Saturday 1st August 2009, 11:30am

CERES Environmental Park, Lee St, Brunswick

In the Multicultural Classroom

From the press release:

First a website, now a book by David Holmgren, Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change will be launched by Adam Grubb, founding editor of Energy Bulletin, an online news list on Peak Oil and Energy related issues, and Permablitz pioneer.

In Future Scenarios, co-originator of the Permaculture concept and leading sustainability innovator David Holmgren shows us what the future might look like in the generations-long era of energy descent that faces us – and also tells us how to adapt to the cultural, political, agricultural, and economic implications of two forces that will shape that future: peak oil and climate change.

Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Probably futures, explains Holmgren, range from the relatively benign “Green Tech” scenario to the near catastrophic “Lifeboats” scenario.

“These aren’t two-dimensional nightmarish scenarios designed to scare people into environmental action. They are compellingly fleshed-out visions of quite plausible alternative futures, which delve into energy, politics, agriculture, social, and even spiritual trends. What they do help make clear are the best strategies for preparing for and adapting to these possible futures.” – Adam Grubb

For more information phone 5348 3636 or email info@holmgren.com.au

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: 26 May 2008

The Australian co-founder of the permaculture concept David Holmgren has today launched a new global scenario planning website, Future Scenarios: www.FutureScenarios.org.

Holmgren says his future scenarios will help both policy makers and activists come to terms with the end of the era of growth.

While the end of growth is so unthinkable to many policy makers and economists that they use the term ‘negative-growth’, Holmgren says we are already entering a generations-long era of ‘energy descent.’ We now face less and less available energy each year, coupled with a destabilised climate.

“The simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation. Each limits the effective options for responses to the other,” writes Holmgren on www.futurescenarios.org.

Holmgren uses a scenario planning framework to bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural and economic implications of peak oil and climate change.

“Scenario planning allows us to use stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail or be transformed,” says Holmgren

Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Scenarios range from the relatively benign Green Tech to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario.

“Many futurists are looking at Facebook, robot pets and other i-fads, whereas David has been studying a much bigger picture. He works from the fundamental resource and environmental constraints, and I’m convinced that he’s got his assumptions right where others have them very wrong. He has followed through with unusual insight, drawing on 30 years of permaculture thinking, which I would say makes him the most important futurist in the world right now,” said Adam Grubb founder of Energy Bulletin (www.energybulletin.net with over 400,000 visitors a month.)

“These aren’t two dimensional nightmarish scenarios designed simply to scare people into environmental action. They are compellingly fleshed out visions of quite plausible alternative futures which delve into energy, politics, agriculture, cultural and even spiritual trends. They help us reconcile our own competing fears and hopes for the future, and to consider the best strategies for adapting to a changing world,” says Grubb.

Holmgren says “we will need resilience and adaptability in the face of radical change.”

‘Energy Descent’
Holmgren coined the term ‘energy descent’ in 2005 as a less negatively loaded way than ‘decline’ or ‘collapse’ for describing a future defined by constantly diminishing energy production.

“I chose the word ‘descent’ because it implies a long and sustained process through which it is possible to survive and even thrive. While energy descent does suggest the demise of globalised industrial civilisation, that process will play out over many decades, if not centuries. For individuals, households, organisations and communities focused on socially and ecologically adaptive design, energy descent is as much an opportunity as an obstacle. Realistic assessment of the larger forces at work in the world helps empower us to better refine our strategies.”

About Permaculture
Permaculture is an environmental design framework modelled on the patterns and relationships found in nature, yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs.

About David Holmgren
Holmgren co-wrote the first permaculture text Permaculture One in 1976 with Bill Mollison (published in 1978). With his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability David re-emerged from the relative shadows as the leading intellectual force of the permaculture movement. Rob Hopkins, founder of the popular Transition Towns initiatives in the UK, described Principles and Pathways as “the most important book of the last 15 years.”

David, his partner Su Dennett, and their son Oliver live at ‘Melliodora’ a small permaculture demonstration property in central Victoria, Australia where they are self sufficient in fruit, vegetables and animal products and provide most of their own energy needs.

Futher info:

David Holmgren
+61 3 5348 3636
info@holmgren.com.au
www.futurescenarios.org
www.holmgren.com.au

How much energy and greenhouse emissions can we save if we grow more home food? How much water? How much waste can we stop going to landfill?

Broadacre industrial agriculture uses 65% of Australia’s water. Our food system (including imports) consumes almost twice as much energy as personal transport, and thanks to soil carbon loss, methane and nitrous oxide emissions, the greenhouse impacts of the food system are disproportionately large. Meanwhile, according to the most recently available figures, most of Victoria’s household wastes going to landfill are organic materials.

Home food production can use existing resources and infrastructure, and use methods which radically reduce resource consumption. This suggests that the potential savings to be made if existing resources and infrastructure are used to increase urban food production are dramatic.

I’ve looked at the Havana example, and various estimates of how much food can be produced in suburban situations and chosen the aspirational targets that by producing the most energy and water intensive portion of our diets at home we can halve our resource use of both energy and water. This is possible because the most energy and water intensive crops — when grown on an industrial scale — are the ones best suited to resource efficient home gardening.

The findings are that the average Victorian household has the potential to reduce landfill waste by around 1.5 tonnes a year by composting, which represents 64% of household total. This resource can be used to enrich urban soils. Further landfill savings would be made ‘upstream’ because there would be less industrial wastes and packaging involved in feeding the household, although no figure has so far been arrived at for this.

Meanwhile, we can drop the total water we use at home in Melbourne by around 100,000 litres with a 10,000 litre rainwater tank, which amounts to 35% of the average household use. Most of the water we use isn’t at home directly, it’s embodied in the food we buy. Through home food gardening we can potentially save a further 410,000 litres of ‘embodied water’. So that’s a potential saving of 510,000 litres per household in total.

Potential energy savings are impressive. Without any authorative Australian studies, I’ve adopted estimates based on a 1993 study of the US food system that around 10 units of fossil fuel energy go into producing every one unit of energy in the food we eat. There’s no evidence to suggest that the Australian system is any better. By these estimates, each individual can save the equivalent of about four barrels of crude oil, or around 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year by home food gardening. Each household could save about 3.75 tonnes of CO2 annually on average, out of about 20 tonnes per household (about 18%). These CO2-equivalent figures may be conservative estimates, as they do not consider the extra non-CO2 greenhouse emissions associated with agriculture.

For these reasons it seems that home and urban food production will be a major ingredient in peak oil adaptation and climate change mitigation and reduction strategies.

More details and an explanation of these respective figures follows.

Water

Australia is the driest continent on earth, with an increasingly dire outlook due to climate change.

The average Australian household directly uses 285,000 litres of water every year through the tap. [1]

Roof area of average home is 175 square metres in Melbourne.[2] With our rainfall since 1980, that’s on average 156,000 litres available every year.[3] We can’t capture 100% of that rain, but we could easily fill a 10,000 litre tank 10 times over, reducing our overall draw on mains water by over 35%. Combined with water saving gardening techniques, such as water harvesting from paths, mulching, and dripper irrigation, we can drop it even further. A quick review of the scientific literature (eg here, here) suggests that soil water retention can be doubled with mulch alone. The Food Forest in South Australia, using permaculture designed water harvesting and storage techniques (including within the rich soil), uses one tenth to one fifth of the water used by a comparable conventional orchard system.[4]

However we never even see much of the water we use. We have to also consider ‘embodied water’ — the water it took to grow and process the food we buy. In 2004-2005 Australian agriculture used 12,191 GL of water, 65% of our total water use, down from 70% a few years earlier. [5]

Figure 1. Water Consumption in Australia. Source: National Water Commission

In their 2001 study, An input–output analysis of Australian water usage, Manfred Lenzen and Barney Foran applied the methods of embodied energy accounting to do the first embodied water analysis for Australia. “Australia’s annual water use of 22,000 Gl is dissected using input–output techniques, showing that 30% of Australia’s water requirement was devoted to domestic food production and a further 30% to exports, compared with 7% required for direct consumption by households.”

Incidentally, in 2005 Australia exported enough grain — 95% of it wheat — to provide the basic calorific requirements for 40 million people. Wheat is relatively low in terms of it’s irrigation requirements however. [x] So, according to Foran and Lenzen, about half of agricultural water goes to domestic food, half to exports.

If we were to take the 2004-5 figure of water use by Australian agriculture, halve it so that we’re ignoring exports, and then divide the remainder by Australia’s 7.4 million households, it equates to 823,000 litres per year per household. So the potential savings are still huge. Lets say that we produce the most agriculturally water intensive third of our food at home, using tank water and water efficient gardening techniques. (Ie. the kind of thing which we grow best at home: fruit and vegetables. We could roughly halve our embodied water use. That’s a saving of up to 400,000 litres in embodied water per household per year.

For more on the water efficiency of garden agriculture as opposed to industrial agriculture see David Holmgren’s Garden Agriculture: A revolution in efficient water use (PDF).

Landfill and waste

The average Australian household sends 2.4 tonnes of waste to landfill each year. [6]

A 2000 report by the Victoria Auditor-General’s office reported that kitchen waste, greenwaste, paper and cardboard contributed to most of Victorian household waste — 64% in total. See figure 2. These three components are easily used as sheet mulch or composted on site — representing the potential of saving 1.5 tonnes of organic material from going to landfill, and instead using it to enrich our gardens! [7]

Figure 2. Composition of Municipal Landfill Deposits (% tonnages)

Commercial, industrial, building & demolition waste amounts to another 2,790,000 tonnes per year in Victoria (total household waste is 2,133,000). [8] What percentage of this would be saved if we halved our dependence on the industrial food system? Further breakdowns aren’t reported so we can’t be sure. But every saving we make at home may well be matched further up the industrial supply chain.

Energy and greenhouse emissions

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever done a comprehensive study of the energy which goes into our food system in Australia, but we can look elsewhere for some guides.

According to Worldwatch Institute, nearly 21 percent of fossil fuel used goes into the global food system. [x] Ecologist Folke Gunther’s research suggests that, in Sweden, food is the single biggest energy cost for a household — and the one with by far the biggest potential for decreasing energy use, as illustrated in the following graph. [9]

Figure 3. A rough breakdown of the energy use of a family of four in Sweden. The single largest energy user is the food system which is where the largest potential for increased energy efficiency (grey part of the bars) to be found.

Is the same true for Australia? Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson certainly thinks so, based on his recent comment that, “We’re pouring as much oil into refrigerators as we are into our cars”. of a similar scenario here in Australia. [10]

To figure out if he’s correct lets consider David Pimental’s 1994 study into the US food system. Pimentel traced all the fossil fuel inputs into the food chain and found that it takes around 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver every calorie of food to the shop. He didn’t even consider in his calculations the transportation back to homes, and home refrigeration, preparation and cooking. [11]

Say you have a roughly average Australian intake of 13,500 kilojoules a day. If we assume that our food system now is about as energy intensive as the US food system was back in 1994, the food system consumes equivalent of 8 barrels of oil to feed you every year. [13]

So how does that compare to car travel? In the year ended 31 October 2004, Australia’s 10.7 million registered passenger vehicles travelled an estimated 148 billion km, each averaging 13,900 km per year. [14] The average fuel use was about 11.5 litres per 100 kilometres, so each car used about 1600 litres. [15] There’s about one car for every two Australians, so we each on average use about 800 litres worth of petrol each year on car travel — about 26 million BTUs of energy. Eight barrels of oil — how much energy we each consume indirectly through our food — contain 46 million BTUs of energy. So John Anderson was right — we really do put more fuel into our refridgerators than into our cars — almost twice!

This also squares with the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Consuming Australia study which found that food consumption is responsible for 28% of the average Australians’ greenhouse gas pollution, whereas personal and public transport accounts for 10.5%. Note that a great deal of personal transport and home energy is related to food procurement, storage and preparation.

How much food can we grow?

John Jeavons the guru of biointensive gardening and his followers shows how we can grow the complete diet for a human on less than 4000 square feet of land, or 1/10th of an acre, including growing material set aside for compost. David Holmgren has pointed out that suburbia is a similar population density as high intensity Asian self sufficient cultures.

However it’s more realistic for most of us to be aiming to provide about half of our diet by weight, focusing on fresh greens, vegetables and fruit. The average house block size is something in the ballpark of 2/10th of an acre (although new blocks average less, especially in Melbourne where they are down to about 0.14 acres on average, whereas houses are growing to about 250 m2 or 0.6 of an acre [x]). But on average each household has access to about 1/10th of an acre of potential food producing area. So enough to feed a single person. But since we’re focusing on nutrition rather than energy crops, we can actually grow a larger percentage of a person’s diet by weight, since it is the energy crops which tend to be more demanding of space. My experience suggests that on a decent sized suburban block we can expect to produce all of our fresh vegetables for a family of four, perhaps 10 percent of our carbohydrates via potatoes and jerusalem artichokes, and a good deal of our fruit — especially if we both eat more seasonally and home preserve.  (From a barely head-height untended, unwatered quince tree in an abandoned neighbours yard in one of Australia’s worst ever drought years, I bottled over 10kg of preserved fruit earlier in the year).

The fresh foods are actually those which involve the most energy in transport, because they’re more easily crushed and spoiled, so must be stacked more sparsely, moved more quickly and kept refrigerated — and these are exactly the things we can easily grow at home. Of course freshly picked organic vegetables are much healthier, so much so that you need to eat less of them.

So really it’s the most fossil fuel intensive half of our diet which we can grow. But to be conservative, lets say that we reduce the energy costs in the food we eat by just 50% with intensive home food gardening. Shopping local, attending farmers markets, buying local organic produce and unprocessed foods could all help drop the remaining 50% significantly.

But just considering the home gardening component, every household on a suburban block could save the equivalent of 4 barrels of crude oil, or around 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.[16]

Home gardening inputs

It may seem a simplification to assume that home food gardening consumes no fossil energy. And of course it is one, given that almost everything we do within an industrial society directly or indirectly consumes some fuel. However, if you save seed with friends, build composts from on-site or locally harvested materials, practice water conservation, there’s no particular need for high energy inputs. The biggest energy costs are the embodied energy in the infrastructure of tanks and hoses. In a future version I hope to consider this.

References

[1] Calculation is based on 7.4 million households (in 2001) using 2,108GL / year
Sources:
http://www.water.gov.au/WaterUse/Waterusedbytheeconomy/index.aspx?Menu=Level1_4_2
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ProductsbyTopic/0AAC8BFAE9DD3241CA2568A90013942A?OpenDocument

[2] http://www.enviro-friendly.com/tank-water-savings.shtml

[3] ibid

[4] http://holmgren.eatthesuburbs.org/DLFiles/PDFs/WaterJournalOpWeb.pdf

[5] http://www.water.gov.au/WaterUse/Waterusedbytheeconomy/index.aspx?Menu=Level1_4_2

[6] Calculation is based on the number of Victorian households in 2001 (886,000)
Source: http://www.greenhouse.vic.gov.au/CA256F310024B628/0/A55E3A4F916BE3D2CA256F620014A6A1/$File/YQA+-+Households.pdf

The total amount of solid landfill waste per year in Victoria is:
Household: 2,133,000 tonnes
Commercial, industrial, building & demolition: 2,790,000 tonnes
Source: http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/report/human-settlements-2.html#table7

[7] http://www.audit.vic.gov.au/old/par65/ags6504.htm

[8] http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/report/human-settlements-2.html#table7

[9] http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/guenther.htm

[10] http://www.eatthesuburbs.org/2007/09/john-anderson-on-food-shocks-oil-dependency-and-drought/

[11] http://dieoff.org/page69.htm

[13] 1 barrel(42 gallons) of crude oil = 5,800,000 Btu
Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/science/energy_calculator.html

[14] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/productsbytitle/18830D3F1604281FCA25723600056557?opendocument

[15] http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/efficient.shtml

[16] Assuming that the greenhouse gas intensity of the fossil fuel inputs into agriculture are about the same as crude oil — about 384kg CO2 per barrel. <http://tothetarsands.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/kealans-greenhouse-gas-research.doc>
The truth is we can save more greenhouse gas emissions by reducing our dependence on soil destroying agriculture — and focusing on soil building home gardening. Methane loss and nitrous oxide from agriculture are major contributors to climate change, and this has not been considered in these calculations yet. Recent research suggests that industrial agriculture and chemical nitrogren fertilizers contribute far more to climate change that was previously thought. <http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/21090701.asp> Rebuilding the humus content of soils is actually a major carbon sink, so we have the potential to have a positive impact on carbon levels.

John Anderson is the former leader of the National Party, Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Minister for Primary Industries and Energy. He’s retiring at the coming election to go back to the farm. As Deputy Prime Minister in 2004 he was one of the first significant politicians globally to acknowledge peak oil. He’s now making the links between climate change, peak oil and food security, and made the following comments on ABC Radio National, Sept 26 2007:

“It’s not beyond the realms of possiblity that we’ll see a food shock in the next few years. We talk about oil shocks, but we go on assuming that the supermarket shelves will be loaded.”

“The global situation is a serious one… We’re pouring as much oil into refrigerators as we are into our cars. Now, oil and energy dependency for the production and distribution and preparation of our food is really very worrying.”

Download the full interview [mp3 / 2.4MB]

Note: Anderson promotes GMOs as part of the solution — but we should be dubious about this as it puts control of solutions into multinational corporations, is inherently dangerous, and the industrial model of farming associated with GMOs is much less effective than small scale biodiverse permaculture systems with water harvesting systems. Because of the clumsyness of GMO technology, basically every cell in the body of the GMO produces proteins from the introduced gene, even in areas where they are not needed, or indeed may be toxic to the plant. This represents a metabolic overhead unsuited to tough conditions such as drought.

Slice food bill, avoid drought: grow vegies
Lucinda Ormonde, John Elder in The Age
September 23, 2007

RIP out your camellias and plant carrots instead.

That’s the advice of the Australian Vegetable and Potato Growers Association, which says growing your own vegetables could help combat rising food prices and a potential shortage of fresh produce because of the drought.

“We’re seeing a shortage of carrots and we could potentially see a shortage in potatoes. Lots of growing areas are very short of water,” said the association’s chairman, Michael Badcock. “While there’s a bit of product around, you might want to put some away for the future. I think Australian families should be freezing their spare vegetables, and planting some of their own in the backyard.”

Mr Badcock said food companies McCain’s and Simplot (which produces frozen and tinned vegetable brand Edgells) are unable to get enough supply to meet their orders. “This means they will not be able to utilise their entire factories, and this makes for a more expensive product — and retailers who have to charge more for the product,” he said.

Calls to McCain’s media office were not returned.

Sergio Canale, executive general manager of supply chain at Simplot, would not say outright if there was a shortage, or which products were affected. “It’s not as simple as more demand than supply, but we think we can cover it for the moment. In another few months it may be a different case. If need be we will source from overseas and this can be sourced at competitive prices.”

Mr Canale added the company “has other options” but wasn’t prepared to divulge them. He said: “We do try to use local product as much as possible, but not all crops are available in Australia.”

Ausveg has had a long-running gripe with Simplot and McCain’s over wholesale prices — and the fact that so much overseas stock has, for years, been used in canned goods.

Mr Badcock describes the state of vegetable growing as “not a pretty picture”. Winter rains provided hope, and there was a boost in leafy vegetables such as broccoli, cabbages and cauliflower. “But there is not enough rain to sustain many of those crops and irrigation restrictions don’t help, either. We won’t lose total production, but we will experience a fluctuation in prices.”

As for his grow-your-own advice, Mr Badcock notes that it’s a good time for planting.

“Vegetables that grow above the ground such as cabbage and cauliflower will tend to get eaten by bugs. But if you plant vegetables such as potatoes, parsnip and carrots, they will absorb the moisture and continue to grow. “

As for freezing your produce, he advises: “Blanch your vegetables and then freeze them on a tray before putting them in a plastic bag. Your vegetables should last for up to 12 months.”

Dealing with stage 3 water restrictions so early in the season, and faced with even tougher ones in the coming months, I am reminded of a cartoon that had a huge impact on me as a child.

It was about a little girl, stuck indoors on a wet day, gazing out the window and wishing that the rain would go away forever. In true cartoon fashion, she got her wish. The rain stopped, and so did the water that had always gushed freely out of her tap. She gasped in panic as she squeezed the last few drops into a glass and was about to drink it when she noticed a flower outside, wilting in the sun, ready to keel over. She raced to rescue the flower but before she got there she tripped and the last of the precious water spilt, instantly being absorbed and evaporated by the thirsty earth.

Recently Sharon Beder, writing in The Age, pointed out the inherent unfairness of using ability to pay as an indicator of water-worthiness, but I wonder whether uniform and severe restrictions on everyone across the State — regardless of situation, type of outdoor usage or needs — is any more fair, or a better solution.

Gardens mean different things to different people. People in suburbs rich in parks and public spaces, for instance, may have less psychological, spiritual or therapeutic need for that little patch of daily-tended greenery.

And while someone who works long hours outside the home will probably feel the loss of their garden less than someone home all day with young children or with a disability, they are much more likely to be able to afford equipment to help bypass the restrictions. Automatic tap timers and watering systems, outdoor lighting so you can water late at night (hard to do in the country when your garden is pitch dark by 8 pm), tanks, pumps, and greywater storage systems all cost money, and often aren’t options for people who rent, or easily affordable to those who live on small incomes. (Not to mention high fences that might keep the occasional violation from the eyes of prying neighbours.)

Indeed, restricting outside usage of water seems to have been chosen not because watering your garden is in itself, or is necessarily, the most wanton use of water in our society at present, but simply because it is the only one that can be cheaply policed (by eliciting a charming and community building, deeply Australian, dob in your neighbours system).

Certainly, stopping all outside usage of water in private homes — which has happened already in some country areas, and is rumoured to be scheduled for introduction to most others by November — is a useful shock tactic to make us take water seriously, and may even help get us through this summer without running out. But is this kind of blanket prohibition useful in assisting us to make the type of changes required if we are to get through every summer from now on?

I’m all for telling people to give up their exotics and summer annuals, choose water-efficient and hardy plants, allow their lawns to die off and their gardens to be naturally browner and more muted. But even natives in a harsh season may need the occasional squirt to stay alive. And even well-mulched vegies need to be watered more often than twice a week.

Instead of encouraging people to garden differently, the restrictions this year seem to be encouraging people to abandon the idea of having a garden at all, and in the current climate, I’m not sure this is a good thing.

The significance of backyard gardens for greener, cleaner, more temperate cities and towns, and their function in harbouring and feeding the surprising amount of native wildlife that still lives amongst us is being increasingly recognised.

The bottlebrush in my garden that is still finding its feet in clay soil is not a luxury to the birds that feed from it, nor is the tiny pond a luxury to my local frog population. We could save a bit of water if we abandon these, but maybe in the long run we’d use even more water producing extra chemicals to control the insects that proliferate in their absence.

Biodiversity and the successful multi-use of small spaces takes time and care to establish, and often a judicious use of water to maintain. And I’d be hard pressed to believe that the salad that comes directly from my garden onto my plate uses as much water as the lettuce I drive to the supermarket to buy, produced as it is in large monocultural batches and watered by aerial spray or irrigation.

Indeed, when eighty percent of a nation’s fruit crop can be wiped out overnight by a bad frost or extreme weather event, is this really a good time to actively discourage people from tending their backyard fruit trees and vegie patches? Could we instead perhaps educate and encourage each other towards permaculture and water efficiency by more diverse and varied restrictions?

Gardening is also becoming an important tool in educating children towards good nutritional habits through the experience of growing and cooking their own food. Stephanie Alexander’s project at Collingwood, as described in her recent book, is just one example that it would be a pity to see halted.

For the girl in the cartoon from my childhood, the wilting flower was a life that needed to be saved. Her dilemma, how best to use those last few precious drops of water, seems to me to strike at the heart of what is happening for us.

In the contemporary world, we make choices every day, countless times over and over, about what is valuable, what is precious, what should live and what should be allowed to die, even when we don’t realise that we are doing this. For every choice we make about what and how we consume has effects.

Whether it’s choosing to sacrifice the two-hundred year old redgums on the Murray that are dying because we choose to wear water-greedy cotton instead of hemp, or a rainforest in another country so we can eat cheap beef burgers, or our own forests so we can toss away the paper carton the burger comes in, or the plants in our backyard and the creatures that feed on them so we can have long showers and keep our hair squeaky clean.

The water authorities have decided that commercial practices are to continue unrestricted, but that gardens – and the beauty, peace, wildlife, healing and food they bring – are a luxury we can do without. But like the little girl in the cartoon, I’m not so sure.

email your feedback or comments

Some useful links:
(thanks to those who sent these in)

Regarding the use of veggie gardens in schools to teach children about nutrition: http://www.theage.com.au/news/epicure/children-learning-as-they-grow/2006/10/02/1159641238776.html

Teachers for Forests website has a great page of links about water politics and policies: http://www.teachers.forests.org.au/waternatnews.html

Permablitz
www.permablitz.net

Eat the Suburbs! website
www.eatthesuburbs.org

Energy Bulletin
www.energybulletin.net

Len’s Gardening Page – lots of advice and info on permaculture and organic gardening
http://www.gardenlen.com/

Centre For Research and Education in Environmental Strategies (CERES)
www.ceres.org.au

David Holmgren’s article, ‘Garden Agriculture: A revolution in. efficient water use’
http://www.holmgren.com.au/DLFiles/PDFs/WaterJournalOpWeb.pdf

and a great description of ‘Luscious Lane‘, a communal garden in the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, sent in by Glenda Lindsay

~~

Beth Spencer is an essayist, writer of fiction, and radio producer. Check out www.DogMedia.com.au and www.BethSpencer.com

An edited version of this piece was published in The Age, Opinion, 19th October 2006 as ‘Healthy gardens are just the start for a healthy community’

David Holmgren recently estimated that for the amount of water used in the production of milk products per dollar value on his property was around 1/300th that of commercial agriculture (those figures from memory).