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Permaculture

Key to Smart Cities?

By Julia ShorttPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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This week was a little quiet on the food knowledge gathering front, so, unfortunately, this post won’t be as bright and shiny as others. However, I would like to talk about permaculture and agriculture. To set the stage somewhat, one of my friends has started to grow things in his garden—from chilies to squash—and he has the aim to grow everything he needs next season. I applaud this; self-sufficiency and off-the-grid living is one of the things I am most interested in. So, he was interested in a film night which is part and parcel of the London Permaculture Group, and asked me if I would like to come along. We wound up in Café Cairo in Brixton on a frozen (ever so slightly wet) Thursday evening, the film was to be screened in the tent area, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t take my coat off for most of it! Due to an AV error, the group never quite got around to seeing the film (which is called Tomorrow) but we saw a few clips and I picked up enough information to investigate the subject further by myself.

A long time ago, okay the 70s, a recent grad from Berkley became inspired to create (along with his fellows) a new system that incorporated renewable energy and rejected mainstream consumption practices. This grad was John Shaeffer, and at the time there was a large(ish) food justice movement called the “back to the landers,” and in a lot of ways, John Schaeffer epitomised the ethos of that movement. This whole ethos was that of connectivity to the earth and our food and attempting to be in synch with the whole shebang. The term “permaculture” was coined in the 70s too, but from a very different viewpoint. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren were attempting to change up the way conventional agriculture in Australia was working. The crux of their argument was that if humanity had managed to live in symphony with nature then why was it being so destructive now?

Now, I have some points of contention with this thesis. Firstly, humanity has had a propensity for extractive processes; crude oil, wood, precious metal ore, and diamonds being the ones that come to mind most readily. Admittedly, these processes have sped up due to industrialisation, but history is littered with examples of these, as well as examples of communities not using extractive processes, so, all in all, I would think that this is a bit of a mixed bag. Therefore, I don’t really see the symphonic element in humanity's relationship to the earth (for a good explanation of how I think of humanity's story can be found in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens).

The second is how permaculture can be articulated. When I first heard about it, it was associated with agriculture, and to be perfectly honest that’s how I still see the uses of permaculture. It’s a great system for growing: the whole idea hinges on layers—including topsoil, canopy, bush, fungi and a vertical layer, these layers help maintain a biodiversity that in turns help maintain the ecology of an area. This system goes against monocropping (which, as you might imagine, destroys an area's biodiversity) and more mainstream food provisioning techniques. The question at the top of my mind would be that how would this system feed people? One of the clips that we managed to see was about urban gardening—a focus on the sustainability of cities, and how to future proof them is very current. Not only has the population of urban areas outstripped that of the countryside, but how we choose to provision ourselves has become a pressing matter. Urban gardening could cure this, to take an example: London’s geography—more precisely the markets—if you look at the positions of Borough, Leadenhall, Spitalfields, Covent Garden and Billingsgate, they are on major transportation networks. Therefore, the city could provision itself quite adequately whilst the city was small enough to manage in those closed environs. Some of the markets have now transformed themselves to meet the expectations of the growing city. And that’s where urban gardening and foraging are so important—we know that as urban populations, we don’t source our food sustainably. To be able to so (with areas of the city being turned over to food growing—think rooves, defunct underground stations, and patches of disused land) would create a more circular system, which is perfectly in line with the ethos of permaculture, and what the clip showed.

The final thing I would like to discuss follows on from the articulation debate. When I was in the tent in Brixton, most of the other participants were chatting about other sides to permaculture than just agriculture, in particular systems learning and care for people. I’m going to be really honest about this and confess that I raised an eyebrow (this could be because I was raised in a very Ulster Scots environment that didn’t really focus on outward displays of emotions!) but when I went away, I had a bit of a think about this, and I quite empathise with it. By placing people within an environment, because as much as we like to harp on about biodiversity and ecology, the environment can still be seen as holistic and involving humans and their built environs. Therefore, an understanding and care for humanity can be part of a permaculture approach.

I’d like to find out more about this subject—because I have a feeling that I’ve only just scratched the surface, so stay tuned as this will probably become part of a wider series.

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About the Creator

Julia Shortt

Food anthropologist, ex chef embarking on a ESL career - to help fund all the eating I want to do!

Twitter @liabecca1

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