The goal for hosting a garden on the trail is to inspire others to growing even a little of their own food. We all need to ease ourselves off the utter dependence on the industrial food chain.
If you're here because of the Sydney Edible Garden Trail, chances are reasonable that you're interested in growing your own food. Maybe you've already got the full mindset and the reasons and just need the impetus to get started. Maybe you've started and are looking to expand and came around to get more ideas. Maybe you just thought growing your own food might be nice and hey, let's see what other people are doing!
All excellent reasons.
Please be warned: this post is not about gardening, per se. It's about people, processes, politics, pragmatism, and, yes, permaculture. It's about the way we approach problems and find solutions for them. And I know I don't have any kind of power to change anything more than my own behaviour and perhaps to influence other people to think things my way.
Permaculture always made sense to me – a permanent culture, instead of the throwaway one I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. I had more faith in politics and powers back then, I thought that more people thought like me – all of humanity, together.
The last 18 months since Trump II, six years since COVID, decade since America dived into its decline, have been a rude awakening for some, but there's been an inevitability about it, too.
War in Iran has just upped the timeline something savage.
Did you know that the LPG plant that was bombed processed a large portion of the fertiliser that industrialised nations use to fertilise their fields? And the Northern Hemisphere is going into spring planting right now.
There may very well be purists thinking “but that's great! Now we can just use natural fertiliser...”
On enough food for 8 billion people, spread asymmetrically across the world?
Yes, there are a metric FUCKTON of problems with the way we do things, but the problem is that if we stop doing things the way we do them just like that, then the billions of people who are depending on the produce of those things that are done the (problematic) way we developed them are going to suffer.
100 years ago, the population of the world was 2 billion. In a century we have cubed that. And although there are plenty of people living in poverty or on the poverty line, their lives are still valuable. They are still human beings with a right to clean water, clean air, shelter, kindness, human dignity...and food.
Let's not be absolutists about this. There are ways that we can use fossil fuels, or problematic processes less. But we cannot give them up entirely without serious horror being visited on a whole lot of people. And maybe those people don't look like you, or don't live like me, or don't think like us, but they're still people. They're still human. And I don't have to like them – or the processes that are problematic – to recognise that we need to wean ourselves off the shitty stuff rather than stop it all cold turkey.
People are going to die. Most of them will be children.
A friend (I don't remember which one, but it might have been the US Republican one) once said 'politics is the art of the possible'. I don't know if she still believes that – she's gone full-bore 'daughters of the revolution' which I think is a right-wing nationalistic 'natural citizen' type movement so...probably not. I imagine that now she would say 'politics is the art of preserving the culture that I personally want to live in with people who personally also see the world like me'.
Nevertheless, 'the art of the possible' is a nuance that entirely too many people no longer recognise – perhaps because the internet has siloed us into our groups, and we have no patience or space for those who think differently.
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