The event was organised by the Climate Action Research Group in partnership with Friends of the Earth Sydney (FOE). The Group appears to consist largely of academics who investigate the politics and methods of climate action in Australia. For someone whose approach to climate change adaptation is indirect, coming mainly through education and advocacy on food-related issues, it was a worthwhile experience to mingle with the milieu that takes primarily a campaigning approach to the climate issue.

By way of explanation

By way of explaining my approach, I see food choices — as well as impinging on community health, water conservation, urban landuse, community development and energy issues — as prime determinants of an individuals or a family’s relationship with climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This comes through the oil dependency of our agriculture, food processing and food distribution networks and the production of food wastes. It makes food choices, and how and where food is produced, new avenues through which to approach climate change… avenues that have been shown to be often more inspirational and participatory than that of the campaigning and lobbying of Australia’s climate change groups. This is not to criticise the climate change groups now found through urban and rural communities — their role in directly engaging with the political process is valuable, however it is my observation that it is potentially less participatory than other community-based approaches.

Observations

My impressions of the event remain largely undiscussed and unanalysed, so I haven’t had the opportunity of changing my mind on them. Here they are…

Academic origin clear

Reflecting the organisers of the event, academic terminology, discourse and approaches were dominant in some of the papers presented, interesting though they were. Some reflected the academic approach of structuring findings within a context of theory. Theory, of course, is of great help in attempting to understand something but it may also apply limits to thinking if the researcher cannot step outsides the boundaries of someone else’s ideas.

There were frequent references to Marxist analysis. Marxism in an academic context means something different to what it means in the broader community where it is associated with particular political movements which elicit either support of abhorrence, depending on the audiences experience of Marxism as a political movement. In academia, it is an approach to analysing social trends and structures and is largely free of its baggage as a political form. Mentioning it in the academic context would only be confusing in communicating with communities.

Applicability of content

The theme of the event was less the production of useful, directly applicable findings than self-examination. Before this is written off as navel-gazing, let’s recognise that evaluation is too-seldom done in civil society organisations, mainly because people are too busy getting on with the job. This I found while working for an international development NGO.

Many community-based organisations would do well to reflect on their practice to derive useful learnings from it. The concept of Peter Senge’s ‘learning organisation’ has yet to filter from the corporate to the world of  community organisations.

Mark Diesendorf, a campaigner for and author on renewable energy systems and who is employed at UNSW, and Ben Spies-Butcher from Macquarie University’s Department of Sociology, were, for me, the speakers with applicable, practical information to offer. Likewise Linda Connor from the University of Sydney’s Anthropology department whose reflections, which concluded the event, offered valuable insight as befitting the anthropological approach to research that consists of observation and, sometimes, immersion in the field of study.

A limited appreciation of organisations active in climate change

Climate Action Network Australia, Friends of the Earth Sydeny, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition were represented. All are organisations with a direct lobbying role in the politics of climate change and, as such, deserved a place at the event.

Other groups deserving a place in talks on climate change are those taking an indirect approach through some other focus. Unfortunately, they were conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps this has to do with the narrower framework through which the Climate Action Research Group and groups like FOE and the ACF view those active on climate change issues. Perhaps they are simply ignorant of the existence of these groups. Perhaps they view themselves as a more elite group and self-position themselves as ‘leaders’. Perhaps those other groups are regarded as minor entities because they work within the sometimes confusing and changeable swirl of citizen initiatives. Most likely is the fact that their approach to climate change is not campaign-based and, in some cases, seeks personal and community behaviour change rather than taking a directly political approach.

Also missing as speakers was anyone working on climate change in local government.

That those among campaigning groups may be unfamiliar with contemporary thinkers on sustainability education was made clear when a local government sustainability educator in the audiences mentioned the work of Bob Doppelt, an acknowledged thinker and doer in community sustainability education and behaviour change. The speakers were all seemingly familiar with Bill Moyes work on social action movements, howevert no other thinker was mentioned.

The groups I refer to above as missing from the event include those in the Transition Towns movement, a social movement that has significance because it was only released upon the world in 2006 and has now gone global. It inspires people because it is necessarily participatory and action-based. Climate change is one of the main topics it addresses in seeking to build local, citizen-based resilience.

When a woman from Transition Katoomba mentioned Transition Towns, it provoked no response from either the audience or the speakers. The impression was that they had been presented perhaps with something they might have heard of but something that was beyond their frame of reference when it came to climate action. If true, it suggests the perceptual divide between academics who study social movements and those who make them reality. It also adds to the perception held by many in the community sector that academics study things but seldom return a great deal of applicable, useful value to movements.

Also absent was any representative of the Permaculture design system. Permaculture, which offers a systems approach to sustainable living, has been talking about climate change since the early 1990s, perhaps before that. Is it Permaculture’s eschewing of the campaigning approach and its preference for individual and community action that makes it invisible, especially to those who see the only valid form of climate action as lobbying?

Although individuals within the Permaculture design system participate in campaigning and other actions on climate issues, it is true that Permaculture as a social movement generally does not. This stems from the attitude of one of its founders, Dr Bill Mollison, that campaigning expends much energy for little result and that building a broad community of practice at the grassroots level is the way to build a constituency for change.

The question of membership

There was polite disagreement among representatives of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, the Climate Action Network Australia and Friends of the Earth Sydney on the role of members of green organisations in formulating and enacting what it is they stand for.

For someone who has worked in local government education programs and local government policy development for community food production as well as in community food systems and other organisations that were unrepresented at the event, the idea that members of organisations participate in policy formulation and in enacting the agenda of the organisation is… well… a basic assumption. It was almost peculiar to hear of supposedly community organisations where this was not the situation.

Listening to the conversation among the three representatives, I realised that people who simply pay membership dues and make donations to groups like, say, Greenpeace, are simply outsourcing their activism. This is reasonable when people are time poor, have demanding work and young families. It is not, however, engaging of member’s skills and motivation.

A good point was made by one of the speakers, I don’t recall who, said that the money Greenpeace spends on putting recruiters and donation collectors on the street would better be spent on salaries for community organisers. Despite the noble intentions of their organisation, these Greenpeace fund raisers have simply joined all of the other streetfront hustlers to blend into the category of ’social pest’ whose cheery, false greetings (so like those of supermarket checkout operators) are best ignored.

Worthwhile way to spend a day? Yes

This was an event for campaigning organisations yet it is unfortunate that they were the only type of climate change organisation recognised. Perhaps this signifies an academic-community disconnect. The observations disclosed were valuable but, in the case of FOE and ACF, they were those of the elite, professionalised environment groups. Community climate change groups have a greater grassroots presence, or potential for that, however they engage members only in campaigning rather than if some broader form that combines this with personal behavioural change.

It seems there are two structures operating when it comes to climate change —  that of the established professionalised groups like ACF and the newer, less-formal formations such as Transition Towns and Permaculture that are firmly grounded in the social grassroots.

They are not protagonists, however, but allies in that their different foci are complementary. Campaigning and political lobbying are needed as are personal and community behavioral change towards sustainable living. What is not happening is effective exchange between the two approaches and the realisaton that they take different approaches to similar ends.

It’s quite possible, however, that this divergence will grow wider. There already has been discomfort with the start-up of local Transition Towns groups that established environment groups see as impinging on their territory.

Maybe this can be seen from a different angle. As the big, established environment groups become more ‘professional’ so as to become more effective lobbyists, they abandon their old grassroots niche which is colonised by the newer, more flexible and adaptable groups like Transition Towns that give to their participants the opportunity for direct action and influence.

This was a worthwhile conference and it suggests the organisation of future symposia at which the different roles of campaigning and lobbying and that of community action can be explored. Hopefully, better understanding of the complementarity of the approach would emerge…. and who knows…collaboration, even?

I’m not  lover of the supermarket shopping experience but I do venture into the places on occasion. Such an occasion occurred recently when I walked into a supermarket in Sydney’s eastern beachside suburb of Maroubra. As to which of the supermarket duopoly’s shopping warehouses it was, I don’t recall… they are so similar that I find little to distinguish them… they blend together in the mind.

I noticed that there was something new when I made my way to the checkout. What was new was the checkout itself. It had gone, at least in its traditional form. Where there had once been a checkout operator there now was none. Instead, a machine stood ready to accept shoppers’ credit cards and a woman was there to help shoppers navigate the touchscreen and insert their cards — her job was to train the customer in this latest iteration of supermarket shopping.

I realised that I was witnessing the beginning of the end of the probably somewhat dulling but nevertheless income-generating job of checkout operator — what has become known as the ‘checkout chick’ on account of the preponderance of women occupying the position.

that avenue of low-demand work might be about to disappear

This was not the first time I had encountered an automated checkout. My first encounter had been some years ago in Lismore in what must have been an early trial of the technology. Now, it appears, the automated checkout is starting to appear in increasing numbers.

The role of checkout operator is not exclusively a female job. I had noticed that males have started to appear, both young men and those of late middle age for whom the work might offer employment in a job market that eschews the older male worker. Now, assuming the automation of the checkout proceeds, that avenue of low-demand work might be about to disappear.

Impact a job-shedding potential

Assuming that the presently small number of automated checkouts prove effective means of corporate cost-cutting and that they proliferate to replace most of the human checkout operators at some time in the not-distant future, what could their impact be, potentially?

there are those stubborn shoppers who like to interact with a human at the checkout

Would the disappearance of the operator have an impact in the newer, outer-urban suburbs where local jobs might be in short supply and where the work might provide the parents of young families the opportunity to shape working life around their parental and other responsibilities? And what impact on the working lives of older working people, now that the federal government is talking up the need to work later into life? One employment option less in an job market that doesn’t want older workers?

The job won’t go entirely, of course… there are those stubborn shoppers who like to interact with a human at the checkout despite the false smiles, the false ‘hello’ and ‘how-are-you’ they are greeted with. Then there are those troublesome others who prefer to deal in that traditional means of exchange — cash — you still need a human operator for that.

Open to criticism

The supermarket industry has become a target of criticism and it could be that an increase in the number of automated checkouts adds to this.

Criticism ranges from the lack of competition inherent in a market dominated by the two big chains through to the impact of supermarket buying policy on farmers and the consequent production of food waste, the impact of supermarkets on traditional streetfront shopping strips and the types of businesses trading there to the high energy consumption of lighting, refrigerating products and of air conditioning the often huge shopping warehouses we know as supermarkets.

the supermarket is sometimes the only source of food in a suburb

The impersonal experience of industrialised shopping that is part of buying your needs in supermarkets was highlighted for me when a friend mentioned how he walked along the laundry and bathroom products aisle unintentionally imbibing the volatile organic compounds outgassed by the products there. Don’t take my word, try it yourself and notice that, yes, that aisle does smell different and what exactly are those chemicals that we can smell?

These are all valid criticisms and some of them could be addressed through changing product procurement policy and through more energy efficient technologies, however they are beyond the scope of this article.

What is not is that critics sometimes fail to acknowledge that the supermarket is sometimes the only source of food in a suburb and that, as well as critique, what is needed are guidelines for sane supermarket shopping. Instructive here may be food writer, Michael Pollan’s prescription to shop the periphery of the supermarket where fresher and less-processed food are found. He calls most processed supermarket food products ‘foodlike substances’ because of their sometimes distant relationship to the foods they purport to be.

Software a shopping helper

Help in navigating the plethora of foods and foodlike substances found on the supermarket shelves is at hand, providing you own one of the newer multipurpose, handheld digital devices known as smartphones. There is already a free application for the Apple iPhone called ‘Shop Ethical’. The idea is that, as you shop the aisles, you can look up the ethics of the manufacturers of particular products, see whether the manufacturer is a Australian company and ask yourself whether the company’s behaviour is worth the support of your buying their product.

Looking up soy products > soy milk, for example, discloses that Bonsoy, a Spiral Foods product, is organically produced. Click the ‘assessment’ button and you learn that it is also GE free (not made from genetically engineered inputs) and that Spiral Foods is based at Unit 4, 56-72 John Street, Leichhardt, in Sydney’s Inner West. Click another button to learn that Spiral Foods manufactures soy sauce and ‘health products’ (type undisclosed) as well as soy milk.

Assessing products through handheld digital devices will likely become a practice of the discerning supermarket shopper

Flick downscreen to find that the Vitasoy brand is highlighted with a big bold black ‘X’ on a red background, in contrast to Bonsoy which carries a big bold black tick on a green background, that it is a product distributed by Lion Nathan Australia and is owned by Vitasoy Australia, both companies being awarded the big bold black X. A further click takes you to the ‘company focus’ screen that lists related companies and discloses that the company manufactures in Australia. The big bold black X signifies what the software describes as ‘criticisms’ of the company, which is one up from ‘boycott call’. A qualifier at the bottom of the screen tells you that ratings are based on the product parent company rating and do not signify the quality of the product itself.

Also now available for your handheld digital device (previously known as the ‘mobile phone’ to signify its single-use origins) are applications making use of augmented reality. Point your device’s camera at the product barcode and on the screen, superimposed over the product image, appears information to help you decide whether you want to support that product and its manufacturer.

Assessing products through handheld digital devices will likely become a practice of the discerning supermarket shopper, however the question must be asked as to whether shoppers disposed to make use of such tools and buying habits would purchase very much in the supermarket anyway. Even if they do not shop regularly in the supermarket, some of the products found in the application are likely to be stocked in organic food shops. This opens those premises to shopper-initiated, on-the-spot assessment of their product lines. Making product and company information available on-demand, on-the-spot, can be seen as a democratisation of the process of consumption.

Were this type of product assessment to become more widespread, is could reflect the popularity of products through their sales figures, and thus steer supermarket and organic industry buyers to stock more appropriate products.

Shopping the old-fashioned way

But none of this was available that evening as I stood in line at the checkout to buy a carton of milk so that participants in the community education course could enjoy the stuff in their coffee or tea.

Incidentally, it had been quite a walk to retrieve that single product from the rear of the store, as, in supermarkets, it is a marketing practice to place popular, everyday items such as milk at the rear of the store so that shoppers have to walk an aisle or two of other products in the hope that they will be sufficiently attracted by something to make an unintended purchase.

Oh, purchasing only a single product implies the use of cash, so it was to a young woman at the checkout that I handed my $5 note, avoiding interacting with yet another machine that day.

“Hello”, she said automatically but cheerfully, “how are you?”.

Surfing remains a preoccupation of those fortunate enough to live within close distance of that curve of golden sand, but new times have thrown up now ideas in the suburb. One of those new — and good — ideas can be found not all that far from the famous beach in the front yard of a modest block of 1970s walk-up apartments. There, an innovative young woman by the name of Kimberley has turned a monoculture of lawn grass into a polyculture of vegetables, all in a garden of curvaceous edges.

Look beyond the circular garden — it’s called a ‘mandala’ garden design because it copies the shape of Indian mandalas — and you will see a number of young fruit trees down the side of the building as well as a compost bin.

It seems that in the City East the idea of food gardens in apartment blocks is slowly catching on.

See another apartment food garden here.

Visitors from the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance's Food Summit tour of food systems in the City East region get an introduction to Kimberley's apartment garden.

The 'mandala' shaped garden is a variation on the circular garden bed design. Plastic weed stripping has been used to define the garden edge and to present a barrier to lawn grass invasion.

Kimberley - the woman behind the garden — who did the Randwick City Council Living Smart course.

The curved shape of the apartment's vegetable garden is evident in this photo.

The first was that these are underpowered machines with cramped keyboards that would be difficult for adults to use continually unless they had small hands, but not necessarily so for students.

The second thought was that students would simply get around the blocked websites and running unauthorised software on their school-issued netbooks by using their own computers at home. I asked my friend about this and he said that this would be done out of school and not using school-issued computers, therefore it was beyond their control. I realised that it was not inappropriate content or the like that the education department was interested in, despite what they might claim; this was no more than an attempt to cover their own behinds by preventing access through a technology that they had made available, putting the blame on the students and their parents.

My third thought was that because the software is locked down and students cannot load their own, it would be sooner rather than later that the more innovative among them would start to hack the machines. That happened sooner than I would have anticipated and now students are sharing the information on social networking sites, according to reports in the popular press, and education bureaucrats are monitoring sites to spy on what their students are saying.

Encouraging innovation and protecting students

Recalling that some of the most innovative and commercially successful people in the IT industry started their careers as hackers, and that the industry has developed thanks to the intellectual freedom of the techno-liberterianism that fostered it, I wondered how the state education bureaucracy would react when students started to get around the barriers their IT people had put in place to lock down the computers. Would they recognise that reality that tinkering is part of the learning process of innovators, that the more innovative among the students would see a locked down computer as a challenge?

Of course not. They reacted with threats of punishing the students in the way that has become so typical of government and its anonymous legion of bureaucrats. As someone once told me, governments and their public service bureaucracies are there to maintain the status quo, to keep things running as they are; they are not rewarded to introduce change and innovation or to think in that way. This is not a criticism of people who work for the public service (except for those who make the major decisions); it is a critique of our secretive and managerial public service culture, that which stifles rather than innovates.

The departmental reaction is little more than a colossal collapse of imagination, but will it stem the drive of student hackers to gain control of their computers? Of course not. Why not? Because the drive to learn, to change, is stronger than any sanctions imposed by a government department. That’s the lesson of the IT industry and of the commercial success of some who started what are now its leading companies.

A more imaginative response in needed to those student hackers… some other way to encourage their curiousity that does not send them along more dangerous paths because the easy ones have been closed.

This has been a question occupying the thinking space of some who have been sourcing their fresh vegetables, fruit and culinary herbs from Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick. One or two, perhaps more, have moved over to the Food Connect delivery for the Coogee/Randwick area.

The two community food systems are similar at the same time as they are different. So, what’s the differences between them? There’s a couple.

Sydney Organic Buyers Group operates in Leichhardt and Kirribilli as well as in the Eastern Suburbs, the City East region. I should make it clear that I am talking only about the City East versions of the two food systems. Presumably though, almost certainly, the characteristics for other locations of both systems are much the same.

Fiona unpacks a 1-2 people-sized Food Connect fresh food box.

Let’s first consider structure

Both systems provide a weekly delivery of mainly organic food to members, a mix of food in season (Sydney Organic Buyers Group providing only organic foods). In neither system is it possible to order specific produce although the Organic Buyers Group does accept special orders for eggs and for boxes of particular fruits.

Sydney Organic Buyers works something like those food co-ops that do not trade as a shopfront but that meet weekly to distribute food to members. Food is delivered to the collection point — that’s a school for the Organic Buyers Group Randwick — by an organic wholesaler. In the early evening members come along and the boxes of fresh organics are packaged into the their weekly take-home boxes, people counting the quantities of fruit, vegetables and culinary herbs into each member’s box.

This can be a bit of a social occasion as people move this way and that around the circle of boxes,  placing food into each, and it is that which some members find attractive about the system.

Food Connect Sydney is an adaptation of the community supported agriculture (CSA) model and delivers prepacked boxes or mainly organic fresh, perishable foods ready for members to collect. These have been packed from farmer deliveries at the Food Connect depot at Blacktown. This system suits members with little time availability… they just turn up, pick up the size box they have ordered and sign it out. While some might stay around to talk or have a cup of tea or coffee, for most its a rather quick visit to the City Cousin collection point.

One or two who migrated to Food Connect Sydney from Sydney Organic Buyers would like to see a hybrid system introduced at the City East City Cousin. For those interested, the Food Connect depot would deliver unsorted foods as well as packaged food boxes for those interested only in picking up. The unsorted produce would then be boxed much like happens at the Organic Buyers Group.

Contents of the weekly box of in-season food from Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick.

Source

The source of food provided by both systems is a point of difference.

For the Organic Buyers Group, there is no way of ascertaining the provenance, the sources, of the organic food delivered. It could be from the Sydney region or it could be from interstate. There is no way of knowing.

Food Connect sources most of its supply from farmers in the Greater Sydney region and nearby, minimising the distance the food is transported. The exception are those fruits that are beyond their ecological range in Sydney — bananas from Coffs Harbour, for example.

This is clearly an attractive model to those whose prime interest is sourcing food with minimal carbon footprint and who want to support local farmers.

Ordering

There is little difference between the two when it comes to ordering.

Both have online ordering systems with orders placed up to a week in advance for Sydney Organic Buyers and several weeks for Food Connect. The advanced ordering for Food Connect is to ensure supply from participating farmers — it is a CSA, after all, rather than a distributor of foods coming from the wholesale market.

The dilemma

The dilemma facing good food eaters is which system to use.

There’s the question of food transportation and support for local farmers and it is this that will be the deciding factor for some.

Location of collection points is another factor, with proximity to home, or to travel routes from work to home, becoming factors in the decision. This may remain fluid for a time as the Food Connect Sydney City East City Cousin collection point is presently in a temporary location while one more central to Coogee is found.

Wherever people choose to get their fresh vegetables and fruit, it appears that there is sufficient demand in the City East region to support both.

Information about the food systems:

Sydney Organic Buyers
Food Connect Sydney

Declaration of interest: Author Russ Grayson has sourced food from both Food Connect Sydney and Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick.

FOOD CONNECT… it’s a bit like a contagion really, something that is rapidly spreading through viral replication.

The contagion has now spread as far as Adelaide and it’s sure to replicate its way further along the coast, perhaps making the hop across Bass Strait to Tasmania and to inland towns and cities as well. It’s a contagion of the positive type and it is evidence that a good idea can move quickly.

Fiona unpacks a 1-2 people-sized Food Connect fresh food box.

For some reason, Food Connect has that elusive quality of stickiness, of being able to lodge itself in people’s heads, and it’s that which drives its spread through our networks of digitally and personally connected people interested in doing something new and exciting about our food supply. This is still the territory of the innovators and the early adopters, however it is soon likely to spread into the lands of the early mass adopters.

These new iterations of Food Connect are not branch offices of the Brisbane operation. They are independent social businesses. A social business, whether for- or not-for-profit, has social rather than profit-making goals and returns any operating surplus (as return on investment or profit is called by not-for-profits) to the business.

The Food Connect Foundation — set up to service the growing interest in the model — assists Food Connect replications by providing advice, planning, software and branding to support the replications to become established and to create a unified visual presence for Food Connect start-ups through the states.

Not all of those inspired by Food Connect set up a direct replication. Some take the model, adapt it and give it their own name, like the replication soon to start in Coffs Harbour

How Food Connect propagates.

Why the rapid replication?

Brock wheels a load of Food Connect boxes to a Sydney City Cousin collection point.

The question is why, seemingly all of a sudden, has the Food Connect model taken off? Why do we see Food Connects in Brisbane, Sydney, Coffs Harbour and Adelaide, with strong interest in Melbourne, Newcastle and the Illawarra?

Let’s use Chip and Dan Heath’s formula (see Made To Stick; Random House 2007) to look at the catchiness of an idea, for the needs for an idea to become sticky enough to stimulate interest, motivation and action… to stick in the mind.

An idea first of all has to be simple. And Food Connect is simple: it is a structure through which city eaters can obtain mostly organic, fresh and local fruit, vegetables and culinary herbs.

Next, the idea has to be unexpected. For a population used to taking whatever the supermarkets say they should accept as food, the notion of sidestepping the supermarket and shortening the food supply chain from farmer to eater sure is an unexpected idea.

The idea needs to be concrete. That is, it needs to be grounded in reality and not be abstract. Food Connect has the property of concreteness because it can be examined with your physical senses.

It must be credible. That is, it must appear as very likely to be true. The presence of detail helps here as this lends credence to the idea and indicates that it has been well thought out, even tested. The details about Food Connect are available through their website, through regional organisers and through members. And… the idea has certainly been tested.

Emotion is a determining factor in what people are prepared to believe. If credibility leads to motivation, then emotion leads to caring caring about our food system and the Food Connect and other alternatives to it. This can include caring about local farmers and their livelihoods, about good, tasty food and about a low-carbon food supply.

The availability of narratives about something — stories, that is — is a means of conveying meaning in a way that will stick. People remember stories more than they remember lists of facts.

Does Food Connect have stories around it or has it not been going long enough? Yes, it does have stories… stories of the lives of farmers that supply it, of its City Cousins who serve as distribution points for Food Connect boxes (and receive cheaper food boxes for doing so), of the challenges of setting it up… and  it has that grand narrative that is the story of our food system, how it is controlled and by whom and of the community-based countercurrent to it that is Food Connect.

So we see that Food Connect meets the criteria for stickiness and that this may have something to do with its rapidly accelerating take-up.

A shorter and fresher food chain

Food Connect shortens the perishable, fresh food chain… the time and distance food takes to get from grower to eater.

Farmers from the region — Food Connect’s ‘Country Cousins’ — simply deliver what they grow each week to the Food Connect depot. There it is packed into the weekly food boxes and delivered to ‘City Cousins’, the suburban collection points where members pick up their food box.

This closely-connected system can also be a conduit for information about the food, such as when Food Connect Sydney send an email message to subscribers explaining that farmers had told them that the heavy rains of February had caused some crop damage and that the produce night not be as good as it usually would be.

The Food Connect food chain is shorter and fresher.

Had this happened with farmers supplying the supermarkets, the outcome might have been rejection of the crop and consequent wastage. Why? Because it did not look as good as supermarkets demand — let’s call that veg and fruit cosmetics — despite it still being quite edible and nutritious. As for farmer-to eater-communication, well, there’s lots of things to be found in supermarkets but that sort of communication is rather hard to come by. All you seem to get there are marketing messages rather than hard, verifiable information.

As an adaption to the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, Food Connect provides farmers with those skills they are less capable at, such as communications and building relationships with eaters. It also solves another dilemma inherent in the traditional CSA: by sourcing their food from a larger number of farmers, Food Connect is not vulnerable to a single farmer going out of business. An additional benefit is that a larger number of farmers can supply a larger range of foods.

It’s still early days for Food Connect beyond its Brisbane homeland. It’s prospects, however, are growing as fast as it it replicated.

Find out more:

Food Connect Brisbane

Food Connect Sydney

Food Connect Adelaide

Food Connect Melbourne

Plains To Plate Food Convergence, Adelaide, mid-February 2010

AFTER ALL THE PLANNING and problem solving, after all the talking and thinking, the moment had arrived.

Speeches over, Robert Pekin walks over to where the food boxes are stacked and around which the Food Connect Adelaide crew are clustered. He picks up a pair of garden clippers — mere scissors being inadequate for a launch of this type — and as he cuts the bright red ribbon that binds a box, Food Connect Adelaide moves from good idea to reality.

An auspicious moment for Simon Martin and Sally Fisher as the Food Connect Foundation's Robert Pekin cuts the ribbon to launch Food Connect Adelaide.

Food Connect Adelaide has already gathered a capable crew together and they were there at Plains To Plate. Simon Martin is the Enterprise Coordinator. He holds a certificate in agriculture and a diploma in biodynamic agriculture, which probably means he knows a thing or two about farming and food. Sally Fisher, who has a bachelor of science in nutrition and dietetics, is City Cousin Coordinator. Together, these two and the rest of the crew make a capable organising team.

Sydney, February 2010

Food Connect driver Brock and Fiona check out a large-size Food Connect Sydney weekly fresh food box.

The launch of Food Connect Sydney just a few days earlier had been a low key event. The Food Connect driver had delivered the food boxes to the City Cousin collection points throughout the city from where local Food Connect members picked them up.

At the Randwick/Coogee City Cousin, local sustainability enthusiast Greg Olsen became a City Council Buddy by collecting the weekly boxes of fresh food and delivering them to Food Connect members who live nearby.

Time to debug

Adelaide has yet to start deliveries to its seven or so City Cousin collection points. But it will have plenty of boxes to fill with fresh food from city region farmers to judge from the pages of contact details left by people at Plains To Plate.

These are early days for Food Connect in Sydney and Adelaide and the enterprise has now to pass through its initial start-up period in which it is debugged, problems solved and the operation made to run smoother. This will require both patience by and feedback from members.

Well, it's done! Food Connect Adelaide is now reality.

The Food Connect Adelaide crew at the launch.

At the Food Connect Adelaide launch, Sally Fisher and Simon Malcolm join potato farmer, Syd Lewis, whose crop will feed Food Connect Adelaide members.

Robert Pekin gets a little help from his daughter at the launch of Food Connect Adalaide at the Plains To Plate Food Convergence.

Food Connect Adelaide's Sally Fisher.

Food Conenct Adelaide' Simon Martin

Elanor signs on to Food Connect at Adelaide's Plains To Paddock Food Convergence.

THE PLAINS TO PLATE FOOD CONVERGENCE is over but its effects linger in the minds of those inspired by it and by the people it attracted. Those effects hang there in the mind to spur discussion, collaboration and the creation of new ideas and initiatives.

So, what were my main observations about Plains To Plate? Here’s the trends I discern:

1. There is an incipient move towards developing food policy at the local government level, stimulated now by the fervour evident at Plains To Plate and, late last year, by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Hungry For Change Food Summit. This has the potential to link to the idea of a national food policy recently promoted by Queensland horticulture industry body Growcom and the Public Health Association of Australia, however the formulation of a food policy cannot be left to an industry body or to a health association alone. There must be a significant role for popular organisations. A recent development has been the Tasmanian government’s move towards developing a food policy although what we can expect from such government-led development remains to be seen.
2. Some local governments in South Australia are active, or plan to become so soon, in the development of policy around community food gardening, itself just one part of the broader community food system. This parallels the development of local government enabling policy for community gardening in NSW, particular in Sydney, in which I have not been an innocent bystander. A concern expressed was that the interest in community gardens by professional health and community workers may place unrealistic expectations on community gardening which is a voluntary, minimally funded activity.
3. Just as animals and plants increase in number and adapt to different situations by diversifying and speciating, so has there been an acceleration in the rate of community food system start-ups and in their number of species these past few years. This can be expected to continue.
4. There is now sufficient commonality of interest and compatibility of agendas between community organisations, academics and some local governments to create a nexus of shared ideas that could form the basis for creative partnerships and the furthering of the search for solutions to our food issues.
5. It is quite evident that there is now a national, social movement around food that is rapidly evolving. It involves a mixed milieu of academics, local government and community organisations. It is not as yet a cohesive movement but the foci and agendas of the food-focused organisations that are interested are probably compatible enough for a broad agreement about what to do to ensure food security, affordable, viable regional food systems and ready access to fresh food and to coalesce around.

The forum to discuss the food declaration was an exercise in deliberative democracy.

That people are thinking this way was evident in the informal conversation at the Food Convergence. Some raised the idea that the time may be approaching when the local and state-based food issues organisations might gain a louder and more influential voice through a representative national organisation. This would be stimulated if proposals for a national food policy by industry and the health sector were to gain traction in Canberra. The time for a national approach might not be now, however it may be soon. What would be necessary would be to ensure that citizen groups and community-based NGOs were well represented on a national body, otherwise it may come to be dominated by professional farming or health interests and so be seen as elitist by community food organisations.

What I think was significant was how Plains To Plate brought together, in an open and collegial conversation space, social innovators working in community food systems, academics and staff from state and local government

The number and quality of orgnisations addressing what is a broad range of topics to do with our food system was evident among the 750 or so attendees of Plains To Plate over its four days. And this in only a single state of the Commonwealth; a similar coalition of the willing around food could be anticipated in most other states. With some local governments active in this social and cultural melange, at least in South Australia and NSW, there exists the potential for constructive, collaborative and positive arrangements to evolve.

This is the second food forum on this scale to include a strong citizen group component and to bring together otherwise divergent organisations around the common theme of food security, access, affordability, quality and regional food systems. In many ways Plains To Plate was the natural complement to the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Hungry For Change Food Summit of October last year, although the buzz at the events was quite different. I anticipate more such gatherings and find them valuable for defining commonalities of interest, the potential for collaboration and, perhaps, alliance building. Such things will be necessary to building an influential presence on the metropolitan, state and national levels.

Trio of speakers enlivens opening night

Food Connect Foundation's Robert Pekin and South Australian Farmers' Federation chief executive, Carol Vincent, spoke at the Food Summit.

Like bacteria in a petrie dish, ideas and inspiration quickly propagated to fill the four days of the event. Inspiration was born on the first evening at the opening forum in the Hawke Centre of the University of South Australia where chef and author, Gay Bilson, Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network South Australia (ACFCGN) co-ordinator and community garden researcher, claire nettle, Grahame Brookman from the Food Forest — a mixed, commercial farm in the drier country north of Adelaide, designed and managed according to the principles of Permaculture design — addressed a hall of almost 400 people.

Gay, a woman in middle age with close-cropped hair and plastic-rimmed glasses, described how she has been influenced by the writings of Wendel Berry and went on to relate three short stories about food from her recent visit to Kerala, India. She also invited people to help themselves to the box of apples and grapes she had brought with her.

claire nettle (lower case is her preference), a young, neat-looking woman who sits on the national executive team of the ACFCGN, addressed the theme of grassroots initiatives for food justice, a topic derived no doubt from her doctoral research. She took us through the plethora of community food initiatives from farmers’ markets to food swaps.

Fortunately, Grahame Brookman’s Powerpoint presentation malfunctioned and this became the spur to an entertaining verbal address that laced serious messages with a buttering of humour. Clearly excited about his topic, a slim and fit-looking Grahame, trimmed grey beard matching his fringe of hair, spoke of population growth, telling the audience that the topic of Australia’s population should become a public conversation. A changing climate and an ailing Murray-Darling system, he said, may eventually make the Murray agricultural lands largely unavailable to agriculture other than for a pastoralism based on kangaroos and fat-tailed sheep.

Joel Catchlove of Friends of the Earth South Australia, was one of the organisers of Plains To Plate.

On tour

Ridley Grove… Woodville High School… Common Ground… St Andrews… Fern Avenue… names probably unfamiliar to people who live beyond South Australia’s borders, but names that figure prominently among the 40 to 50 community food gardens and school kitchen gardens in Adelaide. It was some of these that the Plains To Plate tour visited in what turned out to be a full day on the road.

Alan Shepherd, who recently paid a visit to Sydney to look at community gardens, coordinates the Ridley Grove and two other Adelaide community gardens where he provides support and educational services. Common Ground is a community garden in containers on asphalt, not far from the city centre. Fern Avenue is a large, spacious and neat community garden with a rendered strawbale building housing its office, kitchenette, library and meeting space. Behind, two large, plastic rainwater tanks harvest the fall from the sloping roof to help the garden make it trough Adelaide’s parching summers.

Fern Avenue Community Garden in Fullarton, once the site of a jam factory that grew its fruit in orchards where surrounding houses now stand, offered an extra attraction. Adelaide is blessedly free of fruit fly, so its inhabitants can enjoy big, grub-free and tasty purple figs. So it was perhaps not surprising to find local Permaculture educator, Chris Day and Jennifer Alden, CEO of Melbourne agency Cultivating Community, lurking below the fig trees and reaching up into the foliage to extract the fruits to not-so-surrupticiously munch on them.

Speakers and workshops bring inspiration aplenty

Lolo Houbein signs copies of her book, One Magic Square, at Plains To Plate. Lolo's book metricises the 'square foot gardening' model and applies it to Australian conditions.

Speakers over the next two days were so inspirational and numerous it is impossible to name all of them. They covered a broad table of topics ranging through community food systems, government food initiatives and sustainability programs. What I think was significant was how Plains To Plate brought together, in an open and collegial conversation space, social innovators working in community food systems, academics and staff from state and local government. Interesting was the number of local government staff working on community garden policies and the one or two starting on food policies.

A highlight of the event was the launch of Food Connect Adelaide, an adaptation of the community supported agriculture model.

Plains To Plate will issue a declaration of food as did the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Food Summit last year. The final official event was a forum where ideas about the declaration were raised and discussed. People had earlier listed their ideas on a wall poster. This mini-exercise in deliberative democracy brought a good feel to wind up Plains To Plate.

The day after the Plains To Plate Food Summit, the South Australian team of the ACFCGN launched Growing Community – starting and nurturing community gardens, their new book. That took place at Glandore Community Garden, a newish garden stimulted by ACFCGN local coordinator, Kate Hubmeyer, who works for the local government as well as at the Black Forest primary school kitchen garden, probably Australia’s oldest at 27 years.

One thought that occurred to me in speaking with the varied groups at the Food Convergence was the focus of sustainability, of the campaigns and organisations around it, is quickly shifting to food. Why this is so is hinted at in Melbourne University’s Victorian Eco Innovation Lab’s report, Sustainable and Secure Food Systems for Victoria, in which the researchers disclose the centrality of food choices to energy consumption and production, water use and to the generation of wastes.

Harvesting ideas for the food declaration via a wall poster. People added their suggestions to a list of topics.

In a way, this trend to a focus on the centrality of food as a means of achieving positive environmental and social outcomes to some extent marginalises those older environment groups whose sole focus has been the natural environment. I do not belittle them — they played a significant historic role through the development of environmentalism. Now, however, our better understanding of environment and society, the natural and the human, and the more recent realisation that these entities are part of the same complex adaptive system rather than the old and tired viewpoint that sees humanity as somehow separate from the environment of which it is a natural expression, has moved on the conversation about how we move to sustainability. The dialogue at Plains To Plate hinted at this.

If Plains To Plate truly is an indicator of a growing focus on food systems — those varied structures that bring us our sustenance via food supply chains — and I believe that Plains To plate is this — it builds on the momentum started by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s Food Summit of late 2009.

Where these events lead remains unknown, however it is certain that they have stimulated an incipient movement that is at last seriously addressing food security, sustainable food production, accessible and affordable food and that has started to bring together those sectors in society that are all-too-often alien to each other — citizens and their organisations, local and to a limited extent state government and academics.

Plains To Plate was organised by the South Australian team of Friends of the Earth. It took place at the University of South Australia’s Hawke Centre in the city.

Plains To Plate social networking Ning

A continuing conversation — a friendly critique of Ted Trainers’ response.

Preface

This is a continuing conversation that started with Dr Ted Trainer’s allegation (The Trainer Papers… 1) that the Transition and permaculture movements are not addressing the critical need to change the economic system and to restructure society to take it towards a socially fairer, zero-economic growth economy.

I have no argument with Ted’s ideas about a zero-grwoth economy, however I differ with him on a number of points:

1. The Transition and permaculture movements are not structured and never were structured to address what he sees as the main challenges.
2. The movements take a less-direct approach to changing society by seeking to make changes from within and that these changes, taken cumulatively, could bring about significant change over time.
3. There is no valid reason for the movements to change their focus to comply with Ted’s priorities.
4. Ted offers little by way of a practical program to create the massive change he discusses. By criticising the Transition and permaculture movements — and recognising that constructive criticism is beneficial — Ted criticises what may be the most effective grassroots initiatives to hands-on change-making.

In commenting on Ted’s paper, I do so as someone with great respect for Ted and his ideas. My comments are offered in the spirit of constructive, critical dialog as a means of exploring questions that are quite relevant to the social movements of our time, particularly the Transition and permaculture movements.

Sometimes in the text I refer to ‘environmentalists’ in a general and somewhat critical way. This I do to emphasise that some who so describe themselves continue to operate in the ways I describe. Being a generalisation, however, there are numerous exceptions and I recognise that many who call themselves environmentalists today take more of a sustainability point of view.

Readers should understand that my response is very much stream of consciousness, with all the omissions and clumsiness that implies.

Readers wishing to comment constructively on the conversation are welcome to respond via the ‘comments’ box at the end of the pieces.

First, a general response…

Social change

Ted suggests that society must change to a zero-growth economy so as to achieve sustainability and social justice.

I don’t dispute this as a proposition. What I find is that Ted offers no route from where we are to where he wants us to be. He  describes a future in very general terms. As it does not exist, this is acceptable, however if people are to be attracted to his model of a desirable society then it will be necessary to paint an attractive vision of what life in it might be like. Ted’s paper is strong on general, broad vision but short on ideas for the route we would take to attain it.

In contrast, the Transition movement has a methodology to take us to a largely undefined future through its Skill-up for Powerdown and Energy Descent Action Plan processes. These might not be the whole story, however they are clear and distinct steps into an unknown future. That it remains poorly described in Transition literature is ok because the future is essentially unknowable and many of us are quite at home living in a present that is heading for an uncertain future.

Terminology

Ted seems to lapse almost into cliche in the terminology he sometimes uses, such as portraying those interested in sustainability in terms of ’saving the whales’ or ’saving the planet’.

Saving the whales is now an institutional initiative led by very determined action and lobbying groups and involving government at the international level. It is the focus of those with a specific interest in it. Generalising as if it were one of the main and immediate foci of the sustainability movement might have been true… in 1985.

I venture to say that for those interested in the transition to a sustainable society, saving the whales would be a proposition that they support but that does not occupy a dominant part of their time.

Also, ’saving the planet’ is now a tired, worn-out cliche because a realisation has emerged that resilient nature will adapt to climate change in its usual creative way but human cultures might not. Now, people are about saving those cultures, including ours.

Behavioural change

Sustainability education today focuses on changing the behaviour of people, organisations and institutions. It does not lecture, hector, make people feel guilty or suggest that they follow the ideas of some environmental elitist group.

Doing that is a dated concept — it was part of the way the environment movement operated a few years ago (and, unfortunately, how some of it still operates) but has been shown to be outdated by the research of sustainability educators such as Bob Doppelt (2008; The Power of Sustainability Thinking; Earthscan).

Unlike the Transition movement Ted criticises and finds substantial fault with — even suggesting those in it are wasting their time in regard to social change though what they do might by itself be worthwhile in itself — in formulating his ideas Ted has not engaged in a participatory ideas-creation process. They remain his ideas alone, untested in their acceptance, practicality and desirability. Those of the Transition and permaculture movements, in contrast, are collective works.

My comments are identified in the following text as ‘RG:’.

The dialogue…

TED:

Some thoughts on Russ Grayson’s comments on my friendly critique of the Transition Towns movement.

Russ discusses what I think is the crucial issue of what changes we are or ought to be working for in society, and how to try to achieve them.  Russ thinks my approach to these issues is different from the Permaculture way.

Like some of the people in the UK Transition movement who are uncomfortable with my readiness to make statements about what the movement should be for, Russ says, “…you really can’t tell people all over the world what structures and systems …they need…they have to work that out for themselves.”

Brian Davey recently expressed his unease at me “…prescriptively trying to design a simple society in advance. Rob Hopkins feels the same way, and I would think most Transitioners would share that view.

RG:

I find trying to design societies to be something of a fun activity, certainly an interesting one, but ultimately a futile one. Why? Because there are far too many variables that are operating now and that would substantially influence the zero-growth economy society that Ted postulates.

Societies are complex adaptive systems, and it is inherent within the dynamics of systems that they give rise to properties that are not perceptible at the present time — ie. societies change in unanticipated ways and new things and characteristics continually emerge. It is a property of complex adaptive system that they are inherently unpredictable. If we fail to acknowledge this and fail to expect the unexpected, then we risk getting stuck in our favourite ideological models which bear the same relationship to our 4D reality as does the world of Avatar.

For those wishing to change society to comply with their own pet ideas, I believe there are interesting video games such as Civilisation and interactive online worlds such as Second Life. Apologies, games mavens, if I have this wrong.

As for the imagined world of the Transition movement, we simply don’t know that the model of a low-energy, peak oil world will be. Why? Because we don’t know the future or what it will bring. The Transition model is predicated upon present trends extrapolated and makes use of scenario planning and other techniques, yet doing this in the past has come unstuck and I believe that most of those in the Transition movement are aware that their prognostications might be quite wrong. Sure, there are those that parrot the ideas of others dogmatically, mistaking what are ideas for the future reality.

The best we can say at present is that the consensus energing in the Transition movement, that we face a world in transition under the influences of climate change, peak oil and fresh water shortfall, to be a possible future based on what we know now. But, again, expect the unexpected. Maybe that should be promoted to a law like that of physics, or perhaps as a new permaculture principle.

TED:

Brian said that we should let the movement go where it wants to go and it will eventually achieve what I want anyway.

I think this is quite mistaken and it is very important for us to think very carefully about the issue.  It is my very firm view that the general Transition/Permaculture/Eco-village or indeed wider Green movement is currently not about the crucial goals and practices necessary to get us to a sustainable and just society.

RG:

First, I don’t think you can all-that-closely control the trajectory of social movements over time. Take one that you know, Ted — the permaculture movement. I’m sure you will recall that, in the movements earlier days there was a broader interest in social issues but that this has devolved into a focus on gardening in the popular interpretation of permaculture. This was not Bill Mollison’s dream, but the design system changed due to new people coming in and due to the influence of media coverage, something that played a big role, I conjecture, in shaping the popular conception of permaculture.

When Ted says that he finds Brian’s statement to be “quite mistaken”, I’m not sure if he is suggesting that, somehow and by persons unknown, the movement be deliberately forced to take some course preferred by him. How do you do this? How do you tell all those people out there who populate the Transitions milieu that they should suddenly bow to the direction that Ted suggests and set out to follow it? The Transition movement is like permaculture in that it consists of an amorphous conglomeration of ideas, priorities, politics and beliefs. The chance of succeeding in redirecting it to the direction Ted wants? Zero.

Ted — I wonder about including ecovillages in your conceptualisation of a “Transition/permaculture/Eco-village” movement. Looking back on permaculture’s history I see ecovillages as a rural expression of permaculture with the initial one, the prototype, being the creation of Max Lindegger and his crew at Crystal Waters in SE Queensland. It’s still there, more than 20 years later.

Ecovillages constitute something of a movement themselves, however they are not a major component of the broad sustainability movement because of limitations that come with moving into a rural ecovillage development — livelihood, finding employment, access to services for an aging population and so on. Cohousing is perhaps a better urban model that incorporates some of the features of ecovillages, however I don’t think that either of these are worthy of listing as the equivalent of permaculture and Transition initiatives rather than as subset initiatives initially of permaculture but now of others including property developers.

Also, I am a bit uneasy with the lumping of Transitions and permaculture as some seemingly unitary movement. While Transitions has attracted many from within the permaculture milieu, there are others with little or no connection to permaculture who are active in Transitions. To claim Transition for permaculture could be to risk alienating these people as their outlook can be at times quite different than that which prevails in permaculture.

TED:

My view on the first question is that consumer-capitalist society is so intrinsically, grossly unsustainable and unjust that its fundamental structures and systems cannot be made sustainable and just.

You can’t reform it so that the big global problems are not created yet we still have the same basic systems.  The most obvious example is that sustainability requires a steady state economy, so you cannot reform a growth economy to meet this requirement while you retain a growth economy — you have to scrap and replace a growth economy.

RG:

Question: what economic structure would a steady-state society adopt? Would it include capitalism in some form, perhaps that of what I call the ‘natural market system’ consisting of small scale enterprises and sole traders buying and selling needed goods and services? We see this in microcosm at markets. I have seen it operating in a non-monetary way at Takwa village market on Malaita island in the Solomons when I was doing some work there.

Presumably, and I leave this for those with the depth of knowledge to answer, the natural market would be what we would anticipate in a society organised along anarchist lines, especially that of libertarian anarchism. Or, what we would find in a localised village economy.

What other economic forms would be possible? Fascism gave us, during its trial period in the 1930s, nothing more than state influenced corporatism. Communism, despite its rhetoric, gave us state control of the economy such that any innovative entrepreneurial spirit amongst the people was thwarted. Some called it ’state capitalism’.

The dot.com model of the late 1990s promised an economy based upon innovation, imagination and business daring, originally in opposition to the old big corporations. It was a form of techno-libertarianism.

So, what model for a no-growth economy do we have?

TED:

…because by definition a market attends only to the demand of those with most money to pay and totally ignores need etc. and totally ignores need, justice, rights etc.

RG:

Well, I was watching an ABC video podcast featuring Cherryl Kurnow who now goes around promoting social enterprise.

She was saying, as do other social entrepreneurs, that not-for-profit and for-profit businesses with social goals can primarily serve society. That’s within a capitalist society and by using a business model.

What she was talking about some of us would be familiar with — our food co-ops operate this way, as social enterprises… they are essentially small businesses in which profits are reframed as ‘operating surplus’ and are fed back into the business rather than to shareholders or owners. On a larger scale, there are the cooperatives of Mondragon in the Basque country of Spain and the co-ops of Maleny.

TED:

On the second issue, Russ and Brian expressed the very common assumption that we needn’t fret about all this because if we just help the movement go where it is going then it will in time end up where I want it to be.  This view is in effect that if we just facilitate ventures which are in line with the Permaculture ethic of care of earth and people and distribution of surplus, then the movement “…should evolve in the direction you want anyway.”  Again I think this is profoundly mistaken.

RG:

Ted, with all respect I don’t see why society should change towards your model only, no matter that I have substantial areas of agreement with it. What about public participation in deciding our collective future? We all have to live there, after all. It’s one thing to theorise about these things in a university but it’s somewhat more complicated when you get out into the world and deal with the opportunities and barriers that people face for real.

What you are saying, as I understand it, is that only a complete social, cultural and economic transformation will bring about a sustainable and socially just society. I grant that this is theoretically possible but to do it I think you might have to join the revolutionary socialist party or somesuch. To expect a community-based formation such as Transition Towns or permaculture to  achieve this is unrealistic.

Actually, if you look at permaculture’s ethics, then they are pretty revolutionary and they certainly throw out a challenge to societal models capitalist and socialist. Of course, permaculture has no means of carrying off something on the scale you envisionage.

Permaculture, we know, includes people with a diversity of political attitudes ranging from capitalist to socialist, even some with anarchist tendencies. Bit like a microcosm of society in this regard. We see this in the championing of the Cuban experience of recent years in the form of that country’s commendable self-rescue from its own peak oil future through the application of organic and quasi-organic food production approaches to agriculture both urban and rural, and to its accomplishments in the medical services field. Yet we hear little from permaculturists about human rights in Cuba and about state oversight of life. In this regard it is like some of the more authoritarian capitalist states and this can be a disappointment for people seeking a real alternative.

Permaculture’s approach is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary… it proposes developing a model of the preferred new within the body of the old. Permaculture’s approach — and I think few within that milieu have much of an inkling of this — is akin to Buckminster Fuller’s notion that if you want to change something then you develop a new model that is so compellingly attractive that it makes the old obsolete. Change by choice based on the evidence that the change being proposed is highly desirable.

Transition initatives do not have a revolutionary or society-changing agenda, rather, they seek social adaptations to the potential challenges of peak oil and climate change. Whatever type of economy you prefer, these are likely to be factors it will have to deal with. The present thrust of Transition initiatives is production of an Energy Descent Adaption Plan and handing that on to local government. Doing that is only the start of the process as after planning comes implementation, and that is a much more difficult proposition. There is also a community education component of skills development called Skill-up for Powerdown, however this is certainly no agenda for social change as it lacks any political content to bind its disperate components together. But doing that is not its mission.

Transitions is still a new phenomenon, only being unleashed in 2006 or thereabouts. That it has gone global in the short period since is remarkable and is testament both the stickiness of the idea itself and to the  power of online communications. It remains uncertain how effective it will be in Australia or how durable it will be. At present, there is a trend to express it as an outgrowth of permaculture. This will attract some but not others, and it may have been more effective and potentially more inclusive to position it as an independent initiative with links to permaculture. It is primarily a community-based movement and, unless it attracts the right people with the right background, it might have difficulty bridging the civil society-government gap.

TED:

In my view almost the entire green movement is:

1. Full of good concerned people working hard for good causes
2. Making little or no contribution to saving the planet…because it is predominantly only about bandaiding particular problems and it is not about getting rid of the structures and systems that are causing the problems. Bandaids are very important. The green movement is patching up lots of damage, but it is not about moving to the kind of society that would not destroy the environment. For instance, the Australian Conservation Foundation does heroic work trying to save forests and whales etc but not only has no interest in challenging the growth economy but actually argues that it is a good thing.

RG:

I have a little difficulty with this concept of ’saving the planet’ for two reasons:

1. The planet doesn’t need saving but human civilisations might. Nature is resilient, tough… not fragile. It copes well and has done so with ice ages, global warming and all of the changes through the aeons. The planet will probably adapt to higher temperatures or whatever with new suites of plants and animals.
2. The term is now hackneyed and has lost whatever impact it might once have had. It’s one of those now-largely-meaningless terms emanating from the environment movement that I suspect just flow straight past people.

Don’t know about ACF being so strong on the whales issue, that would be Greenpeace, itself now at risk of being eclipsed by the Sea Shepherd Society.

So, how do you “get rid of the structures and systems that are causing the problems”? What is the ideology, the agenda, the methodology? If the goal is the type of society you describe Ted, what are the steps from here to there? Simply describing such a society has value as envisioning a desirable future, but doing only that does little to move towards that society.

You also offer a situation analysis of sorts with your critique of present day society. That’s good too — any movement for change needs both an understanding of the present and a vision of its preferred future.

But having both of these does nothing to move us towards that future. That requires stages of achievement and a program of action. We go nowhere without this.

Edward de Bono has written that criticism is a good thing, but criticism that simply aims to demolish some idea (and I think much of academic criticism is of this type) is unhelpful. What is needed is the constructive criticism that makes suggestions for improvement.

As for people making no contribution to saving the planet, what is it that they are expected to do? Should they stop doing the small actions that are within their capacity in their homes, workplaces and community organisations? And do what instead? Those small actions sure do not change the trajectory of the planet but they do engage people in action. It is up to sustainability educators to build on this. You have to start where people are at.

The big changes that you propose, Ted, are simply too big for people to comprehend or take action on. They need breaking down into achievable steps over time.

TED:

These good green efforts and campaigns are not going to get us to a society that doesn’t cause the problems, because these efforts have nothing to do with the changes that requires;  saving the whale is a good thing, but it can make no difference whatsoever to the commitment to a growth economy.

RG:

Those whales again! So who goes around saving whales and why do you give it so much prominence in the conversation Ted? The mention of these marine mega-mammals seems to come around so often in this discussion that they have become cliche. It’s not 1985 anymore, it is 2010… a new century with new priorities, new trends, new challenges and new ways of being. Most of us have long ago passed the Great Age of Whale-Saving and moved on to contemporary reality.

Forget whales and think climate change, oil shortfall, fresh water shortfall, how to double food production on the same area of land within the next 40 years… for these are the things that are going to be the real limits. Thee are the crucial things we face. Time to reboot your thinking, Ted.

TED:

Similarly developing more community gardens in Totnes is a good thing, but you tell me how that is contributing to the day when the people of Totness have taken control over the local economy and run it without economic growth.

RG:

There’s a simple answer to that, Ted, and it is this: community gardens are not set up to change entire economic systems. That’s not their role, not their focus, not their mission. To expect that they could achieve this is to live in profound misunderstanding of the purpose of community food production. To place such an expectation on them is to completely miscomprehend their reason for existence.

But again… how would what you suggest come about? Do people in Totnes actually want to take over their local economy? Who says they should? Maybe, with the Totnes Pound, they are having a little experiment in local economics and this is the first step to that end. At least they have an idea to move from vision to actuality and they might just be doing it.

As for community gardens, they are a means for people to reclaim public land and to put it to productive use. Not a bad idea, really… just the sort of thing that might happen in a zero-growth economy to supply people with food from the region. Bit revolutionary in its own way, too, sort of a social revolution of the radish, the lettuce leaf and the seed (non-hybrid variety, preferably). Maybe we can eat our way to social change… hmmm… that idea has some appeal, come to think of it… done in the good company of friends, aquaintenances and colleagues, it seems a little more convivial than the glumness of environmental guilt-merchants and political revolutionaries.

TED:

Those are goals that we do not move closer to by planting more nut trees, and there is no reason to think that if we just go on planting more nut trees etc. we will eventually end up with a zero-growth economy we control.  These are two utterly separate sets of goals and we cannot expect to achieve the second set unless at some stage we start explicitly asserting and endorsing them and working out how we are going to achieve them. At present these crucial higher-order goals are rarely if ever evident in green movements, especially in the Permaculture and Transition Towns literature.

RG:

Yes… the nut-led path to a zero-growth economy… so we don’t need economics professors anymore, just horticulturists. I like that. But, again, nut tree cultivators probably don’t practice their craft to create economic revolution… you’re pushing your ideas on what you think they should be onto others, Ted, which suggests, well… just a little disregard for personal autonomy and freedom of choice.

But your last sentence above, Ted, is so true. Yet, I wonder if we should force these movements along a path they have not freely chosen? One of the good things about even imperfect democracies is that we give people and their organisations some degree of freedom to set a course of their own and to put up what it is that they try to do for consideration in the public marketplace for ideas.

TED:

The goals presently stated within these movements, planting of the commons, setting up the farmers markets etc., can all be achieved without any significant effect at all on consumer-capitalist society.  They are all quite compatible with a growth economy, affluent lifestyles and market forces.   Consumer society can accommodate them comfortably, and they are no threat to such a society.  If you want us to get rid of a growth economy etc. then you have to make that an explicit aim,

RG:

True Ted. All of these initiatives can exist within more or less any type of society (though possibly not the old Soviet model). Why? Because farmers’ markets, community plantings and the like are all part of what I referred to before as the ‘natural economy’, that in which an exchange of goods and services is made so that people can obtain what it is that they need to live and improve their lives.

Do you suggest the Transiton and permaculture movements are delelict in not being a threat to society even though that has never been their goal?

TED:

I don’t think any of the projects I am presently aware of within the TT (Transition Towns) movement are going to make any contribution whatsoever to getting rid of a growth economy, (even though all of them seem to me to be valuable.)

RG:

Again, this is not their objective Ted.

Maybe you need to set up your own movement to do this as none of those existing meet your demands on them.

TED:

So my concern is to badger people within the movement to think…

RG:

Ok. So you’re going to lose any support you have here Ted. Badgering people is a tired old strategy from way back then in the 1980s that went obsolete in the late 1990s, just like making people feel guilty and continually blaming them for not doing whatever it is that environmentalists thought they should be doing. Badgering… yes, it’s a great technique… for driving people away and innoculating them against your message.

This is the research of sustainability educators. Things are a little more sophisticated today… it’s about behavioural change… a more scientific approach, more psychologically savvy… less arrogance and more intelligence.

TED:

Few would reject the general Permaculture ethic of care for people and environment and sharing the surplus, but these principles are so vague and motherhood that they aren’t much use in helping us work out what sub-goals to adopt.

RG:

Sure, these are motherhood statements in today’s understanding, however we must remember that they are the product of  late-1970s thinking, the time when permaculture emerged. They remain, however, good ethics and I have to disagree with you about their not being of much use for developing sub-gaols. I think there are numerous projects, programs and initiatives you could hang from them.

I guess it’s true you couldn’t rally a social movement around them today. I guess they’re motherhood statements in much the same way as ’save the whales’ and ’save the planet’… hard to disagree with but of less value in bringing people together given the sophistication of today’s society and in light of the challenges we face. That’s why permaculture and Transition types develop more tangible goals that still fall within the ambit of these permaculture ethics.

As you say, they have no sub-goals, if they really need that, but what they do have are principles of implementation that are for the most part achievable within the opportunities and constraints of our daily lives. These are a set of principles designed to guide actions. Bill Mollison has a set of these. David Holmgren has a revised set he published in 2002, I think it was. You select those permaculture principles relevant to the task in hand, design your approach then assess that approach in terms of the principles and in light of the overall context of the ethics.

The thing with Bill Mollison is that he was a visionary whose visions are based on a varied life history and experience. This fed his ideas and, when he and David got together in those fateful closing years of the 1970s in that house on the hill in distant Hobart, they realised that at some stage visions have to be made reality or they would have to go. Making them reality is what they tried to do and are still trying to do. There is no single route to this.

Nobody, neither Bill or David, has all the answers. Moving towards a resilient future is a collective work, an amalgam of ideas, of trial and error, your ideas and mine, the ideas of all of those others out there in the permaculture and Transition worlds and all of their allies and fellow travelers marching that same road. Together, we create a future none of us yet see the distant outline of… but it is a future that we collectively create and that our children and grandchildren inherit. Let us go forward in the knowing that whatever it is that we do, however small the contribution we can make, that we walk a common direction of diverse tracks toward a future that unfolds as we move. The future is not a distant destination. It is what unfolds minute to minute as we create it.

TED:

My plea to you is to ask yourself can the ultimate sustainability and justice goals be achieved if we do not endorse sub-goals such as getting rid of a growth economy, and if you agree with me on that, is it not appropriate that you and I should try to persuade people in the movement to adopt such sub-goals?

RG:

I feel a little uneasy trying to persuade people of anything these days. Also, I sort of like the idea of being part of an open-ended social movement like permaculture or Transitions… one without a fixed, unchanging destination that refuses to evolve in the face of changing reality. Better, I think, to accept that within these movements we operate in a context of uncertainty about the future or about what these movements might evolve into. There is, I think, something liberating in this, something that offers a sense of possibility… exhilaration and adventure even… now I think I know what bill meant when he used to speak of “… adventures in good design”.

People are free to choose to adopt the sub-goals you suggest as are their organisations. I have no problem with that.

You mention persuading people to adopt the goals you have chosen… as for me and my role in persuading people, I’m just a humble conjurer of words and images, a mere dealer in ideas and information, a speaker of sentences that people might listen to or dismiss, a dabbler in projects and technologies. I don’t know of I can instigate change of any sort… heavens, I can’t even cook a chook.

TED:

For decades my writings have attempted to show in detail that sustainability and justice cannot possibly be achieved without very radical change in our economic, social, geographical, agricultural, political, and most difficult of all, cultural systems.

RG:

Ted, I love your books and your ideas, your patience and foresight, your persistence in continuing with the Limits to Growth idea over the decades. I have been fortunate to visit your Pigface Point property many times… I even worked for you and your classes at UNSW way back in the 90s
But that’s beside the point. The thing is this:  there is no single route, no single objective we can adopt to take us to a future that we can only imagine. Our existence is mired in a world of complex adaptive systems that are essentially unpredicatable, whether they are those of our body and mind, our economy or cultures, our planet or its home in the solar system and universe (or, perhaps, multiverse?). The only future we experience is the one we continually move into, minute by minute, and in doing that there lay opportunities or doing whatever it is that we do just a little bit better, a little more cooperatively, a little more effectively and little more sustainably.

People have only so much time and energy to devote to pursuing the goal of sustainability, so it is the responsibility of people like you and me, people who have chosen to make more time available to explore this sustainability stuff, to accept whatever it is that people in their busy lives can offer.

To expect people to give their time completely to doing this is the road to activist burnout, a phenomenon that has plagued social change movements since the 60s. People have their livelihoods, their home life, social life and families to attend to. All of these things are important elements of a sustainable society and to neglect them is to step off the track to sustainability. Let’s help people to attend to those things a little more sustainably and let’s congratulate them even is all they do is establish a nut plantation, cultivate a community garden or one in a pot on their windowsill, reduce their energy use or participate in developing an Energy Descent Action Plan.

That track to sustainability is no narrow, single route through the wilderness of ideas and chaos. It is a route made up of many twisting, twining paths. Permaculture, one of those paths, is a many-worlds phenomena — it is many different things to many different people. All of those paths must be trod according to people’s interests and skills. But — and this is the important part — those paths move in the same general direction no matter how different they look, and somewhere where those paths go over the curve of the horizon, in our lifetimes or beyond, they at some point have the potential to converge in the future we seek. Make it so.

The ongoing conversation:

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-1/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-2/

http://pacific-edge.info/trainerpapers-3/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-4/ (this page)

Dr Ted Trainer

Some thoughts on Russ Grayson’s comments on my friendly critique of the Transition Towns movement

Russ discusses what I think is the crucial issue of what changes we are or ought to be working for in society, and how to try to achieve them.  Russ thinks my approach to these issues is different from the Permaculture way.  Like some of the people in the UK Transition movement who are uncomfortable with my readiness to make statements about what the movement should be for, Russ says, “…you really can’t tell people all over the world what structures and systems …they need…they have to work that out for themselves.”  Brian Davey recently expressed his unease at me “…prescriptively trying to design a simple society in advance.   Hob Hopkins feels the same way, and I would think most Transitioners would share that view.

Brian said that we should let the movement go where it wants to go and it will eventually achieve what I want anyway.  I think this is quite mistaken and it is very important for us to think very carefully about the issue.  It is my very firm view that the general Transition/Permaculture/Eco-village or indeed wider Green movement is currently not about the crucial goals and practices necessary to get us to a sustainable and just society.  They are about many very relevant and necessary and valuable goals, but not the crucial ones.  This will surely strike most good green people as offensive so please let me elaborate by quoting from my recent reply to Brian Davey.

One’s position on all this depends on one’s answers to two crucial issues.  The first is what form would/must a sustainable and just society take?  The second is will the present green/transition movement automatically result in such a society?  I have very strong views on both issues. I might be completely wrong and I am happy to reconsider, but you should be willing to think about my cases.

My view on the first question is that consumer-capitalist society is so intrinsically grossly unsustainable and unjust that its fundamental structures and systems cannot be made sustainable and just.  You can’t reform it so that the big global problems are not created yet we still have the same basic systems.  The most obvious example is that sustainability requires a steady state economy, so you cannot reform a growth economy to meet this requirement while you retain a growth economy – you have to scrap and replace a growth economy.  Similarly you cannot have a society which focuses on meeting needs, and prioritises justice, rights, the interests of future generations and those of all other species — if you let market forces determine what happens in society…because by definition a market attends only to the demand of those with most money to pay and totally ignores need etc. and totally ignores need, justice, rights etc

In other words it seems to me that when you analyse the state of the planet you can see very clearly a number of procedures and systems that have to be scrapped and replaced or we have no chance of voiding catastrophic breakdown, and that means you see inescapable implications for the basic nature that a satisfactory society must have.  It seems to me for instance that there can be no argument that a sustainable world must have zero-growth economies…nor can it be determined by market forces and nor can it  be driven by a culture of competitive acquisitiveness.  You might not be sure about such conclusions, but I am prepared to assert them pretty confidently/dogmatically. If you think I am mistaken about these (dogmatic) claims then let’s discuss.

Given my views on these issues it is understandable that I would want to persuade people within the Transition Towns movement to hold them too.

The question this sets us all is, what should our goals and sub-goals be?  If you see the world the way I do then certain general but very firm answers are obvious and I don’t think these are the goals most people within the Transition Towns movement hold at present.  (Of course most people in the movement would surely say they are for sustainability and justice, but my argument is that they can’t achieve these goals unless they adopt as sub-goals things like scrapping growth and affluence, taking control of local economies, and not letting market forces determine our fate.)  I’m claiming that most people in the movement are (understandably) not clear enough about the fact that we cannot get to a satisfactory world through reforms that leave those basic structures in place, and without at some stage focusing on these fundamental/radical system change goals.

On the second issue, Russ and Brian expressed the very common assumption that we needn’t fret about all this because if we just help the movement go where it is going then it will in time end up where I want it to be.  This view is in effect that if we just facilitate ventures which are in line with the Permaculture ethic of care of earth and people and distribution of surplus, then the movement “…should evolve in the direction you want anyway.”  Again I think this is profoundly mistaken.

In my view almost the entire green movement is a) full of good concerned people working hard for good causes, b) making little or no contribution to saving the planet…because it is predominantly only about bandaiding particular problems  and it is not about getting rid of the structures and systems that are causing the problems.  Bandaids are very important.  The green movement is patching up lots of damage, but it is not about moving to the kind of society that would not destroy the environment.  For instance the Australian Conservation Foundation does heroic work trying to save forests and whales etc., but not only has no interest in challenging the growth economy but actually argues that it is a good thing. (Its CEO has lectured me on this!)  The world is full of good people in aid, justice, environmental etc. groups whose efforts are only to achieve reforms to consumer-capitalist society, not to replace it.

These good green efforts and campaigns are not going to get us to a society that doesn’t cause the problems, because these efforts have nothing to do with the changes that requires;  saving the whale is a good thing, but it can make no difference whatsoever to the commitment to a growth economy.  Similarly developing more community gardens in Totnes is a good thing, but you tell me how that is contributing to the day when the people of Totness have taken control over the local economy and run it without economic growth.  Those are goals that we do not move closer to by planting more nut trees, and there is no reason to think that if we just go on planting more nut trees etc. we will eventually end up with a zero-growth economy we control.  These are two utterly separate sets of goals and we cannot expect to achieve the second set unless at some stage we start explicitly asserting and endorsing them and working out how we are going to achieve them. At present these crucial higher-order goals are rarely if ever evident in green movements, especially in the Permaculture and Transition Towns literature.

The goals presently stated within these movements, planting of the commons, setting up the farmers markets etc., can all be achieved without any significant effect at all on consumer-capitalist society.  They are all quite compatible with a growth economy, affluent lifestyles and market forces.   Consumer society can accommodate them comfortably, and they are no threat to such a society.  If you want us to get rid of a growth economy etc. then you have to make that an explicit aim, and to achieve it you will have to do things quite different to stetting up more farmers’ markets and planting nut trees.  I don’t think any of the projects I am presently aware of within the TT movement are going to make any contribution whatsoever to getting rid of a growth economy, (even though all of them seem to me to be valuable.)

If you see things the way I do then it is not sufficient if people just set up whatever good green thing takes their fancy, which is what Russ, Brian and Rob  Hopkins seem to be happy with.  If you think vast and radical structural change is necessary then you want to see these as strongly held explicit goals within the movement, and my pretty strong impression is that at present they aren’t.  That’s not really a criticism of the movement, it’s more appropriately seen as a comment about the present early state of the movement, and the state that I hope it gets to before long.  I think it is quite understandable that at this point in time it is mainly about reforms and good works within existing society.

So my concern is to badger people within the movement to think carefully about what their ultimate goals are, and what it will take to achieve them.  Few would reject the general Permaculture ethic of care for people and environment and sharing the surplus, but these principles are so vague and motherhood that they aren’t much use in helping us work out what sub-goals to adopt.  My plea to you is to ask yourself can the ultimate sustainability and justice goals be achieved if we do not endorse sub-goals such as getting rid of a growth economy, and if you agree with me on that, is it not appropriate that you and I should try to persuade people in the movement to adopt such sub-goals?

Russ suggests that my approach is about “complete destruction and replacement” and is …”more like that of the social revolutionaries.”  If you see the world the way I do then what we have to work for is the most enormous revolution in history (…so big indeed that I do not think it will be achieved).  For decades my writings have attempted to show in detail that sustainability and justice cannot possibly be achieved without very radical change in our economic, social, geographical, agricultural, political, and most difficult of all, cultural systems.  If you think I’m wrong about this, if you think we can solve the big problems while we retain a growth economy driven by market forces and limitless acquisitiveness, then please let me know how. But none of this implies any need for destruction, violence or force.  Actions of those kinds cannot help achieve this revolution.  The task is to get enough people to see the desirability of moving to the alternative ways so that they willingly dump consumer-capitalism as its difficulties accelerate and happily take uyp the better option.  If we fail at that then the revolution is lost.  (The way I see the transition process is spelled out in Thoughts on The Transition, at http://ssis2.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/ThoughtsOnTrans.html

Best wishes,

Ted

The ongoing conversation:

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-1/

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-2/

http://pacific-edge.info/trainerpapers-3/ (this page)

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-4/