MacCruiskeen » Sun Feb 13, 2022 11:44 am wrote:Imagine the improvement in public health and happiness if people had instead been permitted and encouraged to create community gardens, just for instance.
Here a thing, though. I'll relate this as it does deal with food security/supply chains and the human dynamics surrounding community gardens.
I spent the best part of 2005 to 2015 'coordinating' a community garden/food forest project (charity/volunteer run, on local authority owned land), big into skill-sharing / re-skilling. I honestly spent almost as much time and energy dealing with dickheads than working on the land itself. A large part was taken up defending the charity itself from dickheads who sought to use it to further their own private interests, the rest on dealing with 'volunteers' and their dickheaded sense of entitlement.
Someone (before my time) had the bright idea of setting aside a portion of the land as 'personal allotments' for volunteers to grow their own veg, in *exchange* for their volunteering time to work on the rest of the project (maintaining fruit trees, dealing with Japanese Knotweed, scything the meadow etc).
So it would usually go something like this: "I heard I can have a free allotment. Can I have a free allotment, then?"
Yes, and here's a contract that stipulates that you'll need to attend at least 4 volunteer days a year... "OK, great."
They might turn up a few days later with a spade. A frenzy of digging ensues. 3 or 4 hours later, they collapse due to exhaustion. Weeks pass without seeing them, and volunteer day arrives. I'd send out the emails, then follow up with phone calls a day or 2 before. "I won't be coming, I've done my back in..." etc. And these were the ones who *actually did something*. There was also the vocal periphery of 'lifestyle hippies' with their weirdly romanticised notions about, well, *everything*, who would dutifully attend every trustees meeting, but when it came to getting the secateurs out were generally nowhere to be seen.
But every week, often several times a week, I'd be down there with the one other committed volunteer - an acerbic septuagenarian (who frankly didn't give a shit, but loved wielding the brush cutter) - drinking tea under the cherry trees and bitching about the world, still getting more out of it than we'd ever put in.
So I'm not sure it's just a question of being 'permitted and encouraged'. There are opportunities, and if not, they can be made. I see a lack of will, perhaps motivation. Certainly not much of an awareness of what is involved, or how time operates in that domain. The cost/benefit analysis doesn't fit with the need for near-instant gratification, so struggles to compete with the invitation to suckle at the teat of 'Amazon Prime'.
If the collapse is sporadic or slow enough, there might be time to re-learn. But if the efforts to fend it off or delay it are too effective, it might well be that we go so far beyond the tipping point that it's sudden, catastrophic and absolute when it does eventually get beyond sustaining.
