Discuss: growing food in cities, and using the internet to learn how

During the course of my work this week I had reason to visit a school in north-eastern New South Wales. That region has a reputation for attracting and fostering people with "alternative" views and values, particularly in regard to environmental protection and sustainable living. So it was that one of the teachers, knowing beforehand that I publish this blog, introduced me to a student who has a keen interest in permaculture and who is also active in a group centred around the Transition Towns concept (see link in my "highly recommended" sidebar).

Now, not that this blog has a huge world-wide audience or anything, I would like to give that student the opportunity to remain anonymous but at the same time see if I can't get a bit of discussion going here around a couple of the ideas that have come to mind as a result of our meeting.

I put that TT link over there ages ago and haven't looked at their site in months. I think they're clearly world leaders, forging a path to the future. What I'm not so sure about is how to make that path into a highway wide enough to take the cities along with the towns. I should revisit their site and see if there's been any progress on that subject.

One of the obvious things (to me) is that people in cities will need to grow food for themselves and their immediate community. More than that, they'll need to do so sustainably, recycling nutrients in efficient closed loops and doing it all with an absolute minimum of external energy inputs. In other words we need permaculture cities. Unfortunately the vast majority of city dwellers know nothing about growing anything.

Take me as an example: I have a borrowed copy of the 2nd edition of "Introduction to Permaculture" and recently bought the Digger's Club's "Australian Fruit & Vegetable Garden". I've been experimenting in the back yard for the past year or so, but so far have very little to show (or eat) as a result.

So, you thus-far anonymous student, if you're looking for school project ideas that combine IT with permaculture, you might consider starting an online library of training/instructional podcasts or other resources to help city folk like me with no horticultural knowledge transform our backyards and balconies into productive, sustainable food gardens. Seriously - was there ever a period in history prior to the present day where an entire generation of a civilisation had no idea how to grow their own food? We need that knowledge back again, and the internet provides a platform unlike anything else in human history for the distribution of knowledge.

The internet might well be our best defence against falling into another dark age as oil production falls. We stand to lose a great deal of our personal mobility. It just won't be feasible for people like me to travel hundreds of kilometers in a single day just to provide some brief specialist service. But if we can maintain and build on our communications infrastructure and the library of publicly-accessible knowledge then the physical isolation won't necessarily be a barrier to skills and ideas.

What I would like to do now is to invite you all to hit the comments and have a bit of a discussion about those two ideas and their intersection. Will city people need to grow their own food in the future? Can the internet be used effectively to deliver training in the essential garden skills and design principles? If you're a city person, what kind of online resources do you think would help you? If you're a gardening guru, how could you best capture and share what you have learned?

Global Issues, Local Action!

I just received this on a mailing list:



Lots of things I love about this:
- High profile, high quality production focusing on sustainability
- We now have State Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation (an inspired combination!)
- Local council support from the Morningside Ward Livability Committee
- Business engagement (the cinema complex)
- Fund raising for local climate change initiatives

What's more, the message came to me via a completely different political group, which demonstrates unity across a broad spectrum of parties, groups and levels of government.

I've been looking for an opportunity to hear and perhaps speak with Andrew McNamara, recently appointed as the Minister for SCCI as noted above. I'll be trying to make the time to get across the river and participate in this event. If you're reading this in Brisbane, please spread the word.

Springback

There's a phenomenon in metal working called "springback". It's something you are probably already familiar with but may never have really thought about. Briefly, it's what a piece of metal might do when you attempt to bend it into a new shape: it will resist the change and spring back partly or completely towards the shape it started in. A guy I used to know worked as a fitter and turner, and he described how part of the skill of his job was to work out how much you had to bend something past where you wanted it to end up, so that it would spring back to the desired position.

It seems to me that similar effect can be seen in human behaviour.

There's a clear imperative upon us all to change our patterns of consumption and resource use. I've blogged about my efforts to conserve energy and water, to reduce waste and to cut down on GHG emissions in various ways. But I'm finding that after the initial pressure is applied to try and re-shape my behaviour there's a clear tendency to spring back towards the old ways again.

It affects different aspects of my behaviour to different degrees. I haven't checked the meters for a while but I think we're doing OK on the energy front. Water consumption will be up a little because with colder weather and plenty of stress from work and our new baby I'm being less disciplined about shower times. My car is now around a thousand kilometres behind my lease target (which is good for the environment and bad for my finances). But when it comes to Ice Break consumption... I'm failing big time.

I'm about as good a psychologist as I am a gardener (which means not very) but all this makes me wonder about the best ways to achieve the changes that we believe are needed to make human life a sustainable and positive component of life on Earth. Changing our behaviour is not really the goal: the responsible use of resources and the elimination of "waste" is the goal. Our behaviour tends to conform to the pressures placed on it. The challenge then is to work out how to maintain the pressure on our behaviour.

It's stretching the analogy a bit, but if I wanted a piece of springy metal to conform to a particular shape one of my options would be to brace it somehow. To trap it in a framework which didn't permit it to spring back to the shape it's naturally inclined to take. What's the equivalent in terms of human behaviour?

Perhaps instead of focusing on my behaviour and trying to convince others to behave like me, I should be putting the effort into changing the frameworks that guide people's behaviour - including my own. Those frameworks include social and personal values, education, policy, law and technology.


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Hmm... switching mode now from essay to free-thinking blog post as I ponder what I've just been writing.

It seems to me that the primary driver for personal behaviour must surely be personal values. If so, that would imply that my failure to change behaviour in personal matters (such as limiting my Ice Break consumption as I had committed to do) comes down to a question of my own values. That I value the experience of drinking coffee-flavoured milk more highly than the environmental benefits gained by reducing my consumption. And that would probably be because the benefits of drinking it are personal, immediate and known whereas the benefits of reducing consumption are dispersed, delayed and unknown.

I would guess that same comparison could be applied just about universally in regard to the ways we all choose to live our lives. To take it to the extreme, not many of us would voluntarily live a life of poverty and hard labour in order to better the lives of others. Those people who do live lives according to those kinds of principles tend to be venerated rather than emulated.

It all comes down to the question of why we do anything at all, I suppose. For me, at this point in time, the basic motivation is something along the lines of having the best life I can whilst simultaneously promoting the best lives possible for everybody else who lives now and who will live in the future. The attitude is more one of teamwork than of charity, but it's forever difficult to try and balance my quality of life with that of everybody else when both are essentially unquantifiable.

I seem to have settled on some core principles though, including one I mentioned earlier: "the responsible use of resources and the elimination of waste".

I'll leave it there for now. Something to ponder and possibly post about another time.