Can you dig it? A gardener talks climate change. Who better?

Donald Trump's choice of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, like all Trumpian choices, sends an unambiguous message. I, for one, welcome the clarity. We've entered a new political era, thanks to Twitter, of open and honest communication with our national CEO.

So what will a fully corporatized America look like? How will Rex Tillerson, whose major accomplishment at Exxon Mobil was launching a successful conspiracy to distort climate-change research, allow what he called "an engineering problem" to be fixed by "an engineering solution," i.e., more burning of his products, oil and gas?

As industry "grapples with the problem," the planet is being blanketed by ever more climate gases until, presumably, only the 0.001 percent will be wealthy enough to protect themselves from the effects of climate disruption.

What's fair is fair, Ayn Rand would say if she were alive today. Humans never were particularly altruistic. Organized religion didn't stand a chance against humankind's obsession with individualism. Why should a constitutional democracy?

I spent a recent weekend (OK, half of it) helping my neighbors assemble a fancy skating rink in their backyard. It took all day, because this is no ordinary skating rink but one just like the professionals use, only downsized to the scale of the 11-year-old hockey player who will use it.

They have three kids. One is set on making the U.S. Olympic women's hockey team.

I tried to avoid making jokes about last year's rink, which remained frozen for about two days, or the rink the year before, which was great fun until the polar vortex turned winter too nasty for kids unaccustomed to 20-below windchills.

My neighbors are delightful people. They are also, I suspect, climate-change deniers. Best not to challenge a person's political views if you want to remain friends. They live across the street from a gardener. My plants do the talking for me.

When I suggested they mow the grass where the rink would be and their mower turned out to be empty of gas, I brought over my plug-in mower/shredder and ordered them not to rake up the clipping and shredded leaves. This was the proper way to mow a lawn, I said. I know. I'm a garden writer.

They obeyed.

Gardeners are nature lovers and as such we are more in tune with nonhuman species — from microorganisms that dwell in the soil to bees and butterflies that pollinate their plants — than, say, your average football fan who spends his or her summer weekends on the golf course.

I love football (though violence is killing the professional game). Golf is OK, too. But like football, it's only a game. The point of the game is to drive a small white ball high above those aforementioned microorganisms. If the ball happens to fell a migrating mallard, well, watch your flight path, buddy.

It isn't the golfer's job to care for migrating species — or to keep the fairways soft underfoot and the greens flat as a pancake. Those tasks are delegated to laborers who tool around in small trucks with all manner of chemical sprayers attached.

Dandelion just ahead! Unleash the malathion.

Golf, the industry, says it is getting more sustainable. But until the rules are changed to reward those who can loft a ball off a tee planted in native prairie dropseed and putt across a green planted in white clover all while avoiding a water hazard that is a wetland marsh teeming with other hazards to a scratch golfer such as mosquitoes, the concept of golf going green is pretty much hopeless.

There is nothing even remotely sustainable about carpeting a dozen or more acres of once-fertile land in a monoculture of a nonnative turf grass. I suppose paving a parking lot is worse.

Paving the heartland with corn and soy is less sustainable than either of the above because the land in question is vast and used to be the most naturally fertile land on earth, thanks to thousands of years of post-Ice Age cultivation by plants that pushed their roots deep into the nutrient-rich hard clay and kept it workable for heavy steel plows.

Energy-rich coal is what you get when prairie plants don't interrupt the natural process of decomposition. Also underground oceans of crude oil and pockets of energy-rich "natural" gas.

Coming to terms with climate change means more than just making cars more fuel-efficient and replacing coal, with its abundance of energy waiting to be released with the flick of a match (this unfortunately releases carbon into Earth's atmosphere and traps it there), with natural gas. It means getting rid of fossil fuels and cars-as-we-know-them altogether.

Gardeners can make a huge contribution to raising awareness of how and why this must be done. When I speak before a gardening audience, I invariably find my listeners pushing me to be more outspoken, not less, on issues they understand intimately from hands-on experience — better, I would argue, than many university-trained soil scientists, because most soil scientists see their job as finding ways to add chemicals artificially make soil increase yields. They are paid to test products that can be bought and sold, because markets are the lifeblood of a capitalist economy.

Until gardeners are incentivized to offer the earthworm populations they "grow" in their nutritious soils to agriculture, or to package their beneficial microorganisms and sell them to a company like Cargill, they will have no role to play.

Organic products are out there, of course. I can buy worms and even incubate them in my basement. I can buy the packaged version of the microscopic bacteria that feed my soil just as I can buy bottles of calcium pills instead of yogurt.

Unfortunately, though, the best way to fix our polluted planet isn't to monetize the effort. Just as we need to take the money out of politics, so it is with climate. Instead of inventing a product to solve a problem, it's time we focus on the problem first and how to prevent it.

Gardeners can lead the way. They already do, by choosing to spend their free time creating backyard versions of balanced ecosystems that will become more than pretty places to escape to. Home gardeners have long since given up on chemical pesticides and fertilizers. They are way ahead of commercial farmers. Their tiny plots serve as experiment stations and demonstration sites. They answer questions for those curious enough to ask, such as: Why is your backyard teeming with wildlife when all you did was plant some flowers?

Gardeners have a vital role to play as we turn our attention to feeding the world. They will share their expertise with community vegetable gardeners, who will share their expertise with small-scale, organic farmers, who will share their expertise with larger-scale farmers wishing to wean themselves from the industrial model of factory farming plants as well as livestock. The latter will be released from their filthy confinements and returned to the great outdoors to do their part in fertilizing the soil the old-fashioned way.

Climate change is a huge threat. I am hopeful that gardening and politics will partner in saving our species and millions of others from the mistakes humans have made.

It's time to heed the example of Donald Trump. Americans are desperate for straight talk. You may detest the president-elect's policies, such as they are, but at least the man speaks his mind.

How best to counter the threat of fascism that some see looming in the Trump era? Get off the couch. Get into the garden. Figure out for yourself whether climate change is a threat even greater than fascism (I think the two go hand in hand). Then do something to help humanity find a new way forward that harnesses true facts about nature that are millennia older than us.

Bonnie Blodgett is a St. Paul writer specializing in environmental topics. An avid gardener, she frequently lectures on her adventures in the garden (bonnieblodgett@gmail.com).