Marvin Dunn may be the best thing to happen to environmentalism in South Florida since it became as trendy to care about carbon emissions and ozone as it is for women to carry tiny dogs in Prada purses and men to wear T-shirts from Baby Gap.

With the help of a few employees and an army of volunteers, Dunn, an author and former Florida International University psychology professor, recently created Roots in the City, a two-acre, commercial, organic garden in the heart of Overtown, one of Miami's poorest, toughest neighborhoods.

Here's why Roots is so important: It is the ultimate environmentally friendly project in today's troubled economy. It is practical in the short term. It is a green space maintained by the people who live around it. It rapidly provides healthy vegetables for those people to eat. And its very presence provides an injection of hope that the neighborhood can improve.

STRATEGY

There has long been an argument among the folks most likely to claim they are BFFs with the environment that the best way to get Average Joe and Jane to care more about Mother Earth is to teach them to make smaller carbon footprints, burn less fossil fuel, spray fewer aerosols, eat organic foods and so on.

And while those are all noble and responsible things to do, they're not always feasible or practical for the neediest among us -- especially the footprint, which still isn't very quantifiable.

Let's be blunt. It is human nature to care most about what you need in the short term. Right now, people need jobs, shelter, food and general safety. And if they already have those things, then they need peace of mind that none of the four will be snatched from them.

Earlier this summer, Bjorn Lomborg, a scholar with the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a nonprofit foundation that researches practical environmental fixes, met with the world's top environmental scientists for a conference on saving the planet. Some expected Lomborg to give a stereotypical green lecture. Instead, he argued that the best way to help the environment is to take money being spent in poor communities on expensive green technology and use that money to help Average Joe and Jane create infrastructure, jobs, food, shelter, and safe surroundings. Because when regular people have those things, they relax. And when they relax, they care more about their surroundings.

On Wednesday, the day a feature story ran in the Miami Herald about Roots in the City and all the good it could do Overtown, a new episode of A&E Network's The First 48 was born when two young men were fatally shot just two blocks from the garden.

PRIORITIES

I guarantee you no one living in Overtown on Wednesday was thinking of buying cars that produce fewer emissions or recycling the empty plastic bottles and cans strewn about the street near the crime scene.

``They care about their lives, man,'' David Murray, Overtown resident and Roots in the City manager, says of his neighbors. ``Ask me tomorrow, and maybe they care about the earth again through this garden, but even so it will be about how the garden can help them. Food and money, man, protection. That's what it's about. Everything else comes later!''

The murders are discouraging. But Roots in the City is encouraging. And if its growth continues and the job opportunities spread, it is only a matter of time before residents of Overtown spark a domino effect of concern and action for the health of their community. That's practical environmentalism.

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