Cognitive Dissonance (Not) Part I 
By Martin Harris

Few news/feature articles in the Vermont press have been as much fun to read as the two which occupied a good half-page-plus (page 12A) in the 11 June 09 issue of the Addison Independent. One was a discussion of gardening on the front lawn of the State House, and the other was a discussion of some practices in home-chicken-flock management.  Both veggie-raising and poultry-raising are presently very trendy subjects of both fashion and actual practice in suburban and exurban America, and can even be found in efforts at vacant-lot gardening in depressed urban areas as well as the balconies of high-rise apartments in decidedly up-scale zip codes.

Variously identified as SPIN-farming (Small-Plot-INtensive), lawn-to-garden, grow-your-own, and similar labels, the practice is becoming widely popular in contemporary America. Explanations focus less on the economics (grow-your-own really doesn't pay unless you don't count all your costs) than on such intangibles as product quality, grower "self-sufficiency", the local-vore movement, and a level of social approbation which motivates land-owners to plow up front lawns, for higher neighbor visibility, than back yards. Even Chronicles Magazine, one of my monthly favorites, gets into the mood with a July 09 issue cover photo of '50's-era office-worker-clad business folks pretending to weed, thin, and de-bug for the camera. The shot shows an open-land sylvan background, row-crop fore-ground, and stoop-labor postures by urbanites in white shirts, ties, vests, and for the ladies, suits.

Back then, no one objected to the notion of open land accessible to urbanites during lunch hour; nor, for suburbanites,  to generous yards each with ample space for a garden.. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in his Broadacre City model, called for an acre per person in the highly-decentralized development pattern he advocated. Today, however, the smart-growth folks do object. Their major theme, in blithe disregard of Wright, (and, indeed, of the informal broad acceptance of the basic Wright pro-sprawl concept by a striking majority of the American population, even in Vermont) is that urban development densities should be higher -no in-town land wasted on large lots, trees, and lawns-so that further-out farmland won't be urbanized and can be worked by real farmers, not spare-time hobbyists. If you examine the layouts of such smart-growth exemplars as Portland, Oregon, or  Seaside, Florida, you'll see that the houses and condo's occupy tiny lots with no room for much gardening or chickening, unless the occupants go to the apartment-balcony hanging-basket model for the arugula and the PETA-disapproved chicken-in-coops model for the eggs. In contrast, the 420 SF garden on the expansive front lawn of the State House, or the mobile no-floor poultry-shelter (its practitioners call the device a chicken-tractor) each require much more land than the smart-growth advocates deem appropriate for private ownership according to contemporary canons of residential development. It's noteable, though, that when government owns the super-spacious, decorative, and until now, with 420 SF (that's an area equal to 20 army cots)  going under the plow, unused downtown lawn framing the State House, apparently, that's OK.  What's not OK, and fun (not to) read in the two articles is any recognition of the equivalent of Conan Doyle's non-barking-dog: specifically, the un-mentioned inherent conflict between the mostly suburban grow-your-own (lawns-to-gardens) movement, and the also mostly suburban smart-growth (housing on small lots near, of course, light rail) movement. It's fun because most of the folks in movement 1 are also in movement 2. In terms of stereotyping for identity politics purposes, you might call them the Gentry-Left, an identity-group which comprises people who are both wealthier than, and more governmentally-oriented than, average Americans. There's a shrink-speak phrase for holding two conflicting concepts in your head simultaneously: Cognitive Dissonance.

Webster's defines CD in terms of the "anxiety" it causes the conflicting-concepts believer, while Wikipedia prefers "uncomfortable feeling".  By that measure, the G-L's, such as the A-I's page 12A writers) who enthuse over both grow-your-own and smart-growth aren't suffering from CD at all; they seem to be quite happy in their dual (and conflicting) convictions, even though they never mention both in the same sentence. I suspect the "root cause" (a little borrowed G-L lingo, there) derives more from contemporary politics and fashion than from ancestrally-inherited devotions to either "the land" or "the city", and reflects simply a widely-used approval-seeking tactic: telling various identity-groups what they want to hear, at the time you're facing each of them. For a prime current example, consider the new Ed Commissioner's "fire some teachers" declaration. Next week.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights