A Few Good Women

I’m so glad to have caught up with the woman I once called “the Belle of Bolinas.” With her customary Brit’s sophistication, in this cutaway Muriel Murch begins with a trio of healthy, wealthy women in Washington, DC. The women, described in last month’s issue of “Vanity Fair,” founded the Bravewell Collaborative, “based on interactive medicine.” I’m not quite sure what the term “interactive medicine” means, but I trust that Murch’s three “good women” will make sense of President Obama’s labyrinthine Health Bill.

Closer to home, which, for the inveterate traveler, Murch, has recently been South America, are four friends who have founded Ambientate Argentina, an urban organization devoted to sustainable (green)—“guerilla”—gardening.

Today, our fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, seems like the perfect time to air Murch’s celebration of organic soil and clay, Argentine “seed bombs.” In fact, I would have liked a few more Rio de la Plata details than she dishes out; part of the problem is that this piece’s dual focus means Murch devotes quite a bit of time on the piece’s first section.

What I most admire here are sentences that describe Buenos Aires to a T, such as: “This after all was the city in which an ordinance to ‘pick up after your dog’ was so completely ignored that it had to be repealed.” Or check out Murch’s description of two Ambientate participants: “I looked over to a couple who were, like me, on their hands and knees, rolling clay and soil together. They were easily in their seventies, that age when play becomes not only accepted but essential for health. The man was methodical in his mixing, this much soil to that much clay.” Plus, toward the end of the piece Murch steps aside to quote Ambientate attendees speaking with wonderfully distinctive Argentine accents about tending gardens.

Pete Horner’s theme music is, as ever, catchy and fine.