Anti-holidays and sustainability
When is a holiday not a holiday? When it involves working and studying and throwing yourself head-first into a foreign culture and totally different economic reality.
People keep asking me how my ‘holiday’ in Peru went, and look confused when I answer that it was difficult, challenging and one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. ‘But surely it was amazing?’ they ask, and it was but it was also very confronting and exhausting and demoralising at times.
I wasn’t on holidays.
I went to Peru for a month of Spanish school and volunteer work in Cusco, to reality-check an idea born of my first trip there, last year, as a tourist. An idea of living and working in Peru in sustainability management, doing something a little more hands-on to make the world a better place. Through a series of logistical dramas and local connections, I also wound up spending the month living like a working class Peruano, which certainly increased the reality value of my experience!
I spent a month dreaming of real hot water, cooking facilities, heating and having a place that was hygienically clean! A detailed post on living conditions and the reality most Peruanos face will hopefully be forthcoming, but for now let’s just say it’s not easy, and I was living in relatively cosy conditions compared to many.
My neighbourhood, just outside of tourist Cusco, on the edge of another world.
There’s also a post coming about my volunteer project, and the frustrations, obstacles and immense rewards to be found in working with communities to teach sustainability and environmental management skills and try to create real, meaningful change. I learnt a lot about learned helplessness, poverty tourism, charitable entitlement and the disaster that results when external agencies try to impose their ideas of what help, resources and structures the local community needs. I didn’t achieve anything like what I set out to, but I learnt an awful lot!
Of course, spending a month entirely immersed in a foreign culture and a different language is always hard work. My Spanish may be good enough to get by in most day-to-day interactions, but not getting a rest from it was exhausting. For three weeks I started each week day with 4 hours of grammar and conversation lessons before grabbing a quick lunch and spending the afternoon trying to teach gardening and organise resources, all in Spanish. I hadn’t realised how specific the language of gardening was until I started trying to explain basic concepts like soil preparation in a different tongue! Then it was a trip home on the bus, dinner in a local cheap eatery and Spanish homework, perhaps with a catch-up with a Cusqueñan friend thrown in. All Spanish, all day, every day.
I regularly found myself appalled by the pollution and social conditions, ethically challenged by the behaviour of other well-intentioned foreigners, frustrated by language limitations, mentally exhausted at the end of each day and longing for that unobtainable proper hot shower…
The mish-mash of Spanish and Quechua cultures, of modernity and antiquity give Cusco it’s charm but also pose complex challenges!
The trip wasn’t easy for all those reasons, and yet none of these are the main reasons I found myself struggling and questioning if I could really do this. The thing I found hardest was finding myself completely isolated from other people who share my values and the systems that support those values:
- How do you cultivate sustainable change within a culture that does not value the environment, where the overwhelming majority of people drop their rubbish wherever they are, city, country or internationally-significant heritage area?
- How do you start the conversation with people who don’t know what ‘environmental’ means, who don’t understand the impacts of pollution and don’t see the problem?
- How do you talk about the importance of choices when working with people who have been so historically disempowered, and still are under the modern political system, that they don’t believe they can change anything?
- How do you engage a people so scientifically illiterate and under-educated that they have no basic awareness of the links between environment, pollution, agriculture, nutrition and health?
- How to you empower people in a political system that is hopelessly, endemically corrupt and self-serving, where there is no social shame in exploiting the poor and the poorly-educated?
- How do you create awareness and concern for the environment when even those who get it are more concerned about how they’re going to keep feeding themselves or the family, or the dire consequences of speaking out and irritating the wrong person?
- How do you keep yourself going when you’re completely on your own, in a strange country, a foreign culture, outside of your own language, social networks and support structures?
Water quality, water access, de-forestation, soil management, social inequality, absence of infrastructure, corrupt government and the impacts of tourism are just some of the sustainability issues impacting on rural communities in Peru.
For a month this was my reality and I really struggled with it. The problems seem so vast, so endemic and so unsurmountable I wondered if it was all a foolish idea born of naivety and idealism, was there really anything I could do? Then there were the break-throughs:
- The moments when I actually worked out how to accomplish something and the feeling of achievement that came with it.
- The realisations that I’d succeeded in teaching someone something that has the potential to alter their future.
- The ripples of change as one person’s changed perspective and awareness was passed on to another.
- The growing understanding of how to work with people, to be a catalyst for change or knowledge they were seeking, rather than imposing my own ideas or methods.
- Realising that a lesson or experience so small to me as to be insignificant was enough to make a genuine difference to someone there.
- Ground-testing my ideas and realising that my odd set of skills and experience gives me a distinct advantage in succeeding, so long as I get my Spanish (and then Quechua) up to speed.
- Meeting an amazing array of people from different backgrounds, cultures and experiences who saw something in me and offered me the gift of belief in my ability to make something of my dream.
- Beginning to see the ways in which I could actually change things, in small, manageable ways that have the potential to grow and sow real, sustainable improvements.
I wasn’t on holidays. I was busy testing everything I believed about the world and my place in it, about fairness, about universal values, about social equality, about the basic goodness of human beings. I was busy learning difficult lessons about who I am, what I can and should tolerate, where my limits are, and how strong and brave I can be. I spent a lot of time reminding myself to be like bamboo: strong yet flexible, bending with the forces around me yet retaining my true shape.
I went looking for a way to change the world. I learnt there is no easy way, that what I’m thinking of doing is incredibly hard and challenges me on so many levels. I learnt that more than changing the world I end up changing myself. Yet I also learnt that there is a desperate need for environmental education and advocacy in the developing world, that I have a valuable skill set and that I can make a useful contribution if I play my hand well. I can see opportunities to make a real difference to a handful of lives, and I understand that small changes ripple outwards to become much bigger. I learnt that I have a gift for finding and connecting people, no matter where I am, and that even when I’m feeling worn out, discouraged and full of doubt other people still see a contagious passion and energy in me.
I still don’t know if I’m strong enough or brave enough to make a go of it, but I do know that I’m reckless and optimistic enough to try.
A happy afternoon at my volunteer project, knowing that I’d done something to make someone’s world a little bit better.
I grew this
These last couple of weeks I’ve been feeling a little low. This time of year does it to me: I get over-scheduled, over-committed, under-slept, and with most folk getting busy with family commitments sometimes I feel pretty alone. I’m tired, and some days it can feel like a bit of a struggle to keep going, but then the little things come along that lift me.
This afternoon I took myself on a fossick around the garden. You see that luscious-looking big, buttery potato there? I grew that. Or more accurately, I provided the soil and the compost and the seed potatoes and the mulch, and it grew itself.
I’ve never grown potatoes before.
Neither have I grown the beans, beetroots, chard, oca and numerous other things doing well in my garden. It kinda makes up for the disappointments, like having only 3 carrots come up, and discovering the self-sown peas I’ve been nurturing were pretty sweet peas and not lovely food. Then there are the strawberries: what fruit has survived the unusually hot and dry conditions of late has been pilfered by the blackbirds: I have had one lone ripe berry.
Tonight I’m going to steam up that potato, diced into little cubes. I’m going to dice and fry some divine local free-range bacon (payment for assistance rendered) and throw in some broadbeans (donated by a colleague with a surplus) plus some chopped up garlic greens and sage leaves I picked this afternoon. I’ll squeeze over a lemon, taken from my friend’s tree, and toss the lot on top of some lettuce leaves that have evaded the worst of the recent weather in a shady part of my garden.
Between my patch of dirt and my community, I’m feeding myself. Tonight I’m eating outside of the system, far removed from the supermarket. I’m actually doing this, with my sad little garden that the heat has burnt and baked the soil to clay. I’m doing this in a rental house, with a full-time job and a life that takes me out and about quite a lot. I am doing this, and if I can do it, maybe so can you. Maybe together we can build ourselves a food community, connecting eaters with growers and using the land we have to grow the food we need.
Imagine that: a world without dependence on the big supermarkets, with their demands for unsustainable farming practices and shelves stacked with pretend food. A world where we know our neighbours and trade our backyard surpluses, where we’ve met the grower who sells us vegetables, where we’ve gotten close and personal with the animals that become our meat. Lower emissions, more sustainable farming, connected communities. Grow, forage, trade, cook: do it.
Sometimes all it takes is a humble potato to remind me what it’s all about.
The biodiverse gardener
Over the weekend I spent a bit of time in the garden, weeding, composting and mulching. I’m preparing beds for the month ahead, keeping myself motivated through the hard graft (the gardens here are seriously neglected) by daydreaming about the harvests to come. As well as thinking about what will do well in my garden and what I like to eat I’ve been giving a bit of thought to biological and genetic diversity and wondering how my plantings might help to keep rare species and varieties alive.
So what’s the problem with food crop diversity? The limited types of plants we grow, and the few varieties (genetic strains) of those plants we do sow.
Modern agriculture promotes the growing of only a small sub-sample of possible food plants. The plants grown have been selected over the years for various reasons, including high yields, easy harvesting, long shelf-life, market familiarity and easy processing. As western industrial systems of agriculture have expanded across the world, western crops have moved with them, replacing traditional food plants. We’ve lost awareness of many alternative food plants along with the knowledge of how best to grow them, and along the way we’ve lost access to many of the food plants best suited to growing conditions in many parts of the world, and to the conditions predicted in a climate-change impacted future.
As farming has industrialised we’ve also become reliant on a small handful of the known varieties of the plants that have become our dominant crops. Where a century ago there were 400 known varieties of peas in cultivation, now there’s only 25 that are commonly grown and most of the original 400 have gone extinct. Although it might not seem important – after all we still have peas – this loss of genetic diversity is really quite worrying: genetic diversity is the thing that lets us adapt crops to changing conditions, environments and diseases.[1, 2] If we lose the genes, we lose the means to adapt our food plants to new growing conditions. This is a huge concern for food security[1], putting our agricultural systems at risk of collapse due to drought, climate change, plant diseases and even global politics[2] – agribusiness is big business.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 75% of crop biodiversity has been lost from the world’s fields[3] – that’s how big the problem is. Some governments and science organisations are so concerned that they’ve established a secure seed bank to preserve rare seeds as best as possible, behind steel doors in a vault built into a mountain beneath the permafrost in the Arctic circle.[1, 3, 4]
Although it’s not only the lost biodiversity that’s the problem – there’s related issues about fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide use [5], as well as lost potential medicinal and biotechnological properties[6], farming knowledge and cultural traditions – it’s the part that I can do a little something about in my own back yard*. I can plant unusual crops and rare varieties of veggies in my little patch, preserving diversity when I collect seed for the next year and expanding my culinary world at the same time. I’ve taken my day-dreams of fresh greens and home-grown spuds and checked them against growing guides and seed catalogues, getting an idea of what plants and varieties will do well on my fine, claggy soil (I could spend hours looking through seed catalogues, dreaming of gardens that will never be…). I’m choosing for suitability, flavour and biodiversity, tracking down suppliers of unusual, heirloom and organic seeds. There’s a world of weird veg out there that I can’t wait to explore!
Backyard-friendly unusual veggies that I’m contemplating growing include salsify, skirret, salad burnet, oca, mizuna and elephant garlic. I’m also planning to plant unusual varieties of more familiar crops:
- blue sapphire potatoes - seriously, purple spuds that are tasty too – What’s not to love?
- Chioggia beetroot - it’s stripey!
- purple sprouting broccoli - I grew this last year and am hooked
- “Caspar” white eggplants – early harvesting, so hopefully I’ll have better luck than I did last summer.
…and whatever else I come across that’s just a little different.
I’ll find out what works, save seed from the successes and grow them again next season, slowly selecting the genes that do best right here, creating a garden with a genetic profile that’s all it’s own.
What usual food plants or rare varieties are your favourites? What’s the weirdest edible you’ve ever grown? Know any good sources for heirloom seeds or kooky seedlings? Let us know what makes your garden a little more biodiverse!
Sources for seeds or unusual seedlings (Australia):
- www.greenharvest.com.au
- www.southernharvest.com.au
- www.thelostseed.com.au
- www.edenseeds.com.au
- provenancegrowers.blogspot.com.au
In Tasmania and interested in food security? Public lecture: Food Security and Nutrition – The GM Question
- Who? former Chief Scientist of Australia and CSIRO Fellow, Dr Jim Peacock AC
- Where? Stanley Burbury Theatre, University Centre, Sandy Bay campus
- When? 10th July 2012, 6.00 – 7.30 pm
- How? RSVP by email to UTAS.Events@utas.edu.au
References:
[1] http://www.croptrust.org.
[2] Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (2010) Crop biodiversity: use it or lose it.
[3] Longyearbyen (2012) Banking against Doomsday; The Economist, March 10th, 2012.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault.
[5] Altieri MA (1999) The ecological role of biodiversity in agroecosystems; Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 74, Pp 19–31; Elsevier.
[6] Altieri MA & Merrick LC (1986) Agroecology and in situ conservation of native crop diversity in the third world; Chapter 41 in Wilson EO (1986) Biodiversity, Part 3; National Academy of Sciences, Smithsonian Institution, USA.
* I can also do something about it through my grocery shopping, steering clear of the supermarkets for my produce, buying meat from rare-breed livestock and selecting unusual veg from the farmer’s market and local grocer.
