I’m always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

In reality, nearly every square inch of Central Park was painstakingly landscaped back in the mid-nineteenth century to the specifications of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. A massive public works project, it required some 20,000 workers to subvert existing swamps and blow up bluffs to create a soothing pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition.

Oh, and there was the little matter of evicting the Irish pig farmers and German gardeners who’d built shantytowns on the land. And destroying Seneca Village, the “first significant community of African American property owners on Manhattan.” The five acre settlement, which included three churches and a school, was seized through eminent domain and demolished.

All this, so that cooped-up city dwellers could get their fix of “nature.” Our civilized way of life is so removed from the natural world that Central Park’s manicured, manipulated acres are as close to a bit of wilderness as we can hope to get within the borough of Manhattan.

But you can catch a glimpse of what Manhattan was really like before we invaded it and tamed it by watching the fascinating video that architect/educator Fritz Haeg’s created in collaboration with the Mannahatta Project. The video documents Haeg’s Lenape Edible Estate installation, which was designed to “provide a view back to the lives of the native Lenape people, how they lived off the land 400 years ago” on the island that was then called Mannahatta.

The Lenape project was installed back in June when Haeg and a team of volunteers descended with shovels and soil on a triangle of uncultivated land in front of a Chelsea housing project to plant the beans, corn, squash, berries, and other edibles that the Lenape tribe lived on centuries ago.

The project offers a “meditation both on the historical facts and the future possibilities for our occupation of the island,” as Haeg notes. He hopes that it “may also serve as a model for modest small scale urban edible landscapes and as a possible prototype for future green spaces on similar housing sites across the city.”

I’m delighted to see Haeg bring his verve and vision to an American urban setting. His U.S. plantings have been primarily in the ‘burbs, as documented in his book Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (which also includes an installation at a London housing project). Edible Estates, written in 2007 and published in the winter of 2008, anticipated–and surely helped inspire–the recent kitchen garden renaissance. Haeg’s book sold so well that it’s now out of print.

Happily, a new edition will be released next spring. The new Edible Estates will include more stories of lawn-to-lettuce conversions and an expanded preface from Haeg on how the edible landscape scene has changed since the first edition. Urban ag genius Will Allen’s contributing a piece, and there will be a nod to the White House kitchen garden, whose role in helping to inspire millions of new gardeners this year is indisputable.

As Haeg noted in an op-ed this past spring in The Guardian, the First Family’s 1,100 square foot patch of veggies is “not just a pretty garden, or an empty symbol, but a place for a family to grow the food that they like to eat, on the land that is around them” (that’s why there’s plenty of cilantro and tomatillos, for salsa, but no beets– Obama doesn’t like ‘em). Haeg adds:

Many American children today do not see evidence that food comes out of the ground or experience the pleasure of eating food fresh from plants. Instead their diet is causing epidemic childhood illness. The introduction of a food-producing garden into their early lives is our best hope for changing the situation in a meaningful way.

But there’s another compelling reason to start growing some of your own food, whether it’s in your yard, on a rooftop, or in a window box: it’s one way to help curb your carbon footprint, or, rather, foodprint. No one is seriously suggesting that city dwellers can produce all our own food in our yards, community gardens, or urban farms, but it’s just one of the many steps that we can take to lower our impact.

During World War II, planting a kitchen garden was pitched as our patriotic duty. Isn’t it time we made growing your own food a civic virtue once again? Only this time, the fight is against the fossil- fueled American life that’s given us an increasingly unhealthy populace and an overheated planet.

And we’re in imminent danger of losing that battle. “Current emissions trajectories” are hurtling us towards the point of no return, i.e. “the worst-case scenarios” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to the New York Times.

At a daylong conference on climate change held Tuesday at the United Nations, Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the world’s leaders that “Science leaves us no space for inaction now.”

This bleak pronouncement comes on the heels of a headline blaring “We’re Screwed” on the front page of Monday’s New York Post–or, rather, a remarkably New York Post-like publication that was passed out to unsuspecting commuters by activists. The hoax was orchestrated by the Yes Men, that pair of pranksters who’ve so masterfully manipulated the mainstream media, as documented in their upcoming film, The Yes Men Fix the World.

It looked an awful lot like the real thing and fooled a lot of folks. But on close inspection, you could tell that it was a fake because, unlike Rupert Murdoch’s publication, “the faux Post is filled with factual information on the threats posed by climate change,” as USA Today observed.

You’d never see an article in the real Post touting the potential of rooftop farming to help curb New York City’s carbon foodprint, or a shout-out to an upcoming presentation hosted by NYU on Food and Climate Change: The Meat of the Matter, that explores the significant contribution that meat and dairy production make to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, Monday’s edition of The Daily News ran an article about the 18,000 pounds of fresh produce that inmates on Rikers Island have grown this year to supply the city’s soup kitchens and food pantries–further proof of the tangible, quantifiable benefits of urban agriculture.

Monday’s Financial Times also echoed the Yes Men’s “We’re Screwed” headline with an article entitled “Scientific Consensus Over Dire Consequences,” which noted that:

The gap between the glacial pace of negotiations and the rapid progress of global warming is now endangering the safety of the planet, scientists are warning. Martin Parry, of Imperial College, London, says: “That is what is at stake. I don’t think people have realised [sic]. We are nowhere near tackling this.”

Can we muster the collective will to alter the way we live in order to avert the worst repercussions of climate change? Those of us who live in densely populated cities already have the advantage of mass transit–and, ironically, greater access through farmers’ markets and CSAs (though not nearly enough in many communities) to the freshly harvested plant-based foods that form the cornerstone of a low-impact diet.

I don’t know if we’ll ever manage to liberate ourselves from the petroleum-based processed foods that currently dominate our food chain. But I’m heartened by the sight of so many New Yorkers attempting to grow food, whether it’s on the roof of a Brooklyn warehouse or the back of a Brooklyn-based pick-up truck, behind the barbed wire of Rikers Island, or in front of a housing project on the island formerly known as Mannahatta. Let freedom spring!

When I first looked at my current apartment, what I loved about it most was the yard, a tangled mess of weeds covering an area larger than the entire (two-bedroom) apartment.  I moved in at the end of the summer and spent my winter dreaming of the bounty I was sure my garden would produce throughout the year. Fresh greens for spring salads. Tomatoes and peppers for summer salsas. Jars and jars worth of cucumbers for pickling and gifting to friends and family. The last of the carrots, harvested as the coldness of fall began to set in. Amidst all my daydreaming, my friend Adam, an urban permaculturalist who now lives in Denver, advised me to get my soil tested for lead.  “You have an old house,” he said, “It was probably painted with lead paint at some point.”

Spring came, and I dutifully ordered a soil test kit from the Cornell Nutrient Analysis Laboratory, but — much like a dentist’s reminder card — it lay neglected on my dresser through March, April, and May.  Finally, after reading a New York Times article about lead in urban soils, I swallowed my nerves and sent my sample off.

The news wasn’t good – my soil had 800 parts per million (ppm) lead, approximately two times (or more!) the maximum safe level for garden soil, depending on whom you talk to – some experts put it at 200, others at 500.  I didn’t know what to do – I checked out Kitchen Gardeners International for advice, and I found someone in a similar predicament, but no good answers.  I let my garden languish for a little while, and searched the internet for a solution.

All my internet prowling also showed me that I’m not alone – even the Obamas’ garden tested positive for lead, creating a panic that was later calmed when it was clarified that their lead levels were far below the safe maximum.

I found out that the news wasn’t all bad though: while lead contamination of garden soil certainly isn’t a good thing, most lead poisoning comes from direct ingestion of soil, and that – in general – plants do not readily accumulate lead.  Fruits and fruiting vegetables, specifically, are unlikely to take up any lead at all – in a 2003 survey[PDF] of contaminated garden soil in Chicago, Molly Finster, Kimberly Gray, and Helen Binns tested 52 pieces of fruit grown in soils with lead levels of up to 2100 ppm, and found lead  in only one of them[PDF], and at a low level at that.  That was enough to convince me that my cukes, tomatoes, and peppers were okay, at least for this year – though my roommate still has her doubts.  The carrots, radishes, broccoli, and lettuces on the other hand? Not so much.  Though it’s not likely that they’ll have accumulated much lead, it’s very likely that they will have accumulated at least some by the time they’re harvested. So I’ve replaced those sections of my garden with flowers, and have tried to transplant some of the hardier looking sprouts to containers on my balcony.  I’m still hoping they’ll make it!

Many experts say that urban gardeners should assume that they have lead in their soil, especially if they’re gardening near a structure that was built before 1978, when lead paint was widely used.  If that’s your situation, don’t be like me – get your soil tested before you plant.  I used Cornell, but Brooklyn College also offers a soil testing service, as do many university laboratories around the country, and you can order home-testing kits on the internet or buy them at stores like Home Depot, though I’d be wary of their accuracy.

Here is a great explanation of what soil test results look like.  If you do find lead, it’s not the end of the world.  I plan to do the rest of my edible gardening in containers, and grow only flowers in the yard, but if I were planning to stay in my house for longer than a couple more years, I would sow seeds of plants that would phytoremediate the soil, or take the lead out of it.  I might also work on altering its pH level, because high soil pH immobilizes lead, making it even less likely to be absorbed by plants.

The bottom line is that a little soil contamination shouldn’t stop you from gardening.  Don’t eat the dirt, of course, but don’t panic.  After all, as Edie Stone, the executive director of Green Thumb, said in the New York Times article that finally convinced me to send my soil sample in, “You can’t assume that what you buy at the grocery store is any safer.”  Now, I’ve got a little container paradise on my balcony, and the flowers in the yard make me smile whenever I come and go.  I harvested a couple of the cucumbers the other day, and – after washing them with a 1% vinegar solution like the Cornell Horticulture program suggested – my boyfriend and I enjoyed a delicious salad.