This is one of my more peculiar hobby horses, but let's take a moment to non-ironically appreciate Prince Charles. I came around to the Prince back when he married Camilla Parker Bowles. For all the scorn heaped on the couple, they always struck me as a particularly touching love story. They'd been together, in some form or another, for decades. Bowles is frumpy and long-villified, yet despite the hits to his public image and the opposition of both the royal family and the British people, Charles insisted on eventually marrying her -- pure sentimentalism, driven by a desire to legitimize and celebrate her role in his life (even as she will never be part of the succession).
Now, Charles is about to release a book on organic gardening. And the Prince's commitment isn't new, nor untested. Charles has a farm that's run according to organic, sustainable, principles. And he's been public with his convictions, dating back to long before such ideas were hip. "When all of this started in the 1980s," The New York Times reminds us, "the British press ground His Royal Highness down to a nub, branding him the prince who talked to plants. (Granted, he did say things like, “To get the best results, you must talk to your vegetables.”)' So there again, he took shit for a cause he believed in, and that most of us now find laudable. There's a courage to that, and for all the scorn heaped on him in The Queen for refusing to take a strong stand when the monarchy was in crisis, when Charles has stood firm, the principles he protected were significantly more admirable than a mere rearguard defense of his own station in life. "He’s still a little sensitive about [the attacks on his environmentalism]," continues the Times. '"One of the great difficulties” of converting to organic farming,' he wrote in his book, 'turned out to be convincing others that you had not taken complete leave of your senses."'
