Permaculture

Kootenay Permaculture Institute, Winlaw, BC.Permaculture is an observation-based land use system that echoes the principles of centuries-old systems of sustained agriculture.  In the 1970s it hit Australia with Mollison and Holmgren's Permaculture One (1978) and Mollison's subsequent Permaculture Design Course.  
We had an article in On Site 7 by Sam Smith, from Australia, who had taken the course and then took permaculture concepts to the rebuilding of rural community buildings in Bosnia after the war.  
Permaculture is more than just the ecological use of land, it aims for stable agricultural use that is able to sustain itself for generations involving human agency and products, animals both domestic and wild, and the specifics of geology, climate, weather and culture.  
Underneath the principles of permaculture is the idea that an environment will reach maturity and all will be in harmony at that point.  Anyone who has lived in a forest might realise that maturity is perhaps a euphemism for old and that is not an end point, as forests are in a constant state of renewal.  However, permaculture's value is in healing monocultural agricultural land, abused for several generations with chemicals and such.
 
Transition towns - big in Britain.  Urban agriculture - big in Cuba.  Permaculture - huge in Australia.  Islands all, and islands missing at least one key ingredient we in the large continents take for granted: space, water, money.
I wonder if a city such as Calgary in a country such as Canada will ever feel any sort of a pinch that leads to cultural change.  The recent recession glanced off it.  The agricultural land it keeps expanding into are either grain crops or cattle, neither of which are particularly intensively farmed and so are considered, in the public mind, as pretty much empty.  There is a distinct lack of urgency: we have space, water and a lot of money – why would anything need to change.  There is a kind of meanness of spirit in this, especially when one knows that in other places in the world, including in Canada, real social, cultural and agricultural revolutions are happening, out of necessity. 

Urban Agriculture, Cuba

Kristina Taboulchanas. Organoponico La Calsada

The Transition Town network started after a transport strike in Britain when the country was allegedly within 2 days of running out of food, so dependent are western countries on imports. 
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the further tightening of the US embargo, Cuba's intensive chemically-dependent agriculture sector also collapsed. We toy with visions of a world without oil, but Cuba was an island with hardly any oil: no transportation, little energy for food storage, freezing or refrigeration, no more fertiliser or pesticides and farmland largely given over to a cash crop: sugar for export.  The USSR took Cuba's sugar crop in support of the Socialist Revolution: once it was gone, so was Cuba's export sector. 

In what was known as The Special Period, the Ministry of Agriculture formed an urban agriculture unit which supports organic gardening methods for gardens on public and unused land:  27,000 such gardens in Havana alone.  Depending on the size, huertos populares employ individuals to community groups.  Old methods are used: manure, compost, worms, weeding, crop rotation and inter-cropping (crops under, on and above the same piece of ground).
With huertos populares and the state-owned organoponicos (raised beds full of compost on paved or infertile land), produce stays in its own neighbourhood, obviating transportation costs.  The Ministry of Public Health supports herbal medicine, so the production of medicinal herbs is an important sector.  Schools have gardens, hospitals grow their own food, individuals have chickens, gardens and fruit trees in their own yards.  The large collective farms still operate and supply staples particularly to Havana and Santiago de Cuba, which together have 3.2 million people and not enough urban space for total garden self-sufficiency.  However, no longer are Cubans dependent on state distribution of food.  The huertos populares and privados and the marketing of the produce are independent, once they are established and supported in their start-up by the Ministry of Agriculture. 

I think one could look to present Cuban agricultural policy to see what a world without oil might look like: traditional, co-operative, better food, a closer relationship to the land, even if it is a back yard stuffed with vegetables and fruit trees, less packaging, less transport of green tomatoes and rock-hard avocados, bananas that are ripened chemically in shipping containers. 

Of course Cuba has an unemployment problem, again because of the embargo which prevents a good many things, but also provides many hands to work these gardens. In 2003, the agricultural sector provided 22% of all new Cuban jobs.
 
There's the irony: the 'unemployed' are busy sustaining life, feeding people, cultivating the soil, making it all better, improving their communities, culture and bodies.  We have unemployed people, we even have homeless people: might we give them something valuable to do, making them valuable members of our towns and cities?

Transition Towns

Gardening Course, Totnes, Devon.

BBC's One Planet visited Totnes where the Transition Town concept was formed in 2006.  It is now a huge network with 150 towns in England, a dozen in Scotland and in Wales, 30 in Australia, 60 or so in the US, including Reno, 13 in Canada and a scattering throughout the rest of the world.
 
Totnes began by thinking about how they wanted the town to look and to be in 2030 and from that formed a plan which is now being implemented.  This goes beyond watching An Inconvenient Truth and worrying about peak oil, it actually raises money, installs photo-voltaic panels on roofs, has a garden plot exchange as part of a food and land reform initiative so that food starts to be produced locally again.  Transition towns aim for carbon neutrality—they are everything that one would hope for in an intelligent civilisation.  Places apply to become a Transition Town and the city councils have to be on board.

Portobello in Scotland started with a victory over a superstore coming into the community; Armidale NSW in Australia has a local food initiative with workshops, sowing guides, accessible fields for gleaners, farms for manure, a permaculture design course, a perennial food garden (nut and fruit trees) in public spaces.   

The Canadian list of Transition Towns includes obvious places – Salt Spring Island, Vancouver and Nelson, BC, but also Victoria, Ottawa, London and Barrie.  
Peterborough wants to set up two land trusts, fund the necessary access and service costs and ensure that it is used for food production.  Community Garden Land Trusts are 'a way to equalise some of the social inequity built into the 20th century economic growth model'.  

Powell River's transition group is newer and perhaps representative of what really goes on in setting up as a Transition Town. Its website shows a lot of hard slog to raise awareness, get people out to meetings, to films, to workshops and protests.  

However, it is a very large network, clearly made up of people who are not going to wait for their governments to do something about the environmental crisis.  They access whatever government resources are going however, and then just get on with it, bringing in local industry where they can.  Looking at the well established transition towns in England and the ambitious projects underway one realises that the movement there has control and power.  It is not a fringe activity, it appears to be in the centre of the collective community.  

I think it is the brilliant front edge of a paradigm shift starting from below, not from the top.

Hard Rain Project

Mark Edwards' Hard Rain project consists of drastic photos of environmental problems, each captioned with a line from Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's A'Gonna Fall.  The project is shown in outside displays, on temporary hoardings, pinned to railings – in the public domain.  The Hard Rain project has already been shown in 50 cities around the world, none in Canada however.  Dylan's Hard Rain is made, here, to anticipate today's accelerating disasters. For example, 'Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world' underlines a tsunami image.  This might seem obvious except that Dylan's 1962 lyrics were generally thought to refer to Cold War nuclear annihilation.  This reinscription of the lyrics by way of images, plus the tune itself making one inevitably sing the captions, prevents the passive gaze: the tune leaps into the brain, with a kind of synaesthesia the photos rewrite the lyric.  Each line links a contemporary fact – deforestation in Haiti perhaps, with the global inevitablility of disaster.  The line brings it home.