Invest in growers

What is being revealed underneath the fuel/HGV crises in UK?

These are the last offerings harvested from my veg patch. Celery, beans and chard are still giving.

A challenging year 2021 but always plenty of learning and surprises I find when in relationship with life through a growing practice.

A glance at the headlines this last week suggests this is where we should be urgently investing our intelligence, energy, time, money and critically conversations - local food resilience and security.

The revealing insights in the UK into our total dependence on CO2 (for animal slaughter) fossil fuels and HGV drivers to feed ourselves should alone be enough to demonstrate the need for urgent system redesign.

When you hear folks talking about ‘system change’ this is a prime example.

How can we have made feeding ourselves so utterly dependent on toxic, polluting and unsustainable infrastructure, prone to shocks and uncertainty ?

For our most important human need - food.

Surely, investing in local food systems to ensure resilience, security and provision of nutritious, healthy affordable food should be a no-brainer .

New systems which could support huge numbers of people getting onto the land and into new forms of meaningful community enterprise.

Systems which could also help regenerate bio-diversity, soil and local ecosystems.

Alongside food provision itself the opportunities this would provide for improving human health - healing anxious souls and cultivating connection and community in these times of crises is immense.

I realise I’ve gone from vegetable bounty to political rant, but everything is interconnected and food security is real today and that’s before the impacts of climate breakdown and soil degradation kick in .

I wrote a long essay after the first lockdown in 2020 about this moment for building regenerative infrastructure instead of the tired industrial infrastructure narrative that still dominates our depleted political and media imagination.

We need to be talking openly and with curiosity about what sits beneath these HGV driver and fuel shortages.

What is being revealed ?

What would a sane culture do with this new knowledge to look after itself and its young and vulnerable?

The lack of depth and breadth of discussion in our politics and media is staggering - negligent in my opinion.

Invest in Growers.

Growers of food.

Growers of community.

Growers of healthy local places that can imagine, create and sustain themselves.

That can bring life back without total dependence on CO2 canisters, HGVs and endless fossil fuels.

#growveg #gratitude #inservicetolife #regeneration #imagination #becomingcrew #thefutureislocal