As our climate breaks down and food security is threatened, we need a new, bottom-up approach to local food-growing that will also knit our fraying society back together.
We’re hitting the ecological buffers – hard.
Five exhausting heatwaves, with record-breaking high temperatures; life-threatening wildfires (some in unlikely, urban places); wild life, from plants to animals, struggling; satellites gazing down on brown, rock-solid earth with trickling rivers; warnings of food shortages and price increases ahead. What are we summer-weary, climate-tested gardeners to do?
We’ll do what we always do: reflect, mull, adapt, shift, experiment, refine, test out, double down and, ultimately, rise to the challenge of sweeping change. What else can we do?
This summer has given us an unsettling peek into the future – one where, unless we urgently reduce our burning of fossil fuels, our planet gets hotter, and hotter, and hotter, with no ‘off’ switch, and no going back to settled, more clement times. Those of us with a garden or allotment, or with any patch of earth to tend, have witnessed plants, edible or otherwise, struggling in baking days often passing 30°C – showing us that, alongside farmers and growers, we’re among the ever-louder canaries in the climate change coal mine.
Looming food shortages, which the government acknowledges are a real and growing risk, should alarm us all. When food runs out, prices rise, anger grows, society unravels and fragile civility quickly evaporates; don’t expect your tummy-rumbling neighbours to ask nicely whether you can spare any fruit and veg when the supermarket shelves are bare.
We import 80% of our food – 47% of vegetables and 80% of fruit – making us one of the most import-reliant countries in Europe, despite us easily being able to grow many staples here. The shockwaves will hit when those countries even less resilient to climate chaos – which will struggle more than us to grow food – stop exporting it, because they need it to feed their own people. According to the Food Foundation, that could leave us having to fill an 80% food gap.
Harvested together, in one giant trug, the food we grow in our gardens, allotments, greenhouses and polytunnels – and anywhere else – can act as a cushion against weakening food chains. If you’re growing food, you’re not buying that food from shops struggling to keep their shelves stocked; it helps to take the pressure off. It follows that if more of us grow food ourselves, there’s more available to buy for those who simply can’t (or won’t). If we decide to grow even more food ourselves (dead lawns have been of no use this sizzling summer, so they’re ripe for conversion), the cushioning effect will increase and civility, hopefully, will remain intact.
This is why growing more edible stuff ourselves must put its hand up and grab attention. Our gardens, allotments and community growing spaces all add up – there are millions of us – and together we form a green, living, people-powered, climate-resilient buffer zone against the tougher, leaner times ahead. The more we expand this edible buffer zone – gardens and allotments are threaded through where most of us live – the bigger the buffering, cushioning effect becomes. If we’ve got enough of our own food to eat, those unable to grow their own can still rely on what our climate-hammered growers and farmers can manage to supply to the shops. No one should be left to go hungry.
Savvier communities can redirect their buying power into supporting smaller, local food-growing enterprises, ringing our towns and cities, which will themselves become more resilient to bouts of increasingly extreme, whiplash-like weather, be it heatwaves or flooding. Gardeners with an overabundance of fresh food can join forces with small growers, helping to even out peaks and troughs, expanding and strengthening our combined buffer zone even further; the tech buzzing in our pockets will help with co-ordination and distribution.
Growing the buffer zone will be relatively easy. Chances are you don’t live more than a few doors away from someone who knows how to grow food; they might have been at it for decades, amassing local nous, and be providing the bulk of their household’s staples, all year round. They’ll know how to deploy a greenhouse or polytunnel – themselves priceless buffers against increasingly blurred, unpredictable seasons – to best effect, to get footsteps-only food from soil to plate.
Knowledge already embedded in communities is like a social seed packet waiting to be opened; the skills and self-reliance needed to grow food are waiting to be scattered among those eager to cultivate the shockproofing buffer zone. Sowing this knowledge will rely on good, earth-friendly gardening techniques – it will be more No-Dig for Local Resilience than Dig for Victory – and working closely with increasingly unsettled nature, but it’ll also require that magic ingredient that makes meaningful food-growing possible: time.
Our buffer zones might work given the shared time we already collectively have, but to become reliable and robust, we’ll need a way to free up time for more pairs of hands to get growing. We can choose to work less, retire early, or simply stop doing pointless stuff that fritters away time – but we’ll need something chunkier from the top down to build and strengthen our food-growing buffers from the bottom up.
Universal Gardening Income (UGI) would be our buffer-builder. UGI – the gardening equivalent of a Universal Basic Income – would give everyone a set, non-means-tested amount of income each month, allowing those who chose to do so to devote more time to growing food, for the benefit of all, in their local buffer zone. In essence, UGI would recruit, through unlocking more personal time and more breathing space, a vegetable, fruit and herb-growing, co-operative army – community-supported horticulture, if you will – unlike anything we’ve ever seen, just as climate chaos yanks at the seams of life as we’ve known it.
Cries of derision will inevitably go up, and detractors will work to pull such ideas down – the cost! The cost! – but the radically different future climate change is now delivering demands radically different solutions if we’re to live good, meaningful lives, alongside a secure, if at times bumpy, supply of fresh, healthy, affordable food that’s accessible to all. Growing food where most people live makes social, economic and ecological sense, and acts as a balm against fraying civility; it is social security writ large. It might just hold us together, be hugely satisfying, shared fun – and taste good, too.
As we slam against hard ecological buffers, we need to get into the cushioning zone, and grow our own.
Words and images © John Walker
Wildfire image: Depositphotos
Find John on X @earthFgardener