Small-scale eco farming’s new hope Zoe Wangler Few of us remain unaware of the insanity of our current property market, in which substandard housing costs us dozens of times our annual salaries. But how many realise the extent to which these housing costs affect those dedicated to producing our food sustainably and restoring degraded countryside? Average house prices are higher in rural areas than in urban areas, yet average rural wages are lower. In his 2008 review of rural housing, Lord Taylor found that rural areas have become the domain of the ‘wealthy and retired’. A new entrant to organic horticulture could simply never afford the unexceptional £495,000 3-bed bungalow with 15 acres I saw advertised this morning in Mid Devon. This is one of the primary reasons why the average age of a farmer is now 58. Fifteen miles north-east of the £495,000 bungalow, three families are moving on to their first residential smallholdings. These are the first affordable farms made available by the Ecological Land Cooperative (ELC), and they are selling
for £72,000 each. The ELC is a social enterprise set up to provide affordable sites for ecological land-based livelihoods. The three holdings, on a site called Greenham Reach, are to be the first of many. We are seeking investment in January to develop a further twelve. The Greenham Reach holdings were not easily won – Mid Devon District Council refused our initial application and we had to prepare ourselves for a public planning inquiry. We stretched our resources to the limit and we would not have made it without the help of our supporters and allies. The experience confirmed those of our founding members: that the planning process is demanding, on the whole too demanding, for small-scale producers. Those people capable of creating sustainable livelihoods often have insufficient time or money to navigate our current planning system. It is vital to us that the holdings we fought hard to produce remain affordable and are protected for ecological agriculture. We achieve
this through the use of both planning conditions and the 150year lease our tenants purchase. Both of these oblige us and the tenants to follow a Management Plan which, for example, prohibits the use of agro-chemicals, requires electricity to be generated onsite from renewable sources, and requires the protection of existing habitats. Should tenants ever
“Rural areas have become the domain of the ‘wealthy and retired’” wish to sell, the lease requires that the holding is valued, not by the market, but by a re-sale formula linked to inflation, ensuring that the holdings remain affordable. We have committed ourselves to reporting to the Council annually on several indicators, including farm incomes generated on the smallholdings and changes in biodiversity and in the soil. We are also working in a research consortium to assess changes in overall farm
productivity. The consensus in government is that small-scale mixed ecological farming has no place in Britain’s food security. I have never seen convincing evidence of this, but neither have I seen evidence to the contrary. Our research will test their hypothesis. This summer I visited Lammas, a development of nine affordable smallholdings in Pembrokeshire, where the first families arrived in 2009. Most of the holdings had progressed well, with gardens and polytunnels established, producing good amounts of food, hens happily housed and willow for fuel over 10 feet tall. Some of the most beautiful and affordable barns and houses you will ever see had been self-built. What heartened me most, however, was the abundance and diversity of plant and animal life in a site formally used for sheep grazing. One of the people I met at Lammas was volunteer Tom Clare. Tom manages Lammas’ millpond to renew the habitat for wildlife, largely through replacing soft rush, which came to dominate under sheep grazing, with a wide range
of native plants. His passion and love for what he was doing was palpable. Lammas, and now the ELC, facilitate the Toms of this world to do this critical work. It is an honour to be working with the people that, as the First Nation’s Cree prophesied, “put their faith in deeds, and not in words, to make the land green again, and to restore balance once again to our planet.” Zoe Wangler is the ELC’s Managing Director. If you would like to invest, or get involved, see www. ecologicalland.coop.
Reconfiguring our sense of self Chris Thornton
As I was preparing my proposal for PhD research on communication and sustainability, I came across the first of two unsettling clarifications. In 2002 Dutch designer Jan Van Toorn crystalized the impacts of industrial and communication design on society: “Design,” he says, “has become an efficient, world-wide instrument for the colonisation of being.” It takes little more than a trip to the shops or some TV channel-hopping to grasp this; that the nature of being in the world is subsumed into corporate strategy. We are a symptom of the scale and reach of industrialised storytelling, conditioning what is meaningful
and what we aspire to be; it tells us that the modern act of consumption has become inexorably tied to identity. As a designer and educator I remain in a minority concerned about this issue and its social and ecological effects. Communication design is a practice of storytelling, but similar to other manufactured outputs, advertising and media narratives create ‘externalities’ that our industry fails to recognise. Through persistent appeals to our extrinsic values for power, wealth, image and status we have become highly individualised. Psychologically, this shift insulates us from one another and the natural world. Through it we have largely forgotten the experience of collective empowerment and our place in a wider bio-social ecology. But, in reading about the Transition Network last year, I was struck by a second clarification: it seemed Transition was attempting something unprecedented. In its model for localisation, social resilience and collective action, Transition deliberately creates space for people to reconfigure their sense
of self. In very practical ways it offers opportunities to grow and celebrate new personal narratives that encompass human and non-human others. Forming identity is thought to be, in part, an ongoing process of self-narration, so I became interested in how Transition might affect this. I wondered what we designers can learn from Transition to develop communications that genuinely support sustainability, instead of co-opting it into increasing swathes of greenwash? The research resulting from this spans four Transition communities across the UK and South Australia where I now live. These include Transition Towns Lewes and Leicester, selected for their well-established projects and likely socio-cultural differences; and Transition Adelaide Hills and Transition Gawler in South Australia, both younger groups with their own geographical and social challenges. Using interviews, observations and my own participation I am examining the personal, social and contextual stories that motivate sustainable behaviour. All the narrative
accounts so far have been telling and I have begun to see some poignant indicators of why Transition succeeds, and where it may need to adapt. One of the clearest examples of success, and the one most likely to influence selfperception, is the act of ‘doing’. In the majority of narratives shared so far, engagement in practical activities seems highly significant to furthering personal commitment to change. Theory surrounding this suggests that human freedom is recovered by reclaiming the potential of being as act. Action reminds us of our innate potential for choice and making real the things we value. In acting for Transition, people may find increased agency and self-determination. Furthermore, where action is socialised or collaborative, the sense of connection and responsibility to others encourages it to continue. It can ease commitment to change and stimulate intrinsic cultural values that transcend self-interest. This may be particularly important to young people where participation in personal and collective action may be critical to liberating
identity from systematised corporate influences. Other conversations have highlighted that Transition may need to significantly deepen its reach through other language forms in the arts, design, literature, music and performance to present it as visual as well as social culture. There is potential for applying Transition philosophy to serious creative output publicly. In the same way that permaculture relates as much to people as it does to land, Transition is as much about communication as it is about practice. Given time and critical effort it has the capacity to reshape our narrative ecology and provide new space for human authenticity amid the milieu of marketing and media noise. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut in Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Chris Thornton is a lecturer in Communication Design and a PhD candidate with the Zero Waste SA Research Centre for Sustainable Design and Behaviour at the University of South Australia.
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