Zone5

At the weekend I attended the Cool Earth Fair in Dun Laoghaire, part of the Festival Of World Cultures, organised by Cultivate and the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Environment Department, giving a couple of short talks on Peak Oil, and then Permaculture Gardening,

Left to Right: Gavin Hart (seated) Trevor Sargent, Graham Strouts, David Strahan

and participated on a panel discussion on Reducing Food Miles and Carbon Footprints, with David Strahan, journalist and author of The last oil Shock, and the Green Party’s Trevor Sargent, Minister for Food and Horticulture.

Trevor Sargent spoke about the importance of growing local food and the dangers of relying on imported food and from the very few large-scale Irish growers- just 5 carrot growers in the whole country supply the entire supermarket sector, for example. He didnt mince his words and I was impressed by his willingness to emphasize the possibility of starvation in Ireland after Peak Oil.

This is something Ive been thinking about a lot of course, but not something I would immediately bring into a discussion on food miles quite so enthusiastically. Sargent is a keen gardener himself and passed me a slim volume on organic gardening he was carrying around as soon as he sat down. He told us that next year is apparently the Year of the Potato and invoked the Dig for Victory campaign to support home gardening in the war: Tuber Uber Alles.

I offered a permaculture view, that house designs should be required with the “Zone 1″ home garden included as an integral feature of the building, to facilitate food production, with features such as a glasshouse ort conservatory with vegetable and salad beds built onto the kitchen, climbing supports on the sunny walls outside and vegetable beds right outside the door. Houses should also be required to have cold strores or cellars, drying and canning facilities, and other features to help make home food production part of daily life. This would go beyond merely having “energy ratings” on houses depending on how well insulated they are etc.. Since for many in the Western world food accounts for the largest share of energy consumption, we badly need to “join the dots” and look for integrative design solutions.

We also discussed allotments and community gardens; local over organic; and the issue of the competition for land between food and energy crops. I suggested that biofuels might play an important role but that they should not be just sold on the open market as a supplement for general motoring, but be “recycled” back into the agricultural sector for running farm machinery. This would require the calculation of how much land would need to be set aside to fuel the tractors of that farm which would be a very important step in understanding the limitations of bio-fuels as well as making the link between local resources and energy.

Other speakers over the weekend included Iva Pocock and Davie Philip speaking on The Village; Anja Murray of An Taisce on Biodiversity and Climate Change; Overcoming congestion with Richard Douthwaite; Climate Change and the Environment by Minister John Gormley; Food and Sustainability with Jack O’Sullivan; Deconstructing Dinner with David Korowicz; and Will Softly of the Irish Seed Savers’ Association.

Above Left: Aine and Hillary at the Irish Seed Savers’ stall; Right: part of their display.

Cultivate had assembled a great array of stalls from many environmental groups and some great displays on Peak Oil and Climate change, including a Carbon Confession Box.

David Strahan gave me a lengthy and fascinating interview which i will post here once I have transcribed it.