Sustainable, Regenerative, Circular, and all that. Part 1, the Land

There are a lot of buzz words that float around the ecological blogosphere and I'm sure that we all relate to them one way and another, if we have time to think them through.

Probably the grand-daddy of all these terms is "sustainable".  The implication of something being sustainable is that we could go on doing it forever, without running out of anything.

Here is a great hero of mine, Rebecca Hosking talking about a project that's  key to her heart, PlasticTides.  Rebecca realised that our use of plastics was not sustainable.  We were producing more and more plastics, we use them for just a few minutes, they last in the environment for thousands of years, and they are made from a finite resource.  This isn't sustainable, and she started a small project in her local town to persuade people to start cutting out plastic.

And quite a few years ago Rebecca realised that they way we produce food on our planet (well, in the western world) wasn't sustainable, not least because it relied heavily of fossil fuels (oil).

She made a video about that (A Farm for the Future), which is well worth watching (over and over, in my not-very-humble opinion).

She not only makes a case for the non-sustainability of current farming practices, but also introduces a number of people who are farming and gardening in ways that seem to be eminently sustainable.




This video still brings tears to my eyes when I watch it!  It also introduces some other heroes of mine, Charlotte and Ben Hollins of Fordhall Farm in Shropshire.  I'll be writing much more about them later on!

A Farm for the Future from Kromwell Gardens on Vimeo.

Read about the UN's SDGs

So important is the idea of sustainability that everyone and his granny is jumping on the sustainable bandwagon.

If you Google "Sustainable", and look at all the logos, you can see that you can have sustainable just about anything.  Even the United Nations has published the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Which is excellent, and much to be lauded.

But is it enough?

Is Sustainable Sufficient?

No, I believe not.  The thing is, Sustainable implies not making things worse.  But what happens if we've already gone too far beyond sustainable?  What happens if there's not enough oil?  If we have depleted the fertility in the soil to far?  What happens if the oceans contain too much plastic?  Or the atmosphere contains too much carbon dioxide?

If our planet is dying, then we don't want to sustain that position, we need to start doing something that is remediative.  And that brings us to the idea of Regeneration.

I was first introduced to the ideas of regeneration through the work of Allan Savory.  If you haven't watched his TED talk, then you need to do so immediately(!).  It's called "How to Green the World's Deserts and Reverse Desertification".  If that title doesn't turn you on then maybe this project isn't for you!

That's sort of where it all began, but the ideas of Regenerative Agriculture have really taken off, and not just in huge cattle stations in Australia (but a lot of really advanced--and I don't mean industrial--developments are happening down under.  As you watch this next video, look out for where you can see a fence that divides a farm where they are practising regen ag, and where they aren't.  It's there in the colour of the landscape, and the trees (or lack of them).  And towards the end of the video they say what we urban or semi-urban dwellers can do.  But local and use these ideas in our back gardens, too.

I've more to say on this subject.  Later additions to this post will include links to farms in the UK doing this stuff, how this relates to organic, bio-dynamic and so on, and the local food movement.

For instance, if you're a vegetarian you may feel that you can buy some lettuce from a supermarket, or even a green grocer on the high street with a clear conscience.  But did you know that most of the salad stuff that we eat in the UK comes from Almeria in Southern Spain.  On that map, above left, all that white is plastic greenhouses.  And they are staffed by slave labour from sub-Saharan Africa.  People who arrive in rickety boats to escape war and famine, but who then live in appalling conditions, work for a pittance, and have no chance of ever getting home.

Spain's 'Sea of Plastic': Where Europe gets its produce, migrants get exploited

Oh, and, those lettuces, once picked and packed, face a 1400-mile journey in a refrigerated lorry, at an enormous cost in diesel, before they reach the shop where you buy them.  I suggest that this isn't sustainable!

But more of that later.

In part 2 of this blog post, I want to talk about recycling, the Circular Economy, the Restart Project, and Buildings as Material Banks.