Take a tea break to listen to Dr Vandana Shiva interviewed on Lateline.
Listen to her full address after receiving this years Sydney Peace Award at Vandana Shiva's Website
There is also a free download ‘ Manifesto on the Future of Seeds’ on the Navdanya International website.
Check out her new book “SOIL not Oil”.
Dr Vandana talks about many issues in this speech including the future of food and seed for humans and the essential role we must play in caring for this precious planet.
There you have it.... and it was obvious all along but I just couldn't put my finger on the link.... I must be getting old....or something!
Monoculture means growing one thing, usually on a massive scale and killing everything that dares interfere with that one thing, with chemicals.
Then there was organic but often it came to mean growing one thing, on a massive scale and killing everything that interferes with it, with chemicals made from natural substances.
In the organic vegetable garden I always encourage people to make use of every little microclimate, interplanting tall things with short to get shade in the heat of summer; always having flowers and seedlings and mature plants in the same bed; feeding the soil and the plants will feed themselves..... but still I was not quite sure what to say when asked "How can we feed the world this way?"
But then there was "Fresh" the movie.... and I have the answer... its all about food being nutritious and the loop....
Monoculture is like a huge field of wheat; when the crop is taken, there is nothing left. The farmer must get the land ready for next year by fertilising, spraying for pest and weeds, fixing machinery and buying seed. He spends many thousands of dollars on inputs from all over the world, which are trucked and shipped and give me a headache thinking about. Lets say that after expenses, he makes $100 / acre for his wheat crop if it is a good crop and if prices are good.
Then lets look at the kind of farmer shown in "Fresh" who has several fields of mixed grasses which soon self seed every year. First he puts cows on the field. Cows eat grass and grow big. Every few days he moves the cows to the next field, then the next and so on around the property. As the cows go along they fertilise the grasses but they also attract flies which lay their eggs in the dung, and flies carry diseases which can quickly spread through the cows when they come back to this pasture. Eventually he sells the cows for meat, to a local butcher. It is organic and of excellent quality and he might get $100 / acre. His cows had calves and so his next generation is produced.
Second, 3 days after the cows are taken off he lets in the chickens to the first field. The fly and other insect eggs have hatched and the chickens are in rapturous delight and gorge themselves, laying big, healthy, nutritious eggs for the farmer to sell. From these large, organic eggs the farmer receives $100 / acre from the local organic food shop or from the farm gate. Some of the eggs are allowed to hatch and become the next generation.
Third, in come a host of meat birds that eat a different selection of grasses to the cows and the chickens. Once these birds such as geese and turkeys have been through all the fields, they are sold for meat. They are healthy and strong and organic and he might get $100 / acre, sold direct to local shops. These also reproduce themselves.
Fourth, the grass is now well fertilised by cows, chickens and other birds and grows fast. The cows are allowed back in again before the grass dries and goes to seed. Now the farmer cuts it for hay. He uses some for the bedding and winter feed for his animals and sells the rest. He might receive $100 / acre from local people direct from the farm. The grasses self-seed and come up again next spring.
Moreover, some of the fields of the sustainable farmer produce a variety of vegetables at various times and some may have fruit trees under which the chickens graze in their rotation. The system is flexible and is a closed loop, with few inputs from beyond the farm. All his produce is sold locally.
Even with this simplistic view, you can see that he is producing many times the volume of more nutritious food for human consumption than the wheat farmer, whose crop is shipped around the world where it is processed and made into white flour which ends up as items wrapped in plastic bags in supermarkets thousands of kilometres away, adding little but carbohydrate to the diet to those that eat it. And it seems, from the documentary, that the multi-cultural farmer reaps the rewards financially too.
The multi-cultural farmer needs workers to help. He creates employment for locals. Those who may otherwise be driving trucks or ships of wheat, stay home and work on this farm and themselves learn the value of nutrition, raising healthy children who take their message to school and help start a school vegetable garden..... and so the effects go on and on, rippling through every avenue of society.
In this way we not only feed the world but it is sustainable, reducing greenhouse gases, climate change, pollution, medical expenses, unemployment etc etc etc and generally making the world a happier place for everyone.
Watch a trailer, join the movement, find a screening here. It is American, and I am always sceptical of American things (sorry Pattie!) but this is genuinely good and farmer whatsit who lets his chickens be chickens and develop their chicken-ness is fabulous..... as is the big, ex-basketballer turned urban farmer.
Tim Flannery is an Australian scientist, explorer and writer. Even so, there doesn't seem to be a single website that does justice to the whole man. He was Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Change Council and must have been very disappointed by its outcomes. I would like very much to read his account of it all.
As an author he fits more into every sentence than any other writer! That is why I am only reading the second page of his book "Throwim Way Leg" and already have discovered some extraordinary things about geography, history, culture and cloves..... yes cloves, the spice we all know so well. (In France we finally discovered the French name for it was clous de giroffles..... or giraffes' claws! When you think about it, I guess cloves could refer to cloven ie clawed, in English.... I wish we had thought of that when we were standing at the spice section of the supermarket in France!)
Anyway, back to the book..... It seems that this funny, prickly little fellow (the clove..... NOT Tim Flannery!) is the dried flower bud of a lilly pilly that only grows on islands just to the west of New Guinea. The ancient Romans flavoured their food with cloves which must have come from those remote islands.... amazing.
And did you know that they have kangaroos in New Guinea, only they live in trees! And that nine thousand years ago New Guineans living high in the mountain valleys had already developed intensive agriculture where they grew sugar cane.... amongst other things. Even today there are no roads connecting the country because it is so rugged and, because they have no pack animals, walking is often still the norm. One sixth (about 1,000) of the world's languages are from New Guinea because of the isolation of the peoples.
Tim Flannery's book "The Future Eaters" I would put up as one of the best books ever written on human civilisation and how it is eating itself into oblivion. This was written way before climate change and carbon credits and water issues were in the public mind and certainly started me thinking seriously about how I, as a human, fit into this planet. Then there was "The Weather Makers" which was a very early publication on climate change and what it means. He write so well, so clearly and fills the pages with such fascinating and inspiring images that you could never find them dry or boring. Neither does he speak down to you though, nor make silly, frivolous comments..... unlike me, I am afraid! His books are all listed and discussed here.
Now I am up to page 3....
It is an absolutely perfect summer's day as I sit outside at my little mosaic table with my laptop cord plunging unceremoniously inside through the dog flap in the wire door to the power socket in the laundry! Behind me are my two deliciously delicate begonias, meekly displaying sprays of pink and red flowers on tall, elegant stems, and nodding gently in the cool breeze to the raucous laughter of two local kookaburras. It is hard to concentrate on my writing with these 2 comedians laughing so loudly and unselfconsciously from the branches of a gum tree, only about 10m away from me. One even had what looked like the last thin15cm of a snake hanging out of its mouth at the same time as it was sharing a joke with the other. Now that is something..... Hang on while I go and get my camera.......
While lazing about at the shack, without technology, I read 2 lovely books, both of which happened to be by Australian authors and set in Australia. Kate Grenville's: The Lieutenant is an historical fiction story of an astronomer accompanying the First Fleet's arrival in Australia in 1786, and his close association with some Aboriginal people. This book begins slowly and seems scant and superficial at first but it is worth getting into and develops well, leaving you wishing for more. The other, Amanda Hampson: The Olive Sisters, is set in modern times and is a rare treat of a book, captivatingly telling the story of some Italian ancestral discoveries made by a woman escaping a failed city life..... sounds corny.... but is oh so well written and complex.
In between these, I drooled over Juleigh Robins: Wild Food.... 100 recipes using Australian ingredients. Here is a little taste of Juleigh's introduction, which tells how she and her husband came upon bush tomatoes grown by an Aboriginal community, about 20 years ago.....
....About 2 weeks later, 20 large boxes of all sorts of native foods arrived. Ian and I were like kids at Christmas, and eventually we found the much sought-after bush tomatoes in box number 5, labelled 'katyerr' in the Anmatyerr language. I immediately rang Janet and Rita to thank them and see if some more of these marvelous fruits could be harvested for us..... we said please send as much as they could harvest - after all, how much could anyone gather out in the desert? It couldn't be more than 20kgs, right?..... Shortly afterwards we took our first delivery of 2 tonnes of bush tomatoes!
I am so looking forward to making some of the foods, like bush tomato (solanum centrale) and roast pumpkin risotto, and fig, fetta and pomegranate salad with wild rosella (Hibiscus sabdariffa) and pepperberry (Tasmannia lanceolata) syrup, and wild lime (Citrus glauca) friands.
The ingredients are available through Robins Foods (branded Outback Spirit), in partnership with Indigenous Australians, and are sourced from pristine wilderness areas from the Top End and the Central Desert and from rainforest, alpine and temperate coastal regions of Australia. A guide to retail outlets is included. There are even growing instructions for those of us keen enough to seek out plants for our gardens.
In the car, on the way to the shack, with no interest in the cricket which was on my favourite station, I was searching the radio waves for something worth listening to and came across Radio National's The Book Show and later, The Science Show. Now, I am not much of a fan of Radio National on the whole..... full of discussions about classical music minutiae and interviews with artists and dancers and poets .... all much too much about people, for me. But, this particular day I happened across a talk (related to his book) - Nicholas Stern: Blueprint for a Safer Planet.... and how it related to economics and Copenhagen. It sounds rather dull but he is a superb speaker and it is well worth listening to since the whole Copenhagen thing hung very much on his report. (Coincidentally, son Alex also happened to hear this talk.... but he was there in the audience, in Oxford!)
On the way home from the shack a few days later, once more in the car, I tuned in to an hour long reading from Tim Severin: The Brendan Voyage , again on Radio National 729. I absolutely loved the idea of rebuilding a boat out of ox hides and seeing if it could be sailed from Ireland to what is now the USA, by an Irish monk hundreds of years ago.....
The illuminated manuscripts that recount the epic voyage of the sixth century saint Brendan from Ireland west across the seas to an unknown land were long considered apocryphal. But explorer, author and film maker Tim Severin was fascinated by the story they told, and after painstaking research managed to build a replica of a sixth century curragh just as the monks of medieval Ireland would have sailed, and set off to cross the Atlantic. With her small crew, the Brendan - forty nine ox hides stitched over a wooden frame - survived pack ice, storms and inquisitive whales to eventually reach Newfoundland, and prove that it would have been possible for St Brendan to have done so also, thus reaching the New World many centuries before Christopher Columbus.
Having discovered some good things I am hooked on Radio National and have listened to many interesting talks, so often in the car, but also online where the manuscripts and audio are readily available. Lord Bob May: The evolution of cooperative behaviour and Martin Rees: Controlling the Future are two from this week, both of which I want to write about as they are so stimulating and thought-provoking.
Barb rang me this morning and reminded me about Landline, on ABC TV. Langhorne Creek.... home of Newman's Horseradish
.....while fads will come and go, some traditional spreads are finding new favour in a range of dishes - take the humble but fiery horseradish. This root vegetable began life in Germany, but according to second generation horseradish producer Brian Meakins, when the root vegetable's name was translated into English, a Frenchman botched the job, and what should have been sea radish ended up with an equine identity.
Brian grows and processes Newman's horseradish beside South Australia's Lower Lakes, his father having been given permission to use the name by Fred Newman back in 1947. The Meakins have ten hectares under production, from which they harvest 30 tonnes of horseradish to process and sell to supermarkets and communities around the country.
Then of course there is ABC TV's iView where, for 14 days, you can watch all those things you didn't know were on until someone said "Hey, did you see that great show on TV...." but of course you didn't know and missed! I watched a wonderful thing about a man who wanted to make the world's best chocolate so he sold his home in England and went and set up a cocoa bean farm in South America....
And then there is East of Everything...... Like Sea Change, but about some pretty cool brothers in their 30's / 40's, who inherit a sort of hippy beach resort at Australia's eastern most point. I love Art.... he is complex, creative, romantic, interesting, difficult and attractive. Is there anyone else like Lizzy?
So, when it's too hot to go to the beach or be in the garden, fill your days with the wonderful world of words.....
Thanks, Gavin, for sharing this video link with us.
Having 2 boys in their 20's makes this very relevant to me. Young adults today will not take no for an answer, no matter who their leaders are, and they will strive for change. After all, isn't change what everyone wants these days? In my last post I commented on how so much of our lives these days is focused on change. Why then can't our so-called leaders come to grips with the changes we all need instead of remaining focused on keeping things the same? It is so ironic.
.........So those people who say it can't be done should get out of the way of people already doing it....our future will not be written for us, but by us........
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition is a coalition of Australia's largest youth organisations and over 50,000 young people from across Australia. Our mission to is build a generation wide movement to solve climate change before it's too late, through bringing about short term political impact and long term cultural change.
Find out more about the Australian Youth Climate Coalition
And here are their younger brothers and sisters doing their bit too.... growing, cooking and eating gourmet food at Primary School.... this little video clip that Maggie put on a few days ago is fabulous. Of course I knew about this scheme but it is so much more powerful when you watch it happening right here, in Australia. Primary school kids cooking fennel risotto, cabbage and potato fillo pie and a leafy salad with crutons, for the Australian Minister of Education.....all from vegetables they have grown at school.... how good is that!!
Walk Against Warming 2009
Saturday, 12 December, 11am
Victoria Square/Tarndanyangga to Rymill Park/Murwillaburka
Be a part of the biggest ever Walk Against Warming and join millions of Australians demanding action on climate change. Why is this year's walk so important? It coincides with the critical United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where world leaders are gathering to decide what actions they will take for a safe climate. The Walk Against Warming is Australia's contribution to the International Day of Action on Climate Change, as people gather en masse across the globe to have their voices heard. This is BIG!
Your presence will help deliver the strongest possible message to the leaders in Copenhagen that you are deeply concerned about global warming.
Make every step count. Walk as a SPONSORED WALKER
Friends and family can't walk with you? Yes they CAN!
Get friends and family to sponsor your positive action for climate change. By making a donation to you for your action at the Walk Against Warming they can support the vital campaign to prevent catastrophic climate change. It's really easy. To get sponsored, START HERE.
Enough talking – let's start walking! See you on 12 December.
The Walk Against Warming is proudly supported by the Climate Institute, The Wilderness Society, Get Up! Make Poverty History, LHMU and the Australian Conservation Foundation.
If you would like to run your own regional walk or would like to volunteer on the day,
please contact Jamnes Danenberg on 08 8223 5155.
Adelaide
Sat 12 Dec 2009, 11 am
Victoria Square -Tarndanyangga to
Rymill Park - Mullawirraburka
Tel: 08 8223 5155
This is how we keep our garden cool in the extreme heat of Adelaide’s summer.
The main garden bed protected from the vicious sun.
Herb garden.
Passion fruit & tomato shady area.
No scorching of the beautiful tomatoes. They are ripening very well.
Lemon Myrtle on the left also under shade cloth.
Curry leaf tree under shade.
All wrapped up for an extreme Adelaide summer.
Everyone is doing it....politicians, scientists, bloggers, neighbours.....so now it is my turn. What they are doing is making lists...lists of what to do for our planet, our futures, our existence.....and what not to do. There are thousands of lists and they all differ slightly and some are good and some are just advertising rubbish to sell green products. My list is short and simple:
Take responsibility for everything you do, buy, use, say, think, are....everything...eg:
I thought of this because I heard the rubbish truck go by....we hadn't put our bin out again.... because we hardly have any rubbish. Some people in our street have 2 bins....If we put it out and its not full, the truck has to stop, pick it up, put it down, move off again...all using more energy than if we wait and use the service only when we need it.
Sure, I have just come back from 26,000 miles plane travel, in 11 planes, several trains and 7 cars. No way round the facts!
But nearly all our school holidays for 20 years were spent at the beach 2 hours drive from home, swimming, snorkelling, walking, paddling boards, sailing Kermit our dear old catamaran....not a motor in sight....or a shop.
There are hundreds of things to put on such a list but the most effective thing to do is to take responsibility for what and who you are and do. When you die will anyone care if you had a new handbag or a matching phone or newly painted house? No. But they will remember if you were generous with gifts of baskets of produce from your garden or home-made jams or little seedlings for their garden or a kind word and time to listen. Funnily enough these are also the planet-saving actions....
Responsibility is a big word and it has big ramifications.
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