Climate Matters video contest winners: This Lawn Is Your Lawn

This is the second post in a series featuring the winners of the Climate Matters video contest. Each post features a video (of course) and a short note from their creators telling us why they entered the contest, their inspirations for their videos, etc.

Activist Roger Doiron tied for third place with his video This Lawn is Your Lawn:

Roger started the Eat the View campaign last February, encouraging the planting of healthy, edible landscapes in high-impact, high visibility places. The centerpiece of the campaign is a petition urging the next president to plant an organic garden on the White House lawn.

From Roger:

My approach to urging the next president to take action on climate change was to look for a low-cost, high-impact solution that he could accomplish within days of taking office that would inspire citizens to follow suit. As a gardener, I didn’t have to look far: the solution was literally in my own back yard in the form of an organic Victory Garden. My wife, three sons and I grow half of our fruits and vegetables for the year on our own modest, suburban lot. I thought to myself that if we can do this on a third of an acre in our free time, imagine what the next president could do with 18 acres and a grounds staff of 13. So back in February, I launched the “Eat the View!” campaign to urge the next president to plant a garden on the White House lawn, posting the idea first on the website www.OnDayOne.org where it zoomed into first place as the “most popular” idea for what the next President should do upon taking office.

I think the popularity has to do with the utter “doability” of the idea. There’s no organized opposition: who’s prepared to go on the record as being against vegetable gardening? And it doesn’t require the whole world to agree on anything, yet it could have an impact on the whole world. I think there’s a sense among people that we can really make this happen and that we must.

Congratulations again to Roger for his video and the campaign behind it. You can view all four winning entries here and the other 12 finalists at the Climate Matters finalists page on Vimeo.