From that first May morning my town’s farmer’s market opened for the season, Saturday mornings have been delightful. That first week, reunion brought a surprised pleasure, then, as summer pushed in, greetings became more relaxed and more expected, routine. No one comes to the farmer’s market with a long face. Those early weeks most of what was for sale were fledgling plants eager for the earth’s spring and summer offerings: heat, water, and coolness. Summer’s begun to wane. Bounty pours forth each week with a new offering, starting with early green leaves, onto berries, roots, and now peaches and apples and potatoes. The rituals—reunion, planting, harvesting—are small ones, simple pleasures. That first morning, I listened to people affirm that spring provides hope. All summer, I’ve witnessed how much pleasure we humans derive from accepting the earth’s gifts.

Juxtapose all this with people’s mounting concerns for the planet. Terrifying headlines trumpet our earth’s ills, including disappearing honeybees, scorching temperatures in Southern California causing fires and power outages to ever-larger houses built inland. Effective repair will only occur when government and corporate entities decide that healing the planet is fiscally more sound than plundering it. Citizen hat on, I urge my legislators to press for greener laws and try to use my consumer power wisely by supporting companies that are going greener. But do I feel good, really, when doing those things? No. I feel very small and ineffective sending my email or buying my organic whatever.

Recently, I met with Owen Wormser and Mike Keeney, about whose company, Treefrog Landscapes, I was profiling. Wormser and Keeny employ a sustainability model to their landscaping business. What struck me most was something Mike Keeney said about himself, in regards to his work. “I’m a half-full kind of guy,” he explained, before positing an unflagging belief that when people appreciate the beauty of their own physical surroundings, investment in creating a healthier planet inevitably follows. I seized upon “half-full.” Already, it’s changed my vision.

“Half-full” is obviously the farmer’s market. But it’s also the fun I had planting flowers with my four-year-old and his friend earlier this summer. They loved choosing spots for the flowers, they loved pulling at hairy roots, and they loved discovering slithering earthworms, glistening slugs, and spindly spiders. “Eew!” they shrieked with sheer delight. For weeks, we admired the simple fact that flowers thrived where before there were weeds, “half-full” all over again.

Other people’s actions produce that same spirited pleasure. Through my friend, Phil Korman, I learned that his neighbor, Jen Gallant, recently organized a neighborhood tour (they both live in my town, Northampton, Massachusetts). Jen Gallant got the idea after learning some basic gardening tasks from a neighbor (she’d recently become a home owner). She explained, “Then I heard one of our neighbors had just put up solar panels, another neighbor had a huge windmill in his back yard, and others were keeping chickens and I thought a great thing is going on here—people are doing what they can to be self-sufficient and lessen their environmental impact—yet they are doing it either by themselves or with very small groups of neighbors.” So, she set up a tour that about forty people took one rainy Saturday, visiting the 80 foot tall windmill that’s been going for 26 years and people’s compost piles and talking about rail trails, greenway advocacy and car-sharing and collective childcare arrangements. She said, “People met their neighbors—got to walk and talk—and it all far surpassed my expectations.”