Costa Georgiadis - host of ABC Gardening Australia

The stories we tell make sense of and give meaning to our lives.

Costa’s father tells the story of the chook leaping into the feed barrel as he opened it. He tells the story of his flying days too, and of life in the countryside.

His son, Costa Georgiadis, tells stories about our food… how it is grown and how people are taking that into their own hands.

Storytelling was vary much on the agenda last night at the squash club in Bondi Junction where Fiona and I had been invited to join others for the launch of the new edition of ABC Gardening Australia, hosted by Costa.

Hubbub of animated ambience

As you would expect, there was the hubbub of people talking… what could only be described as an animated ambience within which excitement and anticipation seemed to vie for dominance.

But come 6.30pm, it was anticipation that prevailed as the room hushed and ABC 1 filled the big screen.

A bucolic sunset tints the sky and fills the screen with textures of red and pink… fade to a waterfall in the bush and a slow zoom takes us down towards its plunge pool far below where a character stands in the shady defile that thousands of years of running water has carved into the rock… you notice that he is soaked by the spray – and probably cold down there too – then that familiar voice starts and it tells us that we are part of all this… this land both old and new… it says we must care for all this to care for ourselves. Then, a cut to Costa’s Sydney Eastern Suburbs home and we are invited to follow him through the gate and into his backyard of fruit, vegies and chooks.

Another cut, and it’s out onto the footpath as Costa tells of its coming transformation from sandy soil and bland lawn into an agriculturally biodiverse ecosystem of food, flowers and habitat plants. The figure from the waterfall walks towards the camera talking about this – then there’s the slightest of pauses as he looks into the camera to mark the end of his monolog… and makes the transition to launch the program – “Hello… I’m Costa and this is Gardening Australia”.

The four minutes of that introduction, that transition from the wild nature of the bush to the cultivated nature of the city… well, it worked… and it made a fitting entry to this new series of the popular ABC program. As Costa’s welcoming words faded into the program introduction theme, viewers across the nation surely knew that something new was afoot.

Over the following 30 minutes viewers were swept electronically from Hobart Botanic Gardens below the blue bulk of Mt Wellington to a garden in Melbourne and onto rural NSW and over to that Sydney Eastern Suburbs footpath about to undergo transition from landcape poverty to garden plenty.

Continuity, pace and content

Why did the program work? What held it together during its vast sweep across the continental east? Continuity. Pace. Content.

Continuity created by the linking device of references to sandy soils and asking the state-based hosts what you could grow on that footpath in Sydney and elsewhere. The continuity of repetition. And pace. The different sense of pace and dynamic given by those state hosts.

Creative presences

Looking around at those gathered there that evening I realised that there were a lot of expectations around the new program. Community gardeners and permaculture promoters would have their own expectations and hopes, yet these must be tempered by the knowledge that the program has to cater to a broad range of gardening interests. I realised, too, that out there would be those who disliked the new feel, the new direction. But that’s the package that comes with anything new… the detractors, the supporters, the uncertain. Even though I don’t have a television, count me as a supporter.

Present were creative types like Costa’s production people, the two digital mavens from the College of Fine Arts setting up a website for Costa, the elegant Gina Lopez carving out a niche for herself in the business around sustainability, Megan Chatterton and her family… Megan is community workshop organiser from the City of Sydney with whom I used to enjoy working there… Sandi Middleton from the Centre for Sustainability Leadership and so many more. To all these people, to his sister and father, Costa gave due acknowledement in his speech following the program.

As we stood talking, Stan – Costa’s father – said that his son would now be busy in his new role and he would likely see less of him. Coming and going, though, is something Costa has been doing since his days as host of SBS television’s Costa’s Garden Odyssey.

As evening became night people drifted off, and stepping out onto the street a small group turns towards the Bondi Junction commercial district. There, among them, is a fuzzy silhouette soon to become even better known around the country. The good news, though, is that the silhouette is an authentic one with its hands and feet firmly planted in the good soil.

Costa and gardener planting the footpath planter at Waterloo Community Centre

Like nuclear energy and the genetic engineering of crops, geoengineering is a topic guaranteed to provoke heated responses. It is also a topic that splits opinion within the broad sustainability movement.

This became clear to me during an online conversation on the topic. Under discussion was a proposal that an organisation I am affiliated with sign a petition opposing geoengineering. It became clear that most of those in the organisation supported signing, but there were those who weren’t so sure.

“The petition ignores the fact that we have got into the climate mess in large measure via agricultural geoengineering (land clearing, over grazing, overcropping, river diversions, swamp draining, dam building and so on)”, wrote one correspondent.

“The mere reversing of the damage by large scale adoption of agroecological farming methods will also be geoengineering, and large scale adoption is being encouraged by many of the signatories.

“In other words they are shooting themselves in the foot by encouraging geoengineering via agroecological farming on the one hand, and signing petitions against it with the other. Whilst I sympathise with the intent of the petition, it concerns me that the organisations have not thought this through well enough to see their internal contradiction.”

We are already geoengineers

Many in the sustainability movements would surely agree that agroecological geoengineering would be preferable to other types. Those other types include the deliberate manipulation of the earth system to change the climate using high risk technologies such as mimicing volcanic eruptions by seeding the upper atmosphere with light reflective particles (volcanoes put a lot of particulate matter into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and produces a temporary cooling of the atmosphere) and seeding the oceans to encourage plankton blooms to sequester atmospheric carbon.

How geoengineering could be done or whether it really is feasible remain unknowns. What those opposing it have done, however, is have trials of the idea banned. Once again, this discloses differences of opinion within the sustainability movement and shows it to by made up of quite a diversity of tendencies rather than being the solid block it is sometimes portrayed as.

our enterprises on such a scale that they geoengineer the global ecosystem intentionally or not

What we can agree upon, now that the seven billionth person joined the planet on 31 October this year, is that human numbers are so large and our enterprises on such a scale that they geoengineer the global ecosystem intentionally or not. And they have done so for thousands of years. This was what permaculture co-developer, Bill Mollison, was getting at when he said that agriculture has transformed the world and is responsible for the degradation of the land that supports the growing human numbers.

He also said the ‘everything gardens’, by which he meant that life alters its environment to better support itself, including humans. It is what I was getting at when I said that we are already geoengineers, that we have been running a millennia-long geoengineering project that has completely transformed the world… and rather than denying it we should accept it and learn to do it better.

This attitude reminds me of the passage on the back cover of the original Whole Earth Catalog of 1968: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it”. I paraphrase that to: “We are as terraformers and might as well get used to doing it properly”. With seven billion people we have little other choice.

Beyond monochrome

Bold ideas like geoengineering are seldom simple or black and white. Proposing a ban on them, as some of the sustainability movement wants, is to offer a seemingly simple solution to a complex problem. The trouble with this is that complex problems often need complex solutions. We see politicians throwing simple solutions at complex problems and we see the results. The smart intervention is one that comes from insight into the behaviour of systems, for systems are what we are dealing with here.

Driving the acceptance of geoengineering by some sustainability advocates is the recognition that we have achieved a degree of success in civil society adopting climate amelioration behaviours voluntarily, however without similar action by industry and institutions voluntary action will prove too little. Government continues to prevaricate and the time remaining in which to take action is running out. Someone at Sydney’s Green Capital business breakfast last week said that we have only a decade in which we can take action. To put it into the language of the popular cliche, the window of opportunity in which to act is closing. Soon, many fear, it will slam shut with such a bang that things will never be the same afterwards.

Fallback

Geoengineering is a fallback position, a place where humanity can take time-buying action to start to get things under control, if that is possible.

In strategic planning it is not wise to discard your last resort even if you don’t like it. It is wise to keep it in the cupboard until it is really needed… until all other solutions have failed. Then it is deployed although it might be less effective than we would have liked and might cause collateral damage. We use it because to take no action could lead to developments that are worse than those of taking action.

In this scenario, lobbies opposing geoengineering would see that it was not deployed as a substitute for ameliorating and of adapting to climate change. This is important because deploying geoengineering solutions will interfere in the geosystem and, as we know, intervention in a system is likely to produce often-unknown consequences at some place and at some time… collateral damage, that is. Hopefully, one of those consequences would be the preferred global cooling effect but there would likely be other, damaging consequences, too. Which is why geoengineering should be deployed only as a final measure. I fear that the reality is that the impact of not deploying geoengineering solutions would lead us down an equally destructive path with with consequences perhaps worse than those its critics predict for deploying it.

nonlinear change would not give us the time we need because it would be an accelerating positive feedback loop, essentially feeding on itself

The consequences of not acting would be due to the climate system lurching into a positive feedback loop accelerated by methane releases from the melting of northern permafrost and from ocean bed clathrates outgassing methane due to warming oceanic temperatures. For climate change, that would take it away from the linear model that is easier to understand and to intervene in into a nonlinear model in which changes occur less predictably and where the best point of intervention is anybody’s guess.

Depending on the rate of rate of change, linear change might allow the more or less orderly shift over time of agriculture, such as grain production moving to presently cold regions of northern hemisphere continental land masses and dryland grain cropping in areas shifting to drier conditions (whether this would be done by using existing varieties of already-adapted species, by breeding new hybrid varieties by conventional cross breeding, or by genetic modification is a current discussion among those who follow these things). An abrupt lurch into nonlinear change would not give us the time we need because it would be an accelerating positive feedback loop, essentially feeding on itself

Anti-science of just cautions?

The seemingly sensible act of proposing a ban on geoengineering can lead to the perception that those  proposing the bans are part of the anti-science movement most prominent among fundamentalist religious constituencies in the US. This is about public perception and, in advocacy, perception can count for more than can truth, something I learned from a one-time newspaper editor I worked for. We need to avoid these perceptions becoming more common by engaging in an open, public conversation around geoengineering… while there is still time.

We also need to move beyond banning new technologies and engage creatively with issues. Banning this and banning that sounds just like the environment movement c1979. That’s why the permaculture movement parted from it… because of its ingrained, oppositionist negativism and failure to actually articulate and create the things it wanted to see. It became a movement against, not a movement for. It would be sad to see the sustainability movement go down that path.

We have to get used to the reality that we have changed the planet and have greater capacity to do so now… and are still doing so. Once a new technology is developed it is out there for all with the technical capacity to use. Geoengineering won’t be stopped by merely banning it… someone, somewhere will start using it unilaterally or as a coalition of nations when things get tough. Our experience with nuclear weapons demonstrates this all too well.

Taylor Square Market

A FARMERS’ MARKET, the Transition Towns movement and Sydney’s emerging collaborative economy come together with live music, good food and the smell of freshly brewed coffee on Saturday mornings at Taylor Square in Darlinghurst. This is Sydney Sustainable Markets. It’s small but diverse. The market is hard to miss as it occupies the plaza on the northern side of Taylor Square where Oxford Street’s traffic diverges to the Eastern Suburbs or continues towards Bondi Junction and on to Bondi Beach. This is a busy crossroads for both traffic and pedestrians and it’s a prime location for a market. a

Michael Champion Organics from Mangrove Mountain just north of Sydney.

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Here you find Michael Champion’s organic herbs and vegetables grown in the Mangrove Mountain area just north of the city—with Kurrajong Organics one of the fresh vegetable and fruit sellers at the market. There’s Sydney LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System), the community trading exchange; apiarist Doug Purdie’s urban honey, including authentic Darlinghurst honey produced in his inner city hives; Michelle Margolis selling her permaculture diary and calendar and doing a talk on the permaculture design system; sellers of artisan preserves and jams; a range of food that you can sit and eat at one of the hessian-draped tables and, today, the Great Aussie Swap organised by Transition Sydney’s partner Driscoll and partner Christine. The Swap and LETS make up the collaborative economy part of the market. This is an emerging community economy based on monetary exchange of goods and sevice as well as redistribution initiatives like the swap.

Swap day

Today, people have brought what they want to swap… things such as the clothing, books, music CDs, children’s toys, tools and other stuff laid out on the long tables.

Contributors are given a number of tokens (sourced from Reverse Garbage on the other side of Taylor Square). The market opens with an explanation of how it works and participants then have a set time to take a look at what is on offer. Swapping then starts with tokens handed in for each item taken amid a flurry of activity.

Where more than one person wanted the same item, a scissors/stone/wood game determines who gets it. It’s all amicable. While the City of Sydney provides assistance to the market, it’s people like Peter Driscoll and Christine who help make it happen. The couple live nearby, high above Oxford Street in an apartment and are active in the Green Strata organisation (Christine was on the panel

Urban beekeeper, Doug Purdie, with his authentic Darlinghurst honey.

for the launch of the City of Sydney’s Green Apartments program in September 2011).

Location

As it is for all businesses, location is important to Sydney Sustainable Market. Located on the crossroads, it is also on the main pedestrian and cycle route connecting Sydney’s central business district with the Oxford Street shopping strip, the cafe cluster along Crown Street and the Paddington commercial strip further along. Its location makes the market both a destination and a fortuitious find for passing foot and bicycle traffic. The market’s location eliminates the need to provide car parking. The car-bound few might find limited parking in the side streets if they are lucky, however this is a market for the self-propelled and those capable of getting on a bus.

Sydney Sustainable Market is more than shopping destination. It’s a place to linger and this is what people do, buying morning tea and a fresh coffee from the stalls and sitting around one of the tables to talk or, this morning, to listen to the young guy with guitar providing the live music.

It’s the the stay-and-linger ambience and the opportunity to participate in the swap that makes Sydney Sustainable Market a temporary ‘place’ in the placemaking concept used by planners and advocates of urbanism. It’s a place for people and a place to find good food whether that’s the basics of fruit and vegetables from one of the organic growers’ stalls or value-added basics such as the preserves, jams and honey.

Small in size it might be, Sydney Sustainable Market is a human scale intervention in the inner urban streetscape that brings the vitality and interest to our urban areas that they need to become convivial and desirable places to visit and live in.

Annette from AusLETS

Living Colour display at Taylor Square Markets

IT WAS ON A SUNNY SATURDAY MORNING

It was also the day that the garden team acquitted their Matching Grant from the City of Sydney. The City provides the grants as start-up capital to community gardens and other community initiatives. There to acknowledge that was Ashley Heath, who administers Matching Grants for the City of Sydney, and her predecessor in the role, Lynn Welch.

Also invited by the gardeners was City of Sydney CEO, Monica Barone, who in her speech emphasised how the community garden was a local element in the Sustainable Sydney 2030 plan, the City’s blueprint for the next 30 years. The same could be said for all of the City’s community gardens and the civic engagement that comes with them. a

Monica spoke about the value of community initiatives to the City and urban contexts such as the income gap and other sociological matters related to living in Australia’s global city.

Celebration is important to community gardeners and to all community-initiatied projects, especially those that create places in our cities where families and individuals can gather and cooperate in some common project. And the James Street Reserve C0mmunity Garden has much to celebrate, having repurposed under-utilised city land for a productive garden where both food and social relationships are gardened.

The current edition of House and Garden magazine was provided to all at the dinner. It featured photos of the community garden and is just the latest in what has been quite a lot of media coverage. The day after the garden’s first birthday dinner, the James Street garden appeared on television. In the garden, the crew have also adopted an educational role, hosting visits by groups intetested in starting their own gardens, tours for local government staff and overseas visitors engaged in urban agriculture.

From right... Janet Verden (community garden team), Lynn Welch, Monica Barone (CEO, City of Sydney), Ashley Heath (grants manager, City of Sydney), Russ Grayson (community gardens, Landcare coordinator City of Sydney).

Some of the James Street Reserve Community Garden crew at the birthday celebration.

Lessons for community action

I wondered how it is that Planet Ark, a community-based organisation, could bring out numbers like this and realised that it is the result of a long period of attracting people to an easy-to-participate-in event presented by an organisation that has built a record of credibility and acting in thenation’s interest (environmental interest in Planet Ark’s case).

Doing this requires a level of funding, personnel and organisational capability that is beyond that possesed by many community-based groups. If we are to draw learnings from the National Tree Day events across the country so that we can apply them to other types of community organisation, we might start by looking at their  characteristics:

• institutional support (such as local government and sponsorship by business)
• professional organisation
• events that are easy to participate in
• inclusive of families with young children
• provide a means for individuals to do something small but important (revegetation) about a situation that needs remedying, that is in the national interest and that has clear benefits, thus making the link between individual action and the big picture
• that encourage a sense of fun.

For community-based organisations, the question is how they can replicate this on a smaller scale. The challenge is how to make the message and the events sticky enough to stimulate the interest of the general public. That calls for targeting something that has meaning for the public, that is important to them. It has to offer involvement in simple action that is a means of addressing something larger in scale than the individual but not so large that its scale discourages people because it is too big. Simpler, smaller achievements first encourage people to take on bigger issues together later.

Participation in the city – an opportunity

If it’s an engaged citizenry we want, then events like National Tree Day are a means of creating it. Creating something like that calls for city government to make the necessary investment in funds and staff time and to engage with community-based organisations to make things happen.

National Tree Day makes it possible for families and individuals to do something physical that improves the city, that makes it a better place to live. It is the sort of communal action that encourages the type of urbanism we need to make our cities dynamic and inclusive places to live. It also assists the City of Sydney revegetate Sydney Park and other places, setting up a constructive link between the public and city government.

It was a good day in the unexpected warmth of late winter. National Tree Day 2010 and those who participated in it left a legacy in the form of a diverse planting with benefits as wildlife habitat and in the form of the environmental services those plants will offer—filtered air, carbon sequestration and a cooler city environment.

…Russ Grayson worked with Planet Ark to organise National Tree Day in the City of Sydney

Related to this, I believe, is the size of dogs sometimes kept by people in built-up inner urban areas where houses, which are usually of the attached type, have only very small gardens. You would that limitations on space at home would suggest the wisdom of keeping small dogs, however this is not always the situation. The idea of proportionality can be lost.

A growing population brings more dogs onto the streets and into public parks just as much as it brings requests to local government to provide opportunities for other uses of public open space…

There was controversy when a dog off-leash killed a swan in the Sydney Park wetlands.

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Dog owners don’t always oppose community gardens, they just want them built elsewhere so that they are not diplaced from their dog exercise area. Yet, it is dog owners who make demands on public open space who time and again flout the rules about on-leash areas and clearance from childrens’ playgrounds, suggesting they consider the regulations don’t apply to them, only to other people. Given their demands for access to public open space, it would surely be no exaggeration to say that this is a selfish attitude.

The reality in our cities is that they are having to accommodate increasing populations and increasingly diverse demands on open space. A growing population brings more dogs onto the streets and into public parks just as much as it brings requests to local government to provide opportunities for  other uses of public open space.

How does dog ownership stack up when it comes to allocating landuse in our cities?

…there’s the bigger picture stuff around dogs, such as their consumption of resources and the waste created by the packaging of their food…

Let’s look at the positives first. Dog ownership creates a sense of responsibility for caring for a living creature and it teaches children about this. There are psychological values to dog ownership too, as summed up in the term ‘companion animals’ used by governments.

Now, the negatives. First, there’s the demand for access to public space for on and off-leash areas for exercising the animals. That amounts to a lot of space, often in areas where space is limited and there are other interests that would share the land. Proposals to repurpose an area can meet with vociferous opposition from dog owners.

Then there’s the bigger picture stuff around dogs, such as their consumption of resources and the waste created by the packaging of their food. In times past, dogs were fed from butchers’s leftovers but feeding dogs (and cats) is today a multi-million dollar business. A certain amount of their food comes from kangaroo meat and, as I learned from a farmer selling eggs at a farmers’ market, from egg-producing chooks that have passed their prime.

If we want to assess the value of dogs in an urban environment, their value to owners, contribution to the city waste stream and demand for limited urban open space, we could estimate the social and economic returns on investment. I haven’t done this, however it would probably go like this:

…the psychological positives of dog ownership + the physical benefits to owners in getting exercise while walking their animals – the personal and community-building opportunity cost lost to people who would make different use of public land – the cost to local government of catering to dog owners – the environmental, social and financial costs of the waste stream asociated with dog ownership.

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The reality in compact, inner urban areas and others where medium and higher density living is the dominant form is that dogs are like cars. Just as the availability of parking and road space places an upper limit on private vehicle use after which the road system simply can’t cope, so with dog ownership the availability of public open space in parks combined with other, valid uses of parks places a limit on the opportunity for exercising dogs. There may well be a maximum density of dog population after which their demand in public open space becomes disproportionate and untenable. But… there are still the footpaths.

This isn’t an argument against dog ownerhip. It is an argument, however, in favour of local government taking a comprehensive approach to public place decision making and considering the opportunity costs lost when the demands of dog owners are afforded disproportionate importance. It is also a call for dog owners to accept their responsibilities as citizens and obey on-leash area regulations, to recognise (in NSW) the state government regulation of dogs maintaining a ten metre distance from childrens’ playgrounds, to recognise that other uses of open space are as valid as exercising dogs and to recognise that people other than themselves have a valid claim on using public land.

This was the second National Permaculture Day to be called and was one of a number of events in the Eastern Suburbs. National Permaculture Day is an annual event at the start of May, a day when permaculture homes and centres across the country open to the public. Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living that can be applied in densely-packed urban areas, like Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, as much as it can be in rural areas and on farms.

Transition Sydney's Peter Driscoll leads a permaculture workshop using the energy efficiency house model.

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New type of public open space

The Permaculture Interpretive Garden (PIG) is a component of the retrofitted Randwick Community Centre, the buildings and grounds of which have been refurbished for energy and water efficiency, including a grid-connected wind turbine and photvoltaic panels. The retrofit demonstrates simple design modifications and technologies that are commercially available. Having them accessible in a public place, and having guided tours and interpretive signage (designed by Rob Alsop who illustrated Rosemary Morrow’s book, Earth Users Guide to Permaculture) provides visitors with take-home ideas that they can implement. The Randwick Sustainability Education Hub encompasses the retrofitted building and grounds plus Randwick City Council’s Living Smart, Native Haven, Early Childhood Environmental Education and Sustainable Gardening courses, all free events that are held there.

The PIG itself is a new type of public open space that combined the functions of a public park and serves at the same time as an educational facility for council courses and as an activity centre for local community organisations whose focus is sustainability, food initiatives and community development. The Hub serves as a Sydney Food Connect City Cousin, where subscribers to the community-supported-agriculture scheme collect their weekly boxes of seasonal, affordable organic food.

Even though there remains work to be completed in the PIG, such as installing tables and benches, roofing the pergolas, establishing the orchard and building the balcony/courtyard demonstration, there was plenty on the day to inspire visitors. Transition Sydney’s Peter Driscoll provided an introductory workshop on permaculture design, Solarch’s Terry Bail, an architect specialising in solar design who designed the community centre energy retrofit, took visitors for a tour of his work and Russ Grayson, who was on the Waterwise Trail steering committee for the project and is affiliated with the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network to advocate the value of such enterprises, led a tour of the PIG and grounds. The Spots, presumably named for the cafe strip nearby, offered a harmonious accapella of environmental songs.

Announcing outreach

A significant event at National Permaculture Day was council sustainability educator, Fiona Campbell, announcing the Hub’s outreach program. This will see community organisations hold monthly events on a Sunday afternoons. Led by well known sustainability education planner and trainer, Graham Collier, a group of graduates from the council courses and others have been meeting over the past couple months to develop a program of activities based at the Hub. Significantly, some of those graduates were involved in the planning and management of the day, all part of Fiona’s idea to develop the ability of Eastern Suburbs people to skill-up to make things happen for themselves.

This was an auspicious day for the Sustainability Education Hub and just seeing all of those people milling around the raised planters in the PIG, clustered in tour groups inspecting the energy and water efficiency retrofit of the centre and engaged in convivial chatter around the food and coffee provided by council demonstrated that there exists a keen community interest in these sustainability initiatives. Thanks go to those who attended, to the Hub outreach volunteers, to Randwick Council and, especially, to National Permaculture Day for making it happen here under the blue skies and on the sandy soils of the urban east.

See photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150263696374175.379931.46128279174

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