A Joined-up Answer to Saving the Environment
By Neil Fellowes
Last week I took some time out to understand a little more about working with nature. What I found out was fascinating and it broadened my horizons on the meaning and purpose of all life.
I learned how birds, bees, tree, flowers, chickens, veggies, compost, animals, trees, water, sun, earth and even slugs, snails and insects all support life. I also came to understand how, if you take one out of the system, it all begins to fail.
Six to eight months of the year, both you and I probably spend an hour each week mowing the lawn.
We then spend another hour a week shopping for groceries. Neither are particularly good for the environment.
The space the lawn takes up reduces natural habitat for all life and trip to the shop, plus the food miles your grocery accumulated on their way to the shelf are not helpful to the planet.
Many of us give lip service to saving the environment and most of us understand the value of buying organic, and we as yet have not managed to joined up our thinking on the subject. Probably, because most of us don't know what to do...
Permaculture - permanent agriculture - offers a solution. It's an approach aimed at creating sustainable human habitats by duplicating natures patterns. It encourages all of life and is the ultimate in organic production. It also reduces environmental damage. Plus once it's set up, it probably reduces your costs!
I remember back to my childhood. Eating Sunday dinner at my nan's house was a really wholesome experience.
When we sat for our Sunday meal one uncle would bring the carrots and peas, another would bring the beans. We would provide the potatoes. My nan would cook a desert she crafted in the kitchen and we'd all tuck in.
The evening meal was lettuce from our garden, tomatoes and spring onions from one uncle and cucumber and radish from another.
It was a wholesome experience. The pooling of our resources. The sharing of our efforts and the pleasure of each others company. Plus food that had, in most cases only been out of the ground for a few hours before reaching our plates.
Compare my childhood experience to that of buying Sunday lunch from the supermarket.
This is what permaculture offers:
Saves the environment
Puts food on your plate that doesn't poison you
Cuts out packaging
Saves money
Gains the pleasure and personal reward of watching things we plant grow and then eating them and sharing them.
Best
Neil
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