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home and local food A ‘debate’ was recently initiated into why I see home gardening and local food as a more productive approach towards addressing current global concerns, than a focus on ‘future threats’, in particular Peak Oil and Global Climate Change. This was my contribution, my opposite number in this debate is disguised as ‘X’.
Hi X,
You said ‘Chris says she disapproves of my approach (without really saying why),’ so here goes.
My attitude is not so much disapproval as a resigned sadness, an underlying despair, and a feeling of ‘here we go again.’ I’m sure your approach is fine in its own terms, and probably the best that can be done in the circumstances. But… To explain, I’ll have to tell you the story of why I believe that nothing short of a land use revolution is going to make human life on earth secure and fulfilling. And, very much second to that, why I couldn’t give a damn about Peak Oil and Planetary Climate Change.
It starts over fifty years ago, when I was a girl living in Cookham, a village in Berkshire, in a house fifty yards away from the fields, and a stony lane leading up to my school, and then cherry orchards opposite the beech woods, bordering a popular scenic viewpoint, then a network of paths and lanes down to a wild marsh and the ancient willows on the banks of the river Thames. And I was free to wander all that from the age of seven until leaving for university in Birmingham. At home there was my father, a freelance commercial artist who talked as he worked, about when he was in the navy during the War seeing forests being felled in West Africa, about his fears for the tropical rainforests, for pollution destroying the real ‘lungs of the earth’, which he said was the populations of photosynthesising algae around the continental shelves, for jet planes flying through the ‘heavyside layer’ that protects life on earth from high energy radiation. He was wrong about the last point, but not much: we call it the ozone layer, and it was aerosol cans not jet planes.
While I lived in Cookham, one of the two farms, Mr Ricketts’s, was bought up by the other, Copas’s, the farmyards we used to have school visits to disappeared, as did the cherry orchards. There had been child-high wheat we used to tunnel through, and be told not to in assembly by Mr Turner, the headmaster, who also said not to play in the stooks, or climb on the haystacks, or annoy the sheep or the cows. But the wheat plants shrank to ankle height, most of the hedges were dug up to make a huge uninviting plantation, with no official path across. No sheep or cows. The marsh was drained for a golf course.
A couple of marriages, three children and a career followed, during which time I belonged to CND, the Labour Party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, the Soil Association, and a few others, but had little time to be active. Then I read a book called Topsoil and Civilisation, and it changed my life. This told me that ‘organic’ farming was fundamentally no less destructive than ‘Standard Farm Practice’, like Copas’s. For thousands of years farming to feed urban populations had been clearing forests and destroying soils. The problem was citizens’ alienation from the land, and what Marx, in discussions with Justus von Liebig, inventor of NPK chemical fertiliser, called the ‘metabolic divide’: food brought in from a distance, shit poured out into the nearest river. I tackled FoE on these insights, got a motion passed at the Members’ Conference asking FoE to address global land degradation – but nothing happened, as I thought because the members have no mandate over the FoE Board. I became a volunteer at FoE Head Office. I wrote a paper on my concerns. I had a half-hour session with Jonathan Porritt, then Director. He said, ‘I’ve read your paper, and I agree with every word, but FoE can’t do what you want.’ He then explained that FoE is a lobbying organisation. It works by choosing a few campaign areas – there were two on land degradation: ‘Tropical Rain Forests’ and ‘Countryside and Agriculture’ – and identifying very specific measures which decision-makers, primarily politicians, had powers to enact, and then put pressure, just on those measures and nothing else. For ‘Tropical Rain Forests’, it was about getting labelling on imported tropical timber to inform consumer choice; for ‘Countryside and Agriculture’, it was measures to protect the remaining hedges and wildflower meadows. No issue beyond the chosen few could be taken on. The other campaign areas at the time, I think, were ‘nuclear power’, ‘acid rain’, the ‘Greenhouse Effect’, ‘toxic waste’ and ‘recycling’. The public had an expectation that FoE would provide information on ‘environmental issues’, so FoE did some of that, really rather badly. Children doing projects, and their teachers, used to complain about the poor quality and meagre content. I was working as a management consultant at that time, and did an assignment at Marks and Spencer’s Head Office. I hated that culture so much I decided to donate my fee of £6000 to FoE towards saving the tropical rainforests. FoE got excited by this donation and persuaded me to make it a covenant to recoup the tax, which I did. But that meant the money had to go to Friends of the Earth Trust, a charity, so it went towards some of this poor information for the British public, not a penny to the forests. I gave up on FoE – although being on their Speakers List proved useful for what I did next.
I spent eight years giving talks and workshops in schools, colleges, to adult groups of every sort you can imagine, on various aspects of ‘the environment’, but I always managed to turn the topic into something to do with food and land degradation. I had an amazing collection of slides of gully erosion in China, Russia, siltation in Madagascar, dust bowls in America, exhausted cotton fields, helicopters spraying banana plantations in Panama, rows of little oil palms where forests had been and so on, many of them illegally copied from issues of National Geographic, or pictures we took ourselves in this country and in India. I tried to draw people’s attention to how they had some responsibility for what was happening to the land, especially loss of forests, soil erosion, salinisation, desertification. I talked about a walk in the countryside and bringing along a picnic, such as a sandwich: bread, margarine and cheese, orange juice and a banana, and what that did to land elsewhere: where vegetable oil came from, cattle feed etc.; and the damage caused over the centuries, to land and society, by the production of legal drugs: sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco. Lots of interaction, discussions, writing up on flip chart paper, typing up what they said afterwards and sending it back to the group. It was exhausting, being jolly and encouraging in the face of well-meaning incomprehension – total alienation from the land and indifference to it.
Meanwhile, the ‘green movement’ in general, was, as now, heavily into ‘future threats’, with its harangue about ‘unless we do such-and-such, so-and-so will happen.’ Never mind what was happening already, and damage already done needing remedial action, no, it was: ‘let’s worry about the future’. And, of course, to the extent anyone noticed, vested interests could make sure that nothing changed; they could protect their bottom line short-termism by getting scientists to say it never would happen. And the cunning thing for them was that an earlier phase of ‘doom and gloom’, the Club of Rome projections of running out of everything, had been proved wrong as technology was developed to use less of all the critical materials, or substitute others.
And then I discovered permaculture, in late 1980s or 1990, and I thought, ‘Wow!, there’s actually a solution to all this – a land use revolution, beginning in people’s back gardens, to connect them to the land – how brilliant and amazing, it’s all going to be alright. In 1991 I went on an introductory course, given by PW and DW, at D’s place in Surrey, where he had a huge bed of cut and come again and self-seeded salad greens in January, and then I did the full design course with SP and PG (her first, I think). Full of enthusiasm, I added permaculture to my talks, even to a couple to NFU groups, and they were actually quite intrigued, despite being dismissive of organic farming.
Of course, I went along to Convergences, and there a spot of disillusionment set in. They were uncomfortable, filthy, with gut-wrenching food, and a curious lack of warmth and welcome. I felt like an outsider. I didn’t wear the grunge uniform of skirt over ragged tracksuit trousers, big saggy cardigan and unravelling woolly hat, and muddy boots. They all knew each other. They, apparently, owned permaculture, but owned no land. And there seemed to be a hierarchy amongst them, with swaggerers and devotees, and a lot of loud greetings and hugs.
What was lacking – at my courses and at Convergences – was teaching on how to grow food. Design, yes: zones and sectors, guilds, herb spirals, chickens – but little that would help me create at home the little Garden of Eden effortlessly providing profusion and impressing the neighbours so they’d want to do the same – though I tried. At one event, a European Convergence, there was some inspiration to keep up my faith that this might be the new agricultural revolution, as Emilia Hazelip said it was, and the secret was to keep the soil wild. And there I met M and T who were going to take over the Association journal, and I offered to be on the three-group to help. They seemed my sort of people.
Fifteen years later there has been no revolution in Britain’s 20 million back gardens. There are still only a handful of signed-up permaculturists, and few case studies and demo sites and no information about yields. Convergences are still uncomfortable and (maybe a bit less) filthy with gut-wrenching food. Maybe there are fewer folk in grunge uniforms, more ordinary people like me feeling hopeful. There is still little about how to grow food in your back garden. Worst of all, the main attraction is stuff about ‘future threats’. Here we go again, back around the same loop. Meanwhile the tropical rainforests soon won’t be that any more. They are drying out, not because of the blessed global climate change, but because the extent is shrinking and riddled with holes, incapable – or predicted soon to be – of holding and recycling the rain. Erosion: still goes on. Plantation agriculture: worse than ever. Peasants deprived of land and losing their skills: horrendous. Farmers in India committing suicide in their thousands due to debt and GM seeds. What is going on – now – everywhere on the planet – is dire. What is needed is a land use revolution; what are we getting?: [X’s campaign and project]. Maybe you have no choice but get on this bandwagon. Maybe you can include home gardening and local food as part of the scheme. Maybe you can call the whole scheme ‘permaculture design’ and get the word on people’s lips – but that means it won’t be a new agricultural revolution any more, and that’s what we need. I gather it’s been said that Mollison and Holmgren thought up permaculture in response to an earlier oil crisis, but they’ve both said so much, one can pick and choose – but Mollison did say we should learn how to provide for human needs on less land in order to release the rest to wilderness; so he was a deep ecologist once, and ‘earth care’ has always been first – he even said ‘people care’ and ‘fair shares’ (or however he phrased the third one) were subsets of ‘earth care’. For as long as people are alienated from the land, nothing will change, and we’ll loop-the-loop trying to get each other agonising about the future until the land is bare and everyone starves. Another thing, I predict that technology will be devised to address peak oil and climate change to enable business as usual, and one day we’ll wake up and the light will still go on in the fridge, but they’ll be nothing in it.
There are other ways I could have explained my ‘disapproval’, as you called it. I’ve been working on this stuff for a long time. I try other avenues for bringing about world change [for example, the Quakers (Down to Earth Religion) and revolutionary socialism (Design for Revolution)]. I tell lies in other arenas about permaculture, ecovillages, LETS and so on, to make out it’s all happening, gradually, locally (see discussions at: world in common, especially recently on the subject “The ‘sine qua non’ of socialism?” ). Dr Pangloss has nothing on me!
All the best. Love, Chris
PS The problem, as I have said, with ‘doom and gloom’, i.e. a focus on future threats rather than on what is happening now, is that people can – and do – argue that the threat is unreal. This is an example I encountered recently, from a contributor to the World in Common discussion forum:
PPS Do a google search on ‘peak oil myth’ and you get this piece beginning ‘Peak oil is a scam’. Look in that for: ‘self-renewing oil fields’ which ‘shatters the peak oil myth’. There is more on similar lines, but this one looks useful: ‘The Myth of “Peak Oil”’. I am not saying peak oil is a myth, my concern is with the fact that people can say that it is, which distracts us all from addressing what is happening now. |