Archive for the 'resilience' Category

Back in the zone

Published September 13, 2010 permaculture , resilience , workshop 1 Comment

By David Parkinson

The elements of a resilient region, laid out into zones and sectors

Wow! what a summer. It seems as though there has been such a huge amount going on around here; which probably has to do with the fact that there really is a huge amount going on. Over the course of the next few weekly posts, I’ll try to sum up what has been happening and make some sense of it all. The overall sense I am getting lately is that this region is really starting to get fired up to prepare for peak oil and the world of reduced carbon consumption while struggling to figure out how the coming economy is going to work in regular people’s lives. The challenges are enormous, but more and more I am seeing the early shoots of innovation and imagination that augur good things down the road.

One of the recent events which epitomizes this new spirit afoot in the region is this past weekend’s workshop organized by Rin Innes and Transition Town Powell River. The aim of this one-and-a-half-day workshop was to introduce participants to some of the basic concepts of the permaculture design methodology and then apply some of these concepts to a few practical problems in developing community resilience.

The workshop took place on Friday evening and Saturday. To begin with, Rin led us through some of the basic concepts of permaculture, including the three ethics and the twelve principles. Permaculture, according to Rin, is a methodology for designing human systems that function like natural systems, and that deceptively simple formulation conceals an enormous amount of potential power.

Underneath every broken system in our world are a number of design decisions, whether conscious or not, which have somehow gone wrong. We cannot expect that solving all of the problems of the world is a simple matter of better design, but it’s certainly the case that most of our broken systems have evolved without any real oversight at all; so no wonder they produce vast amounts of waste (physical or spiritual), or consume excessive amounts of fuel or other inputs, or in some other way lead to unsustainable outcomes. Natural systems have evolved so that they tend towards equilibrium over time; any system which goes completely haywire cannot continue in that form and will need to change in some way to adapt to its environment: it will necessarily have to take in fewer inputs from its surroundings, or produce less waste, or reproduce itself less copiously, or in some other way find a new equilibrium.

Human-designed systems, in contrast, because they are often designed with short-term goals in mind and omit the long-term benefits or costs, do not have the built-in checks and feedback loops that any natural system possesses. And so, we end up building endless numbers of personal vehicles and vast highway systems to drive on, heedless of the eventual end of cheap fossil fuels. We mono-crop and douse our fields with chemicals which deplete the soil, calling for more chemicals next time around. We base our economic system on the creation of debt in a permanent downward spiral of ever-increasing indebtedness. And so on.

Given human nature, it would be difficult enough to devise systems that minimize the opportunities for greed and carelessness to make a mess of things. But generally we let these systems mutate as they will, without careful oversight and with little regard for the consequences.  It should come as no surprise, then, when our financial, agricultural, educational, governmental, and other large systems turn pathological and start displaying behaviour that does more harm than good. (Typically the good they do accrues to the people in a position to perpetuate the system.)

We’re so unused to thinking about intervening in our social and physical systems that the vocabulary for doing so is underdeveloped (to understate the situation). So the tools that permaculture provides are really worth looking at, and honestly not that hard to grasp. All that’s required is the ability to take a long hard look at the system we’re trying to construct or maintain, to understand the elements of that system and the relations among them, and to find ways to adjust those relations, using the least effort for the greatest results. At all times, we try to think like a natural system, to let the output of one process become the input to another (closing the loop), to make sure that the effects of a process in one place are registered quickly and faithfully (tight feedback), and to work towards an efficient and productive system which is resilient enough to absorb shocks and interruptions.

All of this sounds terribly abstract, and — like all systems with general applicability — it is. So we spent the second half of Saturday starting to apply these principles to three domains of community resilience: education, health care, and communication. In all three of these areas, there are reasons to think that the coming years will see some drastic shocks to the way these systems work; specifically, the ways we pass on knowledge and skills, keep ourselves healthy, and inform ourselves and others will change in the face of declining resources (especially fossil fuels), volatile climate patterns, and ongoing economic instability.

A sane society would take a cold hard look at these challenges, lay out the best facts we can muster, and start building alternative systems which stand a better chance of resisting these coming shocks. Ours instead prefers to do anything to keep fantasies alive, suppresses hard facts and speculation, and doubles down on the status quo.

And so, out on the margins, quietly and slowly, the alternatives will come together. People with an interest in a more sustainable, stable, and socially just world will look at the situation and ask themselves what they can do to make our systems hang together and produce more benefit for less cost. We will talk about all the important areas of human life: food, shelter, health, work, play, art, culture, and so on; and we will use the best tools we have to understand how things work the way they do, how they could work better, and what we can do to get from here to there. The tools that permaculture gives us are very promising, because they give us a vocabulary for seeing and talking about systems in a holistic way.

It’s about so much more than growing food.

Walk slowly, pay attention

Published February 19, 2010 perennials , plants , resilience , skills , Texada Leave a Comment

By Tom Read

Here comes the new stinging nettle! In addition to eating the steamed leaves and stems of young nettle plants, this year I'll use nettle roots and leaves to make a vinegar-based tonic and a fertilizer "tea." The pen in the lower right is for scale; it's about 5" long. Photo taken this morning.

Today I visited Dr. Kevin Black at the Texada Health Centre in Gillies Bay for my annual physical check-up. In the course of our routine review of my cholesterol levels (normal) and blood-pressure (acceptable), we talked about the prescription drugs I use to keep my moderate hypertension “under control,” including how expensive they’re becoming. Nothing new there, but it occurred to me as I drove home that maybe I can eventually reduce my pharmaceutical intake if I start using more of the wild food and medicinal plants that grow in abundance here on Texada Island. This wasn’t a random thought, as I’ll explain in a moment.

For years now I’ve resented my dependency on a daily dose of industrially produced drugs to moderate my blood pressure. When I started using these drugs I lived in the sedentary-yet-fast-paced urban rat race, and since moving to Texada 10 years ago I had hoped that my pharma-dependency could eventually end by adopting a healthier lifestyle. Indeed, my blood pressure has decreased somewhat during my years on the island, possibly attributable to such factors as less job stress, choosing a better diet and the necessity of a more physical way of life here at Slow Farm.

Earlier this week I attended a Texada Garden Club presentation by local herbalist and healer Doreen Bonin on how to benefit one’s health using wild food and medicinal plants that grow right here on our island. Doreen’s talk gave me hope that I might gradually wean myself off the pharma-habit, but I must acknowledge that this is something I approach cautiously. Uninformed self-medication can be dangerous to one’s health, so I will seek my doctor’s advice before making any substantive changes. That said, I was fascinated by her detailed descriptions of how to find, prepare and use the likes of nettle, dock and dandelion, along with many other locally common wild and easily-cultivated plants.  I am looking forward to joining a like-minded group on Doreen’s next “nettle walk” sometime in the near future, to get hands-on plant identification practice in the field.

The place to start looking for these plants is in your own garden, according to Doreen. “I teach people to pay attention, to be like children in adopting a beginner’s mind, and to walk slowly and quietly as you look for these plants.” One example I’m already familiar with is stinging nettle, which in years past we have harvested and eaten as a vegetable in various recipes. But there’s much more to nettle. Along with dock and dandelion, it’s what Doreen calls a “broad-spectrum plant,” because its leaves and roots can create a multi-faceted tonic for people and a powerful fertilizer for plants. As of this week, the nettle on our property is about four to six inches high, and growing fast. The dandelions are also coming on strong. I am walking slowly and attentively, digging tools in hand.

We live on an island but we need the city

Published January 1, 2010 relocalization , resilience , Texada , urban-rural interdependence Leave a Comment

By Tom Read

This slightly modified BC Ferries route map of our greater region shows Texada Island (partially circled in red) in relation to its urban neighbours. Rather than try to ignore these population centres, could we consciously interact with them for mutual benefit?

This weekend we begin a three-day journey, leaving our snug home on Texada Island to visit the city of Vancouver by way of BC Ferries and Vancouver Island. This isn’t a holiday vacation; it’s mainly about me having a root canal operation that requires a big city specialist. It occurred to me, after scheduling this appointment, that I have not seen Vancouver in a year and a half, which I consider one measure of my contentedness with living on Texada.

My dental appointment in the city is just one example of the reality that our seemingly remote home is merely part of a greater urban region. Most of my friends and neighbours on Texada travel to Vancouver, the “Big Island” or beyond far more frequently than I, yet are no less content with life on our own island. Some needs simply cannot be met here in paradise, so we go where we must.

City and rural interdependence has a long history in British Columbia and elsewhere around the world, thus my observation above is nothing new. As we enter a new year and decade it’s also no secret that major economic, political and environmental uncertainties abound, tempering our New Year celebrations with a bit of wariness. And that is what feels “new” to me — a growing awareness that we rural people should take nothing for granted, including, perhaps, affordable access to first-class medical and dental specialists in a relatively close big city.

I’m all for strengthening local self-reliance in our rural communities, but I wonder if we should simultaneously focus more carefully on our relationship with urban neighbours. Rural and city people might both lead healthier, happier lives by consciously developing mutual support networks for coping with the potentially unpleasant uncertainties ahead. Now there’s some good food for thought, and a future post. In the meantime, “Happy New Year!”

What really matters

Published October 2, 2009 food security , garden , politics , resilience , Texada , weather 4 Comments

By Tom Read

There's just one store-bought food item in this photo, namely the bell pepper in the foreground. It's not easy to grow such big peppers here on the cool coast because they thrive on sustained heat. But we like 'em in our salsa, and for now they're still relatively cheap and available through the industrial food system. That's a conscious compromise, eh?

There's just one store-bought food item in this photo, namely the bell pepper in the foreground. It's not easy to grow such big peppers here on the cool coast because they thrive on sustained heat. But we like 'em in our salsa, and for now they're still relatively cheap and available through the industrial food system. That's a conscious compromise, eh?

Texada’s almost ideal mix of mild temperatures, ample sun and just the right amount of rain this past month has given our garden a shot of warmth leading to lots of ripe tomatoes.  So today we turn our attention to converting our ripe Romas into salsa. Most of the ingredients will come from our garden; we will use only a few store-bought items. If we were to consider the amount of labour we’re about to expend on making this salsa, it wouldn’t be “economical,” but what matters to us is the satisfaction of creating a very personal taste of summer that will last us through the coming winter and spring.

Preserving our harvest is a deliberate act of resilience-building for our household. We know that the world around us swarms with economic, ecological and political stresses, but we pretend they do not affect us. After all, we live on an island! What matters to us at this moment is that a friend has loaned us her pressure-canner (we’re keen on trying this food preservation approach), while another friend has offered us an opportunity to glean more apples and pears. And all the while our garden and domestic animals are thriving.

I feel a sense of well-being by living in a place where the world’s problems seem far away. This feeling may be an illusion, but the accumulating supply of home-grown food in our pantry and freezer are real. From time to time I like to write about the politics and economics of Texada Island, but what really matters is being part of a network of friends here, and learning how to be more self-reliant.

Politics in two dimensions (and beyond)

Published September 21, 2009 activism , community , politics , resilience 2 Comments

By David Parkinson

Old stump, new tree. A composition in chiaroscuro.

Old stump, new tree. A composition in chiaroscuro.

Recent events have made me more conscious of how our political system works. It came to me not long ago that the way we talk about politics is very one-dimensional and that there are other dimensions we should be trying to hold in mind as we think about where we are and what lies ahead.

We often think of large-scale politics in terms of left and right. To strip away a lot of rhetoric and vast amounts of detail, the left-right dimension is a continuum along which we battle over the division of the spoils: left means using the power of the state to redistribute wealth and create social programs and a safety net for the less fortunate; right means allowing the individual to decide how to use her or his wealth free from heavy-handed interference by the state.

The real world is obviously much more complex than this simple picture; for example, the right no longer pushes for a minimal state but instead uses state power to redistribute wealth away from the public sector and the commons and towards those who are already wealthy. The last few years have seen a giddy and fast-paced smash-and-grab operation by and on behalf of the economic élite, with the clear intention of destroying the state’s ability to provide a baseline of social services to all. This program seems to be reaching a sort of culmination with the recent project of using the common wealth of the population to ‘bail out’ the élite. When the dust settles from this amazing one-time-only offer — and as we start to face the consequences of spending our capital and destroying the resource base on which all wealth is built — political battles over the allocation of our dwindling wealth will become increasingly desperate.

What’s left of the left meanwhile fights a series of rear-guard battles in a losing war to reserve some share of the common wealth for the poor and less fortunate. As the screws tighten, as the lifeboat shrinks, these battles are only going to become more desperate. Who has the ear of governments? Not the poor.

And all of this wealth, the spoils of reckless capitalism, that we fight over — it’s based on the idea that there are no limits on our ability to continue pulling minerals and fossil fuels from the earth’s crust and food from our fields. Once you have a population which believes that we can keep on creating false wealth forever, then you end up with a political system which is really little more than a stock market. Or a Ponzi scheme.

So rather than a one-dimensional political system which turns every decision into a question of who gets the money, we need to start looking at some of the other less visible dimensions of how we make decisions about how to create, store, and (re-)distribute wealth. Until we start doing that, the language we use for talking about the economy is not rich enough to capture what is really going on. Like a poorly-ground lens, this impoverished language distorts the world around us, accentuating some aspects and diminishing others. We owe it to ourselves to get our heads out of the phony and constricting box of left-vs-right and start thinking about all of the factors that shape the way we interact with one another as individuals, with other groups of people, and with our society as a whole.

It’s important to remember that politics is not just about the ballot box and the talking heads on the television machine. Politics is present whenever people wrangle over who gets what. It’s in the boardroom, the bedroom, around the dinner table, in the meetings we attend, the way we choose to use our time and energy and money. I have seen, lately, a few examples of how bad politics can poison well-meaning non-profit enterprises. Even with the best intentions, if decisions are made in an undemocratic fashion, or if information is not freely shared, or if one person or a small group takes control for their own personal benefit, then the group’s solidarity will suffer.

I believe that we are entering a period in which the community is going to have to step up more and more. I am very uncertain about the prospects for the economy, and if I’m right to be worried then there will be less money flowing around for capital-based solutions to the problems we face. Likewise, we are already seeing sweeping cuts to social spending programs, especially at the provincial level. Many of the social support programs for low-income folks and other less powerful constituencies are going to disappear over the next few years, leaving a huge burden on local communities to find workarounds and patches. How this is going to play out against a backdrop of an extremely disaffected and slothful populace is anyone’s guess; but it’s going to be a rough transition at first. To the extent that we can employ a politics of decency, the rough ride will be less horrible for those of us at the bottom. To the extent that we continue to approach every problem as though it’s just a niche for some new corporate venture, we will blunder and fail.

I want to throw around a few dimensions along which it’s useful to think about how we approach the problems we hope to solve. I’d like to return to these and some others in the future, and spend some time elaborating them. For now, it’s only a skeletal outline of how I believe we should be talking and thinking about the work of renewing and reinventing our communities. Much of this points outward to existing theory and practice, but for now I’m just putting up hasty signposts.

(I’m using the word ‘venture’ below because it allows me not to choose among ‘business’ and ‘non-profit’ and ‘project’ and so on.)

Public vs. private

How is the public involved? As shareholders? Spectators? Make-believe beneficiaries of fraudulent trickle-down effects? Do members of the public have any say in how this venture is run? Phony consultation? Do we have to wait a few years to vote it out? Are we the hapless victims of decisions made in a boardroom to which we were not invited?

Open vs. closed

Similar to the previous dimension, but more about how the real decision-making happens. Even in a supposedly public venture, there are many ways to marginalize members of the community. Cliquishness, secrecy, and any number of needless hurdles can be put in place to keep power concentrated in the hands of the ‘right people’. Are we telling the truth? Is everyone able to ask tough questions without being shouted down or shunned? Are we actively encouraging more public involvement?

Intrusive vs. free

Can people opt out of the venture or its effects on them or their community? Must they be constantly alert to potential damage, pollution, or other ill effects? Are people coerced into either participation or resistance? Are people allowed to opt out, but at the risk of falling behind in some important way? Does this venture create more choice? Or less?

Community vs. individual

Is this venture about satisfying individual needs or wants? Is it about providing some resilience at the community level? Is it doing one when it should be doing the other? How does it strengthen community or reinforce individualism? Are we overlooking some way we can use this venture to create or strengthen community?

Paid vs. free

This is a really important and largely invisible dimension.This society trains us to see everything through a money-coloured filter. When we look through a red filter, we can no longer really see red, because everything and nothing is coloured red. Money is the same way. We do not even see the extent to which we create ventures which are born addicted to the money economy. Could we have done it  otherwise? Who is excluded? Who is advantaged? Have we asked ourselves how far we could have got without taking that first hit of corporate sponsorship?

That’s enough for now. As I say, I’ll try to come back to these and try to have something more illuminating to say about them. I do feel that those of us who want to work on making our communities more resilient need to spend as much time interrogating our methods as we spend considering our goals. It is possible to have admirable goals but undermine their success by hitching them to working methods which enshrine the very things we pretend to be getting away from. It’s maddening and all too common.

The challenges of a 50-mile diet

Published August 31, 2009 50-mile diet , eat-local challenge , economy , food security , local food economy , relocalization , resilience , solutions , Wendell Berry 6 Comments

By David Parkinson

Seeds of the red orach, one of the surprise hits of the Edible Garden Tour

Seeds of red orach, one of the surprise hits of our garden during the Edible Garden Tour

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
(Wendell Berry)

We’re just about halfway through the 50 days of this year’s 50-mile eat-local challenge, which goes from Sunday August 9 until Sunday September 27. On August 9 we held the first ever Edible Garden Tour, which showcased thirteen gardens from Lund down to Lang Bay where people are using a variety of techniques to grow food in a variety of conditions. From backyard lasagna gardening experiments to a demonstration garden and a community garden, and with all kinds of gardens in between, it was a really good opportunity for gardeners and would-be gardeners to see how other people are tackling the eat-local challenge by eating as locally as possible.

This is the third year that I’ve been involved in organizing the eat-local challenge; in fact, the famous ’50-mile diet’ was one of the first things I knew about Powell River before I moved up here in late 2006. And one thing I’ve noticed is that there are far more people eating locally than you might know from the number of people who sign up. In fact, quite a lot of people, when asked if they want to sign themselves up for the eat-local challenge, say something along the lines of, “But I eat locally all the time!” I’m sure that many people out there reading this can understand that response, since the idea of eating locally is really a part of the culture here, at least for a significant chunk of the regional population who have homesteading in their personal or their family’s history — or for those like me who moved here with the intent of getting closer to the sources of our food.

Another theme which has really jumped out at me this year is the number of people who feel that the eat-local challenge needs to be kicked up a notch. After all, just about anyone can go 50 days in the height of summer eating something like half of their daily food from sources within 50 miles of where they live; this is not entirely without some challenges and a certain amount of effort, but it can be done and it’s not a terrible hardship. But just try doing it in the winter! In the summertime, you can go to the Open Air Market, to numerous farmgates, and you can find local food at the fruit truck and at some of the grocery stores. In the winter, though, if you haven’t taken steps to put food by, you’re going to have a hard time finding local produce at any price. The upshot is that a wintertime eat-local challenge has to start in the summertime, while fresh food is abundant and while there’s time to plan and plant a winter garden. Of course, many people are busy right now canning, freezing, drying, and pickling, which are age-old techniques for preserving the harvest for leaner times. But if we were serious about eating local food year round, we’d all have to be doing this, and in serious quantities. Instead, we rely on the grocery stores to get us through the winter.

And this doesn’t even touch on all the foods that we don’t grow here, or grow in such small quantities that it barely counts:

  • Meat, dairy, poultry: I’m putting these at the top of the list, because — although we can obviously produce them here and in pretty serious quantities if need be — the government in its wisdom has seen fit to clamp down on small-scale production of animal products. This situation is still unresolved, and constitutes on of the most serious obstacles to a local food economy. What are we supposed to be doing about this situation? Will the grocery stores always supply our needs?
  • Grains: Imagine the amount of wheat, corn, oats, and other grains consumed here every day. Should we even be trying to grow these here? Many people are interested, and I am seeing some interest in a local grain CSA. Is it feasible? Can we produce these grains at anything like a reasonable cost?
  • Beans: A similar situation, except that beans are pretty easy to grow here. Although the amounts required are enormous. How can we approach the sort of commercial scale required to make a real farming enterprise out of this? Again, can it ever be economically realistic to do so?
  • Oils: Sunflowers certainly grow well here, and of course animals can provide oils for some uses. But again, imagine the amount of production needed to supply the needs of the region. How did people handle this in the days before importation of almost all food? I’m guessing that lard and other animal fats were pretty much a staple.
  • Spices, tropical/sub-tropical fruits & cocoa, coffee, etc.: There are some foods that we cannot grow here. That’s always been the case and always will be. We can try to find substitutes, or we can accept that no region can ever be completely self-reliant.

When you take a look at a list like this, imagine the amount of food passing through the tills of the grocery stores in the region, and then contrast that with the puny amounts of food produced locally, it’s enough to make your head spin. Are we even producing 1% of our local consumption? I’m not sure it adds up to even that minuscule percentage. But just because the task ahead of us looks Herculean, that’s no reason not to tackle it. The question you have to ask yourself is: why should we care? Why not continue to rely on the amazing global food industry, which brings us food from around the world at all times of the year?

What motivates the people who commit to eating locally, whether for 50 days at the height of the summer or all year round? I believe that for many of the people who make a commitment to local food, it’s worth growing, preserving, and hunting down local food for many reasons. But not the least of these reasons is the pure satisfaction — which is at heart an aesthetic pleasure — of connecting in the most primeval way possible with our surroundings. A strawberry from the garden certainly tastes more delicious than a strawberry from the grocery store, protected during its world travels by a pathetic plastic clamshell. But the strawberry also tastes better, and pleases us on a deeper level, because it is the fruit of our very own soil. It is as much a part of the place we live in and care for as we are. There is something genuinely spiritual about this connection to our food, and sadly this is a connection that many people have lost or have never had. The fight to save local food (and it is a fight, make no mistake) comes from the desire to save something whose passing from the world can never be replaced: the wonder of bringing our food into being, caring for it, harvesting it and preserving it, and creating meals that sustain our bodies and our spirits. The cultural importance of these activities is huge, but like so many things in our world, they get swamped in discussions of economics and efficiency.

Eating locally is an act of cultural preservation. And I think that most of the people who are drawn to the eat-local challenge understand this on some level, even if they’re not easily able to express it. And that’s why it is not going to stop growing, getting a little bigger and more visible each year. It’s a long game, but we have nothing to lose but the best food in the world.

Seed-saving adventures

Published July 24, 2009 food security , garden , plants , relocalization , resilience , seed-saving , Texada 4 Comments

By Tom Read

My apologies for this focus-challenged photo I took today. We'll soon be awash in carrot seeds, even if they're a bit blurry at the moment.

My apologies for this focus-challenged photo I took today. We'll soon be awash in carrot seeds, even if they're a bit blurry at the moment.

Texada Island is a good place to grow carrots, once you dig the rocks out of your garden and if you’ve got enough good seeds. Given the converging economic, energy and environmental uncertainties besetting the world today, we do not take for granted our access to good vegetable seeds. So, last summer we grew a Nantes open-pollinated carrot variety from West Coast Seeds. One difference between carrots and some other vegetables is that you have to let carrots continue into their second year of life to harvest seeds. Thus, we over-wintered the best carrot plants from our 2008 garden in hope of saving seeds this year.

Meanwhile, our friend Fred gave us about 30 scarlet runner beans last fall after I made admiring noises about their colourful long seed pods in his garden in Van Anda.  After decades of saving these runner bean seeds, Fred has noticed a gradual darkening in their colour.  Before planting, I soaked all the seeds overnight in a bowl of tepid water, then the next morning I set aside for planting only the seeds that had sunk to the bottom of the bowl. I had read somewhere that if a seed floats, then it’s not as vigorous as one that sinks. This may be a mistake in regard to scarlet runner beans, but I’ve soaked other types of bean seeds before planting, with good results.

I’m no expert in plant genetics, but of the 30 scarlet runner beans I planted (some more black than brownish-red), only about half germinated, which seemed a bit low compared to the store-bought pole bean seeds we planted about two weeks earlier elsewhere in our garden.  The store-bought seeds showed an 80% germination rate and are already six feet high, while the scarlet runners are barely above knee level, so far. This is probably a result of sun exposure and weather differences in the different garden locations, and each variety’s planting time requirements. I should have tried some side-by-side same-time planting for a truer comparison. Maybe the scarlet runners will catch up by September.

My point is not that Fred’s generously donated scarlet runners are somehow deficient.  The point is that I haven’t learned how to run valid plant genetics experiments in our garden. This matters because if we don’t learn how to keep our own food plant seeds viable generation after generation, we will remain dependent on an increasingly tenuous seed supply from a shrinking number of reliable seed companies.

We’re not alone in thinking about this issue. The Powell River Farmer’s Institute co-sponsored a 2009 seed-saving venture, which was promoted on Texada by PR farmer Wendy Devlin. Last winter, Wendy visited the Texada Garden Club and handed out seed packets for several types of garden vegetables to anyone interesting in seed-saving. I took 15 Styrian pumpkin seeds provided by a volunteer in the Powell River region, which we have since grown into six rather happy pumpkin plants.  They’re perched on well-fertilized hills containing rotted chicken manure and seaweed, about five feet apart.  Growing like crazy in the mid-July heat! We’ll have Styrian pumpkin seeds to share come October, if all goes well.

But our attempt to grow pumpkins in 2008 utterly failed due to several obvious-in-hindsight errors which could have been avoided by doing more research or having guidance from an expert. Confirmed optimists like myself call that a “learning experience.”  This year we’ll make different mistakes, no doubt. I believe that you can’t truly garden successfully just from reading about it on the Internet or in gardening books; experience counts, especially hard-won experience.

Which brings me to another, somewhat sobering thought in closing.  After several years of gardening, Linda and I are still really novices. We get some pretty good crops every year, but we make lots of mistakes, too. What will happen when the global price of oil takes another sharp turn upwards, making store-bought food a lot more expensive, so that people with even less experience than us must try to grow their own? Yes, we can help each other, but that will amount to novices leading other novices. That, and sustaining vigorous seed genetics, gives us something to ponder as we continue our adventures in seed-saving.

One down, eleven to go

Published May 25, 2009 community , public meeting , relocalization , resilience , sustainability , Transition , Transition Town Powell River 3 Comments

By David Parkinson

Seeds, awaiting the right moment to create new life...

Seeds, awaiting the right moment to create new life...

Last Wednesday (May 20 2009), the Unitarian Hall in Cranberry was the scene of a meeting which might end up having some historical importance. I was happy to be part of this meeting, and I’m excited to see what the next steps will be, since this was the inaugural get-together of a new group, Transition Powell River.

It seems as though 2009 is the year that Transition starts to go mainstream: none other than the New York Times published a recent piece on Transition, and even Elle magazine got into the act with a piece titled “Do Worry, Be Happy.” So what is this thing called Transition?

All it really is a set of procedures for starting out with two big realizations:

  • we are approaching — or possibly have gone past — the point of maximum worldwide oil production;
  • climate change is a real problem, largely man-made, and we must reduce carbon emissions drastically and quickly.

Little by little, these realizations are seeping in from the fringes of respectable public discourse and starting to occupy centre stage in average people’s understanding and in the decision-making of political leaders. But they are such enormous and far-reaching sets of facts which pose huge problems to us all, on an individual and community level. How are we supposed to deal with the fact that we are at the end of the era of cheap fossil fuels? How can we reduce carbon emissions quickly enough to have a meaningful effect on the earth’s atmosphere?

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by questions like these. And in a society which tends to keep us all separated from one another, we all feel as though we are dealing with this on our own. Should we buy the recycled toilet paper? Change our lightbulbs? Start bicycling to work one day a week? Ditch the car altogether?

So we start from the two big assumptions and add to them (as if they weren’t enough) the geographical isolation of the Upper Sunshine Coast. So now we’re facing an ongoing and accelerating decline in the availability of fossil fuels, leading to ever-higher prices. And the need to sharply reduce carbon emissions. And to deal with the fact that higher prices for gas and oil mean higher prices for all goods shipped to us from outside the region. And maybe we need to start seriously planning for occasional disruptions in supply.

And so what are we supposed to do with this litany of seemingly insurmountable problems?

This is where the Transition movement comes in (and not a moment too soon). The main idea behind creating a transition to a future of limited fossil fuel supplies and reduced carbon emissions is that we need to harness the creative energy of the whole community in order to have the greatest chance of success. Here are some of the questions we need to start answering:

  • How are we going to feed ourselves as the costs of oil-dependent agriculture and transportation rise?
  • How can we travel around the region more efficiently?
  • How can we heat our homes as oil, natural gas, and electricity become more expensive?
  • What will the basis of our regional economy be?
  • What are the expected effects of climate change on our water supply and on our capacity to produce food regionally?

What attracts me most about the Transition approach is what it is not. It is not something for our political leaders to sort out. Nor is it something that individuals are expected to cope with (which would almost certainly mean: through their choices as consumers). Instead, it is a community-based approach to coping with some very heavy realities and coming up with solutions and mitigations which make sense to the community.

The City of Powell River is still engaged in its effort to create a Sustainability Charter for the region. At the point of writing this, the City is looking to hire a consultant for the final phase of creation of the charter, which will be a brief document outlining some goals and policies for making the City more sustainable (however that is defined). This is a good thing, but it’s not clear how regular citizens will engage with the outcome of this charter — for all we know, the resulting policies may have much to do with lowering the City’s consumption of fossil fuels and overall carbon footprint and not so much to do with helping all of the inhabitants of the region to reduce their individual and collective footprint. Governments are good at some things, but galvanizing activism is traditionally not one of them.

So one of the nice things about this Transition Powell River effort is that it belongs to us. It was started up by one local person, Kevin Wilson, who read The Transition Handbook and got fired up with enthusiasm. He contacted some friends and put the word out through a few local email lists and in Immanence magazine. And so we met last week and started the ball rolling; you can read Kevin’s brief summary of the meeting here.

And that brings me to the title of this week’s column: “One down, eleven to go”. This refers to the twelve steps to Transition, which are a good introduction to the whole idea. If you take a few minutes to read through them you’ll get a good sense of how loose and organic the process is. Transition is not a set of rules and formal procedures for getting from here to there; they’re designed to be more like a set of attitudes and approaches which allow the genius of the participants to find expression. Like the twelve principles of permaculture, which I discussed last week — what is it with the number twelve anyway? — they are ways of thinking about a tough problem and maximizing the chances of coming up with good solutions. I am very drawn to problem-solving strategies like these, since they allow for the greatest amount of human creativity and freedom. Any jackass can follow a set of rules, but only a community of people focused on a common task can converse, debate, argue, disagree, and eventually (we hope) work towards the best overall solution — which may be no single person’s preferred solution, but one that everyone can live with and contribute to.

And so the “one down” is the very first of the twelve steps: “Set up a steering group and design its demise from the outset”. Which is what we did last Wednesday. The slightly funny part of this step, of course, is the second clause: “… and design its demise from the outset”. Why is that a critical part of the formation of a steering group? The idea, as explained in the twelve steps document, is that one of the first actions for the steering group to get going on is to start forming working groups which will tackle specific areas of concern, such as food supply, water supply, housing, energy, transportation, etc. Once a few of those groups are up and running, the steering group dissolves and a new group is formed by appointing a delegate from each of these working groups.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. Success depends on bringing more people in and getting them involved in making a real impact on our region’s resilience and capacity to withstand some coming challenges. It’s scary stuff sometimes, but better faced as a community than as a bunch of isolated individuals. Interested? If you want to know what’s going on with our Transition effort, email Kevin Wilson and keep an eye on the Transition Powell River blog.

Growing the local food economy

Published May 4, 2009 economy , food security , local food economy , resilience , Robin Wheeler 4 Comments

By David Parkinson

Yarrow, one of the medicinal plants we found thriving next to the road on Brian Lee's wild plant walk

Yarrow, one of the medicinal plants we found thriving next to the road on Brian Lee's wild plant walk

This past weekend, as part of my work with the Powell River Food Security Project, I hosted something I called a “Food Skills Weekend“. This consisted of a series of workshops and talks on improving our personal and community-level self-reliance and resilience with respect to our food supply. We had one workshop on increasing our capacity to produce food in our own backyard, led by Robin Wheeler, edible landscapist extraordinaire; local canning whizzes Nicole Narbonne, Will Langlands, and Peggy Fedor presented two workshops on the basics of water-bath and pressure canning; and wild plant aficionado Brian Lee took us on a wild plant walk around Powell River to learn about some of the wild foods in our area.

Among all of that, Robin led two workshop/discussions on the importance of breaking down barriers that get between us and increased resilience. Much of this conversation consisted of talking about what prevents us — as individuals — from becoming better prepared in the home and garden, and what prevents us — as a community — from working better together to increase resilience at the level of the neighbourhood, town, district, or region.

This is a valuable and an essential conversation to be having.

When we think of becoming more food-secure in our own homes, we can think of certain assets we can work on creating:

  • a thriving garden;
  • a well-stocked pantry;
  • a kitchen where we can prepare healthy meals;

And creating each of these assets might require that we work with others in the community who can help us acquire the necessary knowledge and skills. In some cases, we might achieve economies of scale by working with others; a good example here are old-fashioned canning bees, which allow us to put large amounts of food by at one time by working together.

Community food security consists of the sum total of individual and household food security plus the sorts of resources which exist to serve larger groups within the community. Farms, farmers’ markets, buyers’ groups and cooperatives, garden-sharing networks, community dinners, food pantries and food banks… all of these are ways of organizing food security at higher levels and building resilience into the local food economy.

Many people around us are aware of the importance of food security and are concerned about the fragility of the global food supply, especially in a time of economic uncertainty. All over our region and elsewhere throughout the world, people are having conversations about how to increase their control over the food that they eat, how to create community around food, and how to develop a robust local food economy. This is a huge topic, but I want to focus here on personal and community food security, and especially on how we can start to create more initiatives which will allow us to become more self-reliant without having to spend all of our time and energy gardening, canning, and cooking.

So, what are the skills, areas of knowledge and know-how, and capacities that add up to personal food security? Let’s look at three pretty basic ones. In each case I want to briefly outline what I’m talking about and also think out loud about some of the ways we can make it easier for people to acquire the necessary skills or take advantage of other people’s skills and work.

I. The ability to produce food

This is a huge domain of knowledge, skills, and experience. It covers everything from planning a garden and selecting seeds to rotating crops, using water efficiently, building soil, choosing amendments, and many many more practical and theoretical skills. (I’m setting aside some other ways of producing food, such as foraging, hunting, and fishing.)

How can we make it easier for people?

Some people are simply unable to grow food for themselves. Maybe they lack the necessary space; or the time it takes to do all the planning, planting, weeding, watering, and so on; or they are physically unable to do some of the strenuous work. There are businesses springing up all around which use urban lots to grow food, and about as many business models as there are businesses: some grow the food for the homeowner; some use lots as urban farms and sell the produce; some are more like a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, which produce food for subscribers. (You can browse a number of these urban-farming enterprises here.)

These sorts of enterprises — whether structured as for-profit corporations, not-for-profit community initiatives, or cooperatives — are necessary because we are unlikely to find ways to free up people’s time or make them more physically able to work in the garden.

So how can we encourage more people to think of farming the city and collaborating on larger farming operations? What stands in the way? Is it simply not economically feasible? Not attractive enough as a potential business opportunity? Too much damn work for most people to even think about? Maybe there are not enough highly visible models… yet.

II. The ability to process and store food

There are many skills associated with processing and storing food, especially used when food is abundant. Canning, freezing, pickling, drying, fermenting, and root-cellaring are among these skills.

How can we make it easier for people?

Besides continuing to present workshops so that those who are experienced in these techniques can hand their knowledge on to people willing to acquire them, we need to start considering some of the real barriers that stand in the way of people doing more of this. One of the major ones is the cost of the necessary equipment and supplies as well as access to proper processing facilities; in the case of canning, this might mean the cost of a canner or pressure canner, jars, lids, and other bits of kitchen equipment. As so many people have pointed out to me, why should everyone have to own their own canner, etc.? And why should everyone have to work alone in their own kitchen processing large quantities of food? There are surely economies of scale to be realized by working together in a common kitchen, not to mention that it would be a more pleasurable activity, like an old-fashioned canning bee.

So one thing I personally want to concentrate on this summer — in collaboration with the local Fruit Tree Project — is to organize canning bees in local kitchens. We’ll need to work out the details of how people participate; people should be able to put in labour or money or some combination of the two. But the bottom line is that by working together we ought to be able to produce large quantities of properly canned food at affordable prices.

Likewise with drying food: why should everyone have to have their own dehydrator? What if we pool money to buy a good solid commercial-quality dehydrator, which people can rent space and time in? We can organize work parties to prepare food (gleaned locally or otherwise procured) and keep the costs as low as possible. And again people can choose to participate by contributing labour or money or both.

III. The ability to find, store, and prepare healthy inexpensive food

An obvious aspect of personal or household food security is knowing how to get the best food at the lowest possible prices, how to store food against rainy days or disruptions in the food supply, and how to use basic ingredients to prepare nutritious meals at a reasonable cost.

How can we make it easier for people?

This is, of course, a huge area and not likely to be successfully tackled anytime soon. Part of this involves educating people about how they can save money and eat better while supporting the local food economy as much as possible. The 50-mile diet challenge and the Open Air Market are two of the best and most visible ambassadors for healthier local eating. But we need more. One thing we could use are more cooperative food-purchasing groups or food cooperatives. Many people have no room to store frozen food, while others have huge amounts of room to spare.

As with the need to get more food produced locally, part of the problem here is simply that the global food supply is working well enough that there is no widespread perception of fragility. And by the time there is that perception, it will be late in the day to start developing these enterprises, man of which will require a long and cautious incubation period.

Creating a local food economy

I’m throwing some of these ideas out there in a casual fashion, but as a community we need to start tackling some of these if we intend to become a region where everyone is secure in his or her ability to eat well and to do so in a way which supports a strong local economy. There are all kinds of efforts out there which point in this direction, but the sky is the limit. It is impossible to have too many projects which aim to help people become more self-reliant, more able to produce and store food safely and wisely, more able to understand how to eat cheaply and well.

More and more, I understand that this is not going to happen solely as a result of not-for-profit or volunteer-based endeavours, whether government-funded (e.g., the Food Security Project which I work for, or the Food Bank), charitable (e.g., various church dinners and food pantries), or ‘shoestring’ (e.g., the Fruit Tree Project, which has no reliable funding or infrastructure). We have to start trying to develop the local food economy, with the accent on economy. There is a huge amount of critical work to be done, and too much is already happening as a result of volunteer effort. The most important thing we can do to increase food security in this region is to develop small businesses or cooperative enterprises and support each other in these efforts.

One type of enterprise I dream about is a cooperative which will bring together people who want to be as food-secure as possible. Members will contribute time, labour, money, or some combination of these. In return for their contribution, they will be subscribed to a year-round food-security service which will:

  • produce food on their behalf;
  • provide them with collective work parties where they can learn essential skills and get the benefit of their work (e.g., canning bees, sowing and weeding parties);
  • offer them significant savings on purchases of bulk staples, sourced as locally as possible;
  • work closely with local producers to create and support markets for dairy, meat, fish, grain, and other foods which require larger-scale production;
  • provide members with a library of shared tools and common food storage facilities;
  • act as a clearinghouse for information and expertise, offer workshops, etc.

As Robin pointed out in her workshops on this subject, some of the barriers to developing cooperative efforts are pretty widespread and easy to identify: lack of time, lack of trust, and often a lack of self-confidence and willingness to step forward and claim a common problem as our own and start working on it. I don’t know how to address these stumbling blocks, but clearly we need to fight against the isolation that keeps us all in our own personal silos working on our own personal problems and failing to draw the connecting lines between my garden and your freezer, between her farm and our canning bee, between our buyers’ group and their community dinner.

I think we’ll get there in due time, but if anyone out there wants to start working towards these goals now, contact me.

Seven sunny days

Published April 24, 2009 drought , environment , food security , forest , resilience , Texada , weather 1 Comment
Where's the rain? It's starting to feel a little like a drought might be headed our way. Here's the forecast for the coming week for Texada/Powell River

Where's the rain? It's starting to feel a little like a drought might be headed our way. Here's the forecast for the coming week for Texada/Powell River

By Tom Read

Our local weather forecast from Environment Canada shows a string of sunny days reaching into the future. Spring weather predictions are notoriously unreliable, but if we get all this warm sunshine, we’ll need to get busy in the garden, weeding and prepping beds for May planting. And the bees will be busy, I hope, so they’ll need some attention, too. Not to mention the chickens, which we let out to go walkabout every afternoon when it’s nice weather. They’re always back waiting for their evening snack by 5 or 6, then have to be tucked in for the night.

We’re still waiting for one of the hens – any one! – to go broody and start sitting on a clutch of eggs to ensure our next generation of chicken for the freezer. The rooster crows earlier every morning it seems, especially with all these bright days that start peeking out around the darkness way too early.

There’s some not-so-great parts to all this sunshine, though. The rain gauge in our garden seems stuck at about 1.5 inches for the whole month of April. Let there be no doubt: we’re too dry for this time of year. The implications for our homestead, for Texada Island and for the region include:

– barbeque season will be short, while irrigation season will be long;

– we’ll make a lot of solar power at our homestead during the day, but little or no micro-hydro (which operates 24/7) once the creek gets too dry, so we’ll have to burn propane in our back-up generator to make up the shortfall in electricity production. And propane costs a whole lot more than “free” microhydro;

– due to our decreased electricity production in the months ahead, we’ll probably have to shut down our freezer until the rains return sometime in the fall;

– some people with shallow wells aren’t going to have enough water this year;

– the forest will become “tinder dry” as they say, with water-stressed trees and increased fire danger;

I could go on and on about the implications of too little water for our area. Consider, however, that drought is affecting the world’s industrial food-growing areas as well. We’re fortunate that our creeks and rivers still have any water at all, because many other regions have little or none. “Resilience” is not an abstract concept, it’s a necessity. We live on an island on this sphere called “Earth,” and we are about to get a lesson in how to cope with multiple shocks to our too-comfortable, industrial-based, supposedly non-negotiable way of life.

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