Sustainable Blather

Scott McGuire

For most of my grown life I’ve been a plant person; farmer, gardener, tree-planter, landscaper… and for quite a while now have been beating the sustainable-living drum as a “food-supply activist”. For the past few years, in addition to growing a backyard demonstration garden (www.greentownaction.tv/sustainable-garden), I’ve been teaching classes on plant-craft, as well as going to meetings and organizing activities like the Neighborhood Garden Project, matching folks wanting to expand their gardens with others without any space for one. The Transition Towns movement is well underway in our small Oregon town, which is quickly becoming a haven for retirees and other equity immigrants from California.

But I’m burnt out on all the blah-blah. Sometime last spring I stopped going to these kinds of meetings due to the lack of focus and distracting blather that never seems to get grounded in any compounding action (oh, and it was also time to sow seeds, so seeya). One symptom of denial around the immensity of the changes required/pending, is the invisible goo that fills a room causing everyone to think and move as if they were underwater, or in a dream where you can’t run away fast enough or find where you left your backpack… It’s absolutely surreal, the effective slow-motionizing of cognitive dissonance.

Some of the suggestions for action steps, coming from otherwise intelligent and informed people, I find either unworkable or outright absurd; I’m drawn into conversations I’ve concluded years ago, which is frustrating and useless and costs a baby-sitter. Here’s an example:

If neighborhood gardens could become a retail business I think that more people would have the incentive to spend their time and effort to make more neighborhood gardens happen.

The idea is that with promotion and education 'lawn care' professionals could become market gardeners. Are there city regulations that would make this difficult?

I would love to see a meeting organized with lawn care professional and gardeners to see if there was any consensus that produce production could be profitable.

And another:

I suggest that we design and implement The Ashland Front/Back-Yard & Community Edible Gardens Project (ACEGP).

I'm talking about a very focused project: to accomplish a 5-year goal of utilizing 30% of existing front-yards, back-yards, vacant lots, a larger portion of neighborhood parks, every school campus, and businesses with the space, to implement organic methods for edible plant gardening. And, have a longer-term goal to reach 80% by 2020.

First of all, I can’t muster much respect for “lawn care professionals” otherwise known as mow-blow-and-go guys. Setting aside my personal political prejudices is difficult, because for over three decades of doing landscaping projects as well as “maintenance” work (some weekly m-b-g), I’ve been continually under-cut in the bidding by illegal immigrant “landscapers” who know very little about plants and basic English, but can sure wail those small, loud 2-stroke engines. Yet these idiots get hired by the Wal-Mart minds of even the wealthiest, conscious townies, neither of whom will ever call each other neighbors (but they have so much in common!). And of course the work is seasonal, while the bills aren’t. Trying to support a family from this scenario leaves a sour taste. Time for something new!

It is not an exaggeration to say that lawn care horticulture is utterly saturated in the repugnant toxicities of the worst chemicals ever cooked up to make a profit. Chemicals exist to replace work (herbicides; weed-pulling, ferticides; composting, etc.). No such thing as soil-building, recycling nutrients, or deep digging in the perverted universe of ToxoLawnChemGreenCorp. Educating these guys about organic food growing when they can’t read the labels on their own buckets of poison is definitely the long way home.

There are a zillion regulations in every jurisdiction that hinder making money off your back-yard. Business license? Sanitation? Worker’s Compensation? Parking? These are off the top of my head, there are surely more, and are all possible hurdles to bureaucratic legitimacy. Just try to cut down an ornamental shade tree for more sunshine for food growing. The Tree Commission will crawl up your alley and slap you with a big fine faster than you can say “persimmon”.
I believe that the one most effective thing our city could do to promote backyard food production is to create parity within the water billing. If your property sprouts nothing but worthless shrubs and lawns, you pay the top rate. Demonstrate a substantial transition to edibles and receive a discount. The devil’s in the details as always, and spirals back to a core revenue glitch: the City needs the receipts from the water usage to function. How do we incentivize home food production without choking the flow of dollars back to the City?

Now who actually owns all those nice lawns? The people who live behind them? Not always. Not even mostly. It’s my impression that owner/residents are the minority, and that at least half the homes in town are rentals, or possessed by an absentee owner. Insert the Property Management Company into the equation, many of whom operate their own Mow Blow and Go divisions to make another cut off the properties they manage.

Most homeowners simply want to maintain their market value without a hassle (good luck with that). Who wants the garden? Often it’s the renter, who in these days of depressed home sales and increased availability of rentals might actually have some clout, as in, “let me make a garden here, or I’ll rent somewhere else”. Yet most rational renters are justifiably hesitant to invest tons of work and manure into a place they could be asked to vacate within a single cycle of the moon.

A lot of homeowners have not yet figured out that a garden might actually increase the appeal of their house for sale. Even so, in growing numbers are the home/owner/dwellers who in order to grow their own food either must be able to afford the moderate expense of hiring someone with the skills, tools and muscle to help (that’s me!), or face a much more expensive and steep learning curve with fresh blisters and too many trips to the rental yard.

Maybe one solution is to start an alternative landscape company, offer to take over existing contracts, rip out the junk and plant food. Could this company make money doing this for the same amount, trading chemicals for the serious labor and know-how required? I’m not reaching for a pencil and calculator right now, but someone else just might…

Besides, how much money is made from growing food in the first place? These days, based on the cheap chemicals, cheap gas and massive cheap transportation, not much. Food’s pretty cheap for what you get, staying alive and all. Sometimes really good food fetches dollars per pound, but it’s mostly still cents, two digits on the wrong side of the decimal.

Next door, the neighbors are calibrating their checkbooks with a scale that matches their participation in the real estate market/investment realm of dollars, 5 or 6 digits way over on the other side of the decimal and much closer to the dollar sign. As long as property is valued according to “dollars per square foot”, how will cents-worth of food ever compete in the same market for the same grid of earth-space? These two economies of scale may as well be on different planets.

Food will become precious again when the true value of a meal re-asserts itself in the minds and bellies of our neighbors. When the Centralized Machine of Big Ag begins to creak and croak from all of this not being so cheap anymore, we’ll begin to snap out of our complacent grocery store trance and recall the deep worth of a dependable local food supply. Blink, blink, where are all the farmers?

Of course, we can all grow more food in our backyards to share the value of its nutrition and goodwill bonding, without requiring that it make us a buck. The simplest tried-and-true formula for community building has always been Feed One Another. What is the point of “community building games and exercises” without a food supply? No food, no community, because everyone has left to go where they think the food might be.

Even if a household couldn’t make decent money (what a concept) from growing food, it could offset some material costs like I’m doing this year with a garden CSA or CSG where I feed 7 households for 5-6 months for less than $20 per share per week. This isn’t enough dollars to make a big impact on a modern household budget, and only makes sense if the household is already mad enough to grow significant amounts of food for themselves anyway.

In my case, this small group serves to absorb the excess produce and cover some expenses. But unlike most tiny city lots, I’m in an old farmhouse with 2/3’s of an acre and a well for the gardens, so no water bill for growing, only household use. Still, more and more versions of home production could expand this niche, somewhere between community gardens and farm CSAs.
But if you want to make some money in your backyard, get a medical marijuana card and grow six plants. You’ll make thousands, enough to invest in local agriculture in any way you see fit. I’m not kidding. Of course, this is recommended only if you’re fortunate enough to live in one of the 15 states (and rising) that have passed such sensible legislation that challenges the rapidly eroding federal Prohibition. In the process we’ll be un-demonizing one of the most useful agricultural plants ever to exist, because we’ll need fibers and oils as much as foods when we finally take stock for ourselves. (And a little safe plant medicine can’t hurt as much as Big Pharma’s billion dollar mind-numbing boondoggle…).

And then it comes down to the biggest hurdle, the re-skilling. Who really knows how to do any of this food production stuff? Within the general population, about the same percentage as locally grown food itself; 5-10% at best. The vast majority is clueless, and without a clue they need to get a clue. This is the true bottleneck when awareness finally turns.

I’ve spoken at length with our mayor (who was elected on a sustainability platform) about an educational farm facility, cutting out some Parks Dept. land to develop an ongoing learning center. Because truth is, even the best class or workshop is woefully inadequate, being only a slice. The essence of plant-craft is not only knowing what to do, but when to do it. Timing is everything, and learners need a seasonal context into which they can grow a consolidated understanding of how all the pieces fit together.

This would become a destination place, where locals and visitors spend dollars to learn Big Sustainable Skills. This would be an excellent project for the Transition Towns movement, as it blends many an agenda into a purposeful creation that is both achievable and politically possible right now.

The number of backyard food gardens is growing, and will continue to increase, although in increments necessarily defined by the growing season itself. People can decide to grow their own any time, but that decision can only be applied during the next turn around the sun. Living on plant time requires a deep personal commitment, because it’s so at odds with cubicle time. Getting “the public” to focus on “projects” (ACEGP above) is like herding cats, but a shining beautiful farm for teaching will draw and inspire and educate at once. And it might just break even before all the banks are broken.

When the City Parks Dept. starts ripping out ornamentals for edibles, citizens will do the same. (Or is it the other way around?). Then we can start in on the School District (which I believe has more farmable land and water rights than the City), kick out the venal corporate nugget-pusher currently holding the cafeteria contract, and start feeding our own children our own food. Then get the re-skilling into the curriculum, and boot the little buggers out into the field!

Just kidding. Once the kids know how to grow it, we’ll be on our way to hopeful.

Scott McGuire is an organic farming and permaculture master based in Ashland, Oregon.
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From Jenna Orkin:

US/Economic Collapse
Incredible Shrinking Boomer Economy
Geithner Assures a `Concerned' China the U.S. Will Shrink Record Deficit
"Concerned" is the new, "scared out of our gourds."
Real Treasury Yields Highest In History
U.S. to conduct record long-dated Treasury sales -- $115 billion (from Rice Farmer)
But China's still concerned:
China to hasten dollar dump to buy resources, energy (from Rice Farmer)
June U-6 Unemployment Rate Topped 20% (25% SGS) in Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, California, South Carolina and Rhode Island
U.S. Jobless Claims Rise More Than Expected
States Where the Unemployed Are Giving Up (from Rice Farmer)
Caterpillar: Second Quarter Down 66%
Foreign cash for U.S. jobs
Reappoint Him
Roubini endorses Bernanke.
U.S. Home Vacancies Hit 18.7 Million; What's the Real Story?
Detroit Heads For Bankruptcy; 50 Cities Must "Shrink to Survive"
Hotel Hell - Luxury Hotels Foreclosed
UN Group Gets Look at Post-Katrina Housing Woes
US prepares major terrorism readiness exercise (from Rice Farmer)
High Frequency Trading and Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs Says Attempts to Reduce Speculation Could Disrupt Markets
Video: We Now Have A Total Gangster Government (from Rice Farmer)
And if no government, we'll still have gangsters:
GOP Candidate: If We Lose Elections, We Still Have Guns (from Rice Farmer)
Dow Chemical Loses $486M In Q2
Short Range Missiles Biggest Threat

Swine Flu
Swine flu cases doubled to 100,000 in one week
Who should get the swine flu vaccine?

Energy/Environment/Science
Hydrocarbons in the Deep Earth
Can the Military Find the Answer to Alternative Energy? (from Rice Farmer)
"The U.S. forces deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq are voracious consumers of energy. As a result they have become perilously dependent on long, costly, and vulnerable convoys of diesel-fuel tankers. More vehicles are used to transport and guard the fuel than are deployed in actual combat."
World temperatures set for record highs
World Will Warm Faster Than Predicted in Next Five Years, Study Warns
Insects to be brought in to control Japanese Knotweed
Swiss Scientists Aim to Create Synthetic Brain Within Decade

Europe
Jobless Youth: Will Europe's Gen Y Be Lost?
The Pain in Spain: Recession Hits Hard
Drawing up the Drawbridges: Europe Falls Out of Love with Labor Migration
Counterfeiters Target the Euro
Defiance as Pound Crashes: Brits Own Up to Euro-Phobia
Massive Fraud in France: Societe Generale Hit By €4.9 Billion Crime
The Banks that Wouldn't Lend: Experts Warn of New Credit Crunch in Germany
Put the Champagne Away: Too Soon for Optimism on German Economy, Survey Reveals Criticism Grows Over Banking Data Deal
Germans Hoarding Traditional Light Bulbs

China:
New 1 Plus 1 Child Policy