Alastair, Chris, Ian, Michael and Stephen write:
Is local food sustainable? The team task carried out by this years students on the MA Sustainable Development Advocacy course was an assessment of the barriers to local food consumption in the Malvern Hills area of Worcestershire.

We investigated the local supply chain in terms of sheep/lamb production as a salient aspect of agriculture in the Malvern Hills. From this research we identified a range of factors that are currently constraining local food production and consumption. There were some indicators of positive change on this issue.

One of the main findings was that current inertia in localised supply chains has economic and social causes in both local and global contexts. These factors are overlaid by a complex set of issues concerning the true sustainability of local food and the systems which support food production and its by-products – resulting in the conclusion that local is not necessarily sustainable. The key to increasing sustainable local food consumption appears to be rooted in community and business engagement with re-emerging local supply chains. This can build a resilient local food supply chain and related communication forum that can sift the environmental, social and economic sustainability of food and land use bolstered by local social support.

Local food is a growing agenda across the UK but its sustainability cannot be assumed. Developing local food networks and the environmental legitimacy of such activity requires a constant eye on the resulting ecological footprint both locally and globally, and the concurrent development of community social capacity for local sustainable food.

The members of this years team task ‘The Long Shadow of the Sheep’ were: Ian Harris, Michael Hancock, Chris Leck, Steven Walters and Alastair McGowan. For a copy of our report or to discuss with the team please contact alastair@advocatingchange.org.uk

Some key readings are:
Firm Foundations (2004)
Louisville Foodshed Project (2009)
Making Local Food Work (2009)
On the Commons (2009)
Policy Commission (2002) Farming and Food: A Sustainable Future, Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food, Cabinet Office, London
Soil Association (2000) Local Food Routes: A Summary Report of Food Futures, Soil Association, Bristol
Steinfeld, H., Gerber, P., Wassenaar, T., Castel, V., Rosales, M. and De Haan, C. (2006) Livestocks long shadow: environmental issues and options, Food & Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, Rome.
Sustainable Communities Act (2007)
UNCED (1992) United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, 3-14 June 1992

Stephen has suggested this event:

“Low Impact Living: Consumption Beyond Consumerism”

(or, with reference to Gil Scott-Heron, “The Eco Revolution will not be Gadgetised”)

Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th June 2009
Karuna, Picklescott, Church Stretton, Shropshire SY6 6NT
 
A weekend of camping, discussions, workshops and contemplating change
Cost: £20 weekend or £10 per day / donations

The focus of the weekend is on the impact of modern lifestyles, and the need to change human lifestyles to address climate change or resource depletion rather than trying to adopt “gadgets” (such as green consumerism or sustainable consumption) to “solve” these problems technologically.
 
Paul Mobbs will present his new project, ‘Consumption Beyond Consumerism’. This looks at the recent science and research behind the impact of human lifestyles, through effects such as climate change, and explains why addressing the human impact on the environment requires that we create a new concept of our “lifestyle” — as a active, participative system that integrates our needs with the means to provide them — rather than just being just mechanistic’ consumers. This transition isn’t based on “hardware” — gadgets and other ‘things’ that we buy — but rather on “software” — developing our own personal, or group, skills and abilities in order to support our needs. By taking our lifestyles “apart”, and examining where the demands and impacts lie, we can work to change our lifestyles — our work, home and activities — to operate more ecologically. To meet the problems of peak energy, resource depletion and climate change our future existence is about becoming thinking, active human beings rather than inert consumers.  

There’s no rigid programme to the weekend (other than Paul and Larch will do their sessions on Saturday afternoon/early evening). From early Saturday afternoon to late Sunday afternoon we’ll throw ideas around then adapt them to meet the needs of those present. Hosts Janta and Merav Wheelhouse  will give a short presentation about their work and developments at Karuna, an inspiring exemplary  Permaculture site for Low impact living in Shropshire.
The aim is to leave the weekend pretty open, that way we can work on the expectations of those attending rather than the expectations of those presenting.
 
Please bring enthusiasm , food to share (no flesh please!) and acoustic musical instruments to play around an Open fire in the evening.

“We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of Government,nor are we for this party nor against the other but we are for justice and mercy and truth and peace and true freedom,that these may be exalted in our nation, and that goodness,righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace and unity with God, and with one another, that these things may abound.”
(Edward Burroughs, 1659 - from ‘Quaker Faith and Practice’)

Alastair McGowan writes:

One of the major issues in sustainability is how we can live in the countryside with less dependency on transport and other economies that city life brings.

BBC Radio Four dealt with the issue this week in the Open Country series, focusing on Canon Frome Court in Herefordshire where a number of families are already living more sustainably. This means not only producing their own food but creating a sense of community and interdependency among the families who live in the 20 or so flats at the Georgian mansion surrounded by 40 acres of beautiful and productive farmland.

Canon Frome is a microcosm of the wider world, but here solving social questions in order to maintain a stable and equitable community has an immediacy both in terms of problems and their solutions. The closing comments by our own Margaret Robbins illustrate how Canon Frome is helping to address fundamental questions about the way we live:

Canon Frome “…is such a change from the established order of things – a hierarchy, and what we are trying to do in the court is really to live a very level sort of life with no one being boss or lord of the manor, or whatever. You know I think it’s just interesting over a hundred years to see a change from this sort of life and lifestyle [the baronial manor] to what we are attempting to do now…a herald of things to come, the way in which we can use the countryside in a much more egalitarian way”

Alastair McGowan writes:

I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process. The applied theories of politics, economics and industry have made a sick society; it is time for new approaches. We live in the post-industrial world, and have an immense amount of sophisticated information and technology which enables us to exchange information while living in a village situation.   Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture (1991)

If you look around right now you may get the impression that the time for change is imminent, that converging factors of climate change, financial instability, social instability, war, peak oil, and zeitgeist are begging for real change to begin and that world leaders are stepping up to the challenge. An alternative view is that change already started, decades ago or more, and that current turmoils are bound up in that change. The global restructuring looks like its just getting under way but only from the standpoint of institutions and centralised organisation - the real change has been happening since the early days of the information age.

When we look at the human organised world we tend to see it the way it is presented through the lense of our culture: Most human societies are presented as being organised in centralised ways around institutions and group norms, in terms of objective (abstracted) standards, in pursuit of quality and speed of decision-making, in the belief that some are better at governing us, some are better at teaching us, that some are better at this or that aspect of keeping our world turning – standards are good. Through this culture, our governance and our habits are constrained, certainly in terms of the way the mass of society converges around common principles. But this constraint is as much in our minds as it is a reality – the world continues to turn regardless. Liberal culture began to disturb the foundations of the monoculture significantly during the twentieth century.

Liberal culture may have been one factor in social change but another critical factor was mass communication. Alexander Graham Bell started it and the World Wide Web lead a quantum leap in the way we telecommunicate. The ongoing reorganisation of society which has been accelerated by the web, the fragmentation of (rigid and limiting) institutions and centralised norms of behaviour as its core, is seen by some as yet another crisis on the horizon. But to others this is a new age of creative possibility. The norms and averages, the classes and trends, standards and winners, of an institutionalised society are giving way to a diverse culture created from the bottom up. It is communication technology that is weaving its way around the foundations of a top-down centralised society and beginning to strangle the constant increase in power that a sustained hierarchy must feed on. And there is no way back other than through repression, and thankfully we left that behind a long time ago.

Self-organising communities, distributed communities of people and their minds, in nature’s own image - Capra’s Web of Life, the real forces of cultural change, do not operate as classically formed institutions. Self-organising communities, communities of rich ecology, reflect life in its uncertainty - there are no rules or norms but the fundamental need for equilibrium and permanence of culture. Conversely, the classical culture of institutions is based on the idea of norms and acceptance of Kantian ideas about ‘natural class’, an abstraction and poor representation of equilibrium, often anything but equium or librium. In our social and family lives we have always practised the self-organising, informal way of finding equilibrium. Now it is the turn of public life to submit to the flat structures demanded by peer-to-peer communications, to build a rich human ecology unconstrained by concepts of norms and standards and power hierarchies, no limits to creativity and difference, no limits to the potential for change and hence the strength of human ecology.

The short and homogenous tail of the Greeks’, Kant’s and Gauss’s ideas about the way the world works is giving way to an ecological way of thinking (see Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, and Makridakis et al Dance with Chance). Self-organising networks and communities of people are nurturing human culture back to its potential of rich diversity and creativity in balance with the earth’s life processes. The ecological and creative thinkers, the non-normalists, the unclassifiable, have been excluded from the filters of our narrowly homogenous institutions and the power structures which perpetuate them but the new framework of the internet is now allowing their creative solutions to flourish beyond the control of centralised concepts of authority and standards. Creative minds hook-up and instantly they have the competitive edge over-and-under fixed institutions - self-organising communities spell the end of centralised hierarchical thinking.

Clay Shirky argues that current economic trends are partly related to this ongoing shift as the information age truly takes over from the industrial age (mass centralised organisations of production). The information age, in terms of peer-to-peer organising possibilities (e.g. social networking, collaborative tools, open source problem solving) is subverting existing social power structures and forcing them to contract. This happens whenever a form of industrial organisation is replaced with a new method.

When the motor car and oil-based production were in the ascendant the old social structures were forced to restructure and this caused economic turmoil. We are now in a similar situation as information and communication technology is beginning to support new ways of non-industrial economic organisation - the power of the individual is starting to overgrow institutional rigidity and causing them to contract. The grass-roots rhizome promised by ideas of democracy is now empowered by communication technology, it is spreading scale-free, it is putting pressure on representative forms of democracy to perform better at their representation, and is bleeding over into our economic world in ways that were never intended. It is a brave new world of opportunity for the creative thinkers of the long tail and an unsettling future for those who based their world on social norms and standards promoted by institutional hierarchy and classical thinking.

In terms of the Bill Mollison quote above there is everything to be sanguine about in these changes - the potential for a relocalised world in the context of peer-to-peer global communication means that power will continue to trickle from centralised and globalised processes back to the minds, places and activities that are best fitted for their environments. We are in the heart of an ongoing revolution of human reorganisation that institutions will inevitably try to keep up with as they go through their ‘global restructuring’ - but they will be the last to realise the facts of life long after the power of self-organisation has reasserted itself on human society.