Articles – Page 7 – Adventures in Permaculture

OPENERS:
1. What’s your must-have favorite food that cannot be grown or produced in your region?

2. What would you have for dinner tonight if you relied completely on your home garden?

Living in an Ecosystem: Eating What Nature Brings
By Steven Saint Thomas

Byron Bay is universally considered a must-see destination for travelers in Australia. The white beaches along Cape Byron – the most easterly point on the continent – are pristine and breathtaking.

In town, sidewalks are filled with surfers, hippies and tourists sauntering past cafes and trendy clothing shops, alternative health centers and organic food stores. Seems to be a prime place for permaculture to take root.

One of the pillars of Byron Permaculture is Sharon Gibson, who has created an urban permaculture center on a sleepy suburban street in Mullumbimby, a small town just west of Byron Bay.

Like a lot of homesteaders, Gibson has vegetable gardens, fruit trees and chickens. But as a permaculturist, she’s reluctant to run out to the local Woolworth’s supermarket for her daily bread.

Her goal is to be self-reliant and light on the carbon footprint.

“We eat what needs to be eaten,” Gibson says, flashing a shy smile and yanking a big taro out of her backyard garden. “We’ll have this for dinner.”

For human habitat to function as a part of an ecosystem, people need to eat what nature brings in any given season. Our 24/7 culture of eating whatever we want, whenever we want it, is predicated on cheap petroleum – a resource that is rapidly going away.

So Gibson cultivates what grows best in the subtropical Climate of Byron Bay – black sapote, choko, pigeon peas and zucchini. Rather than buy imported apples from the supermarket, she grows yacon, a South American tuber that tastes like apple.

After calculating her food footprint, Gibson moved from a long-standing vegetarian diet to eating home-raised chickens and ducks. Now she’s not importing tofu and other processed vegetarian items.

At the other end of town, Gibson has helped organize a section of the Mullumbimby Community Garden into a permaculture center. Fledgling designers in her Permaculture Design Certification classes use the “Permaculture Backyard” section for hands-on learning.

The Community Garden functions as a local food hub with a section for private plots, a children’s garden, “Food For All” beds where volunteers can work for veggies, outdoor kitchen, events pavilion, and seed and garden shop.

Gibson says she raises all the vegetables, fruits, legumes and poultry she and her family needs. Trips to the store are reserved for specialty items like soy sauce, chocolate and coffee.

“The tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus and greens need to be eaten, so that’s what we’ll base our lunch around,” she says, looking out at the garden irrigated completely by rainwater. “For dinner tonight, we’ve got taro, beans and whatever else is available. In a permaculture home garden, you’re looking at what needs to be eaten.”

DIG:
1. Does your region or neighborhood have any restrictions on using rainwater or graywater? On raising animals in your yard?

2. What fruits, vegetables or animals are you currently raising on your property?

3. Do you know the carbon footprint of the foods you eat?

4. What governmental or nonprofit entity is most involved in establishing community gardens in your area?

REFLECT:
1. What should you start cultivating to move a significant part of your food needs from the grocery store to your property?

2. How could eating more seasonably reduce your and your community’s carbon footprint?

3. What local food items could you substitute for foods that your community imports or that require lots of energy and water?

4. Is there an existing community garden in your area that could be expanded into an ecology or permaculture center? What would be a good step towards that transformation?

By Steven Saint Thomas

Where is your next meal coming from? If you’re like most middle-class Americans, you don’t give it much thought. You’ll pick up food at the nearby grocery store, or pop into a restaurant or fast-food drive-through to get a meal someone else prepares for you.

As long as the grocery stores and restaurants stay in business, you are what they call “food secure.” If you ever stumble upon a discussion of “food security,” it usually revolves around poor people who have challenges accessing the current food system.

These people often live in so-called food deserts, where the closest place to get a meal is a convenience store or vending machine. Or maybe they just don’t have any money – access to food is not an inalienable right under the U.S. Constitution.

Now, suppose that our current food system collapses or is disrupted for a while. Maybe a drought in California wipes out half this year’s harvest and prices skyrocket. Maybe a Middle East conflict knocks out a major pipeline and gas prices jump, making it impossible for truckers to drive long distances with your food.

What if your nearby grocery chain is acquired and the new corporate owner decides to shut down the stores in your state because they are lower-performing or less-profitable?

Any of these possible scenarios would bring food security jumping like a jaguar over those poor people to beat down your middle-class door.

In 2010, the Australian government developed a national food policy. While recognizing the challenges of climate change and population growth, Aussie leaders declared the country “food secure.” After all, Australians produce three times the food they consume every year.

The government is taking that for granted and focusing on the business potential in positioning Australia as the bread basket for a food-insecure China.

Faith and investment in the status quo – a globalized food system owned and controlled by Big Ag, Big Oil and Big Box – is the de facto food-security policy of the U.S. as well. The Farm Bill – the closest thing Americans have to a national food policy – assumes if we give the Biggies what they want, we’ll all eat.

Permaculturists and others in Australia don’t share this faith. For two years, they criss-crossed their continent to develop a “People’s Food Plan” – a blueprint to help people feed themselves rather than rely on the Biggies.

The Australian government doesn’t pay much attention to the People’s Food Plan, but that’s OK. The whole point is regional self-reliance, the foundation of permaculture.

Does your state or county have a Food Future Plan? Has your region done a food assessment? What does your food system look like?

Colorado does not have a Food Future plan and the state’s sustainability coalition website doesn’t even mention food. Meanwhile, 5 million Coloradans import 95 percent of the food they eat. They are almost completely dependent on the global food system to survive.

Trendy civic leaders and politicians adore farmers markets and large grocery chains boast “local food,” but there is relatively little cultivation in Colorado and no push to encourage young entrepreneurs to go into farming.

Local-food stakeholders in my region need to draft a Food Future plan. The process began in earnest in 2010, but stalled. If we can complete the plan, at least we’ll have a blueprint to face the future. We might even know where our next meal will come from.

Category: Articles

Living in an ecosystem: Eating what nature brings

Food Future