It's not been a good season for tomatoes. It's not just me - at the Wholefoods co-op we've been talking about how they aren't quite forming fruit, despite lots of bees.

In the greenhouse, the black cherries are doing extraordinary well - I'm bringing in fat handfuls. There's an early ripening roma that's grown a few green fruit in the front vegetable patch. Everything else though - meh. Great leaves, lots of bees - but not enough fruit for this time of the year. It hasn't been hot enough, we think. La Nina, I'm both grateful for you (the apples are plentiful) and I'm shaking my fist at you.

As I pick warm cherries and black pot chillis in the greenhouse, exploding the sour fruit between my teeth, I think about how this world needs diversity more than ever. We appreciate it in nature. Monoculture is of the old ways - we simply cannot have one crop over many, because if changing weather patterns, disease or insects destroy that crop, there are others that might provide for us. Next year, I'll plant more in the greenhouse, and a lot of different varieties of tomato, trying to figure out which one does best in what season. Black cherries of course, are on the list. I've already saved the seed to pass on to the community at large.

This year though, tomato wise, my efforts aren't enough. I'm less than in the tomato growing world, jealously checking to see if anyone else has a better crop than me, if they are more tomatoe-ly rich than me. They aren't - thank god, as I'd feel so inferior. Yes, I'm joking - I just want more tomatoes.

I think about how we can agree that biodiversity is important. We know intensive farming and monocrops are bad, and companion planting, successive sowing, heirloom varieties that have stood the test of time, and various varieties that work in your area are good.

Somehow, we don't see this with people.

Bodies become political. America is founded on equality between men - that is, white landowner men. Black, disabled, LTBQI, fat, woman, poor - all less than. All needing to climb some hierachical ladder to prop up a system. Buy this, conform to that. Do as you are told. Stay where you are whilst the socially mobile enjoy the power they do. The rich, the famous, the beautiful - that's something we should all be working to attain to achieve happiness, wealth, social standing.

Yet we need diversity in people as much as we need it in nature. We need the strong in body as much as we need the empathetic, we need the rational just as much as we need the emotional, the artists as much as the scientists. We need to look upon others not with acceptance for who they might be, but with love. We need to find radical love for ourselves so that we can love others unconditionally, and thereupon not use them for our own gain, or keep them down to make ourselves feel better. In this way we stop striving to climb the imaginary ladder we've created with our institutions - capitalist, educational, relationships, all - we just don't need the ladder.

In this way we achieve a more socially just world.

How beautiful the world could be if we understand that it took many varieties of tomatoes to make a productive, abundant and nourishing garden. Biodiversity is absolutely neccessary to feed us year to year. By this extension of my greenhouse musing, it takes all of us - every single one of us, no matter the body - to make the world a better place for all.