Committee.

Trying to change music laws alongside Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell at the state legislature “was kind of my civic education,” Novoselic recalls. While working with state legislators, “I started recognizing these flaws. Why have a ‘get out the vote’ campaign when an incumbent state senator in Seattle is going to win?”

Convinced there had to be a better way to vote, Novoselic booted up his computer, and, this being the ’90s, waited while the modem buzzed, beeped, and screeched, then started searching. He found Fair Vote, a nonprofit formed by former independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson, which is devoted to bringing RCV or a similar system to ballots everywhere.

Voting rights are so punk rock: Krist Novoselic at the 2010 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy in San Francisco. (Photo by Steve Rhodes.)

Here’s how RCV works: Rather than a system with primaries followed by general elections, all the candidates for an office run in a single election. Voters then rank their top choices in order of preference. So imagine the 2000 presidential election: There would be only one election and voters could have ranked their top three preferences. Ralph Nader could be your top choice, Al Gore your second, and Mickey Mouse your third.

The votes are tallied in rounds starting with the first choice. The lowest vote-getter is dropped and the second choices of the people who supported him are distributed to the rest of the candidates. So if your picks were Nader-Gore-Mickey, and Nader got the fewest votes in the first round of counting, Gore would get your vote in the second round.

In theory, this system gives third-party candidates a better shot at being elected. They are able to campaign through to the general election, and getting a slew of second-choice votes could be enough to push them above a Democrat or Republican.

In practice, a third-party candidate (or fourth or fifth) isn’t much more likely to win under RCV than any other system of voting — big party money and incumbency being what they are.

But Novoselic says the need to be someone’s second or third choice to ensure victory means that campaigns are less negative, and candidates have to try to appeal to more and wider interest groups. If a Democratic mayoral candidate runs primarily on health care issues, she still has to address the environment to appeal to Greens in hopes of being their second choice.

“The prevalent voting methods today, they screen out issues and candidates and parties that are not primarily focusing on whatever the No. 1 concern — the issue of the day — is,” says RCV fan David Zwick, founder of Clean Water Action.

Zwick, who now works with Fair Vote’s Minnesota chapter, says that polling regularly shows people care about the environment, but it isn’t their No. 1 concern, so major candidates don’t spend as much time talking about it. RCV, he explains, “gives a bigger voice to more issues and to candidates representing more issues.”

For environmentalists, that means perennially underserved topics like climate change get a shot at a little more love and attention.

—

St. Paul, Minn., adopted RCV before its city elections last fall, and all those great things Novoselic claims come with RCV happened, says city council candidate and Green Party member Jim Ivey. “I experienced all those positive effects.”

His opponent, Dave Thune, was a repeat incumbent; Ivey had no name recognition. Thune had the backing of St. Paul’s powerful Democratic Party. Ivey had to confront people still angry over their perception that Ralph Nader stole the 2000 election from Al Gore.

But Ivey still managed to finish in second place among six candidates, leading to a photo finish with Thune. The day after the first round of counting resulted in no clear victory, Ivey called Thune and asked if he wanted to meet for coffee — that’s how amicable the campaigning had been.

Ivey suspects that without RCV, Thune would have run a fear-based campaign against him, warning voters that if they wasted a vote on Ivey, the leading conservative candidate would clinch victory. Instead, they practically ended up campaigning for each other.

“You could say, ‘The guy I’m running against is a great guy,’” Ivey says. He encouraged fellow green-thinking environmentalists to put him in the No. 1 spot, but to give their second choice to Thune.

“That’s a classic ranked choice dynamic,” Novoselic says. “They reach out, they’re building a coalition.”

Turning it up to 11 on some pesky rural Washington brambles. (Photo courtesy Krist Novoselic.)

In return, Thune had to campaign — if not for Ivey — then at least for the environmental second-choice vote. By the end of the campaign, in-city agriculture was a major part of Thune’s platform. “I’m real high on urban gardening now,” Thune told MinnPost.com after winning.

Ivey didn’t win the office, but the planet picked up a small victory by incentivizing a mainstream candidate to consider and eventually adopt outside ideas.

Ranked choice voting still has a long way to go before it leaps from a few cities to mainstream acceptance in the U.S. San Francisco adopted RCV in 2004, but efforts to end it are gaining steam. This February, a proposed ballot measure repealing RCV nearly passed in a 5-6 vote by the city Board of Supervisors, leading to a condemning editorial by the San Francisco Chronicle. The paper argued RCV “produced voter confusion and vacuous campaigns.”

“It takes voters some time to adapt,” acknowledges Phillip Ung, a spokesperson for RCV advocates California Common Cause. “It takes time for third-party candidates, and candidates in general, to get used to campaigning in a ranked choice voting system.”

(Ung might also want to point out that voters in the country that gave us the criminally dumb Crocodile Dundee seem to have been capable of figuring out RCV.)

In Novoselic, who now chairs the board of Fair Vote, the issue has a backer with the kind of name-recognition and pop-culture reach most individual candidates can only dream of. From that position, he lobbies local governments and legislators to adopt RCV — or its close cousins Instant-Runoff Voting and Proportional Voting. He also blogs about movements around the country to expand democracy’s reach.

One day after speaking with Grist, Novoselic hopped a plane to attend a conference at NYU boasting the ambitious title “United Citizens: How We Revive Our Democracy.” Now studying for a Bachelor’s in the social sciences at Washington State University, he is a perpetual student of new ideas to, as he says it, “put the power in the hands of the people.”

Before grunge was perverted to sell flannel and Xeroxed into oblivion by scourge-of-the-Earth bands like Creed, it actually argued for substance over style in music, and often allied itself with movements of empowerment and political progression. “Coming out of the punk rock world, we had a healthy dose of it,” Novoselic reminisces.

In that respect, perhaps his crusade isn’t so shocking. He just found a way to help those ideas mature into something that might effect lasting change. If a few more of his grunge-era rock ‘n’ roll comrades follow suit, we’d all be better off.