freedom ahead

Six weeks in, and my Year of Buying Nothing New is going pretty well. Some things, like white paper, have been hard to source. Freegle this week yielded two bird feeders, and chicken wire for the allotment. I’ve been borrowing and lending a lot more things like books, and giving away quite a lot of stuff including my own produce and preserves. I’m buying the seeds we need this year, though – aiming to save a lot more next year. My Saturday Guardian has mainly been sourced from the Ellie where I have started to lurk, beer in hand, towards closing time.  Generally, though, I lack for very little.

Being in my early 50s, I find that I already have enough ‘stuff’ and clothes, probably, for a lifetime if carefully looked after and mended. But age isn’t the only factor: buying second-hand and making do with less seems to come naturally my 22-year old daughter and many of the younger people in our 36-strong Facebook group. Perhaps it’s because they have less money and are also more canny and more aware of the problems of the throw away culture.

I can sense that some of my contemporaries are uncomfortable with this little experiment and project on to me that it’s an exercise in righteous self-denial and even self-punishment. Far from it. As anyone who has experienced fasting or conscious simplicity knows, there can be an increase in connection, joy and freedom.

Freedom Ahead is the title of a lovely new film being shown by Transition Town Lewes this Friday; see here for the trailer. It documents the lives of a growing number of people across the world who are turning to the land and a simpler life, with fewer overheads, less stress and more community and more security. As an eloquent young Indonesian says in the film, ‘Security is in seeds, not money’.

checking out from the checkout

Today I’m celebrating liberation from supermarkets. I last stepped into one of these cathedrals of consumerism three months ago, before the Lewes Octoberfeast. Far from being difficult, it’s been a great relief  - as though I’ve finally come off a toxic addiction.

Looking at a recent questionnaire about food shopping by Transition Town Lewes, it appears that I’m joining a growing band of people seeking supermarket freedom: there are at least 32 people in Lewes who buy almost all their food from our two markets and local shops. The others stated that the main barriers to supermarket freedom are convenience and price. I’m going to argue that this doesn’t have to be so.

In the spirit of enquiry, I’ve kept a note this last week of all my food spending in my little diary. The backbone of our household’s food spend is a quarterly delivery from Infinity Foods of grocery items, including pulses, grains, tins, sauces, chocolate, teas, toilet paper and cleaning products. Everything that’s not fresh gets delivered to our door, for free; being wholesale it turns out incredible cheap, apportioned weekly here:
 

£25 Infinity Foods chickpeas, lentils, oats, rice, pasta, noodles, sauces, oils, spices
£50 weekly food market (£6 bread, £8 apples and eggs, £13 meat, £8 veg, £15 cheese)
£26 Pleasant food stores (oranges, lemons, milk, butter, biscuits)
£11 Lansdown (veg sausages, yoghurt and tofu)
£4 potatoes from sack from Ashurst Organics

Backed up with plentiful greens and some frozen fruit from the allotment, this weeks’ total  food supply, for a family of four adults came to just under £120 or about £30 a week per person for a diet that’s entirely organic or biodynamic and where all the fresh stuff is local. 

I think it's so cheap compared to supermarkets because little of this food is processed or part of the industrial food chain and because I'm not temped to just buy a few extra treats.
 

It's also convenient: I shop at to the market every Friday and bike down to Lansdown every Saturday. For dairy and some treats, one of us drops in at our lovely new Pleasant Stores.
 

It’s bliss not to have to deal with supermarkets, which are designed to dupe us into spending more on things we think we need and bombard us with choice. I hate all the packaging waste and the lifestyle messaging that we are fed in a zombie-like accepting way - including the idea that Waitrose is really much better than the other supermarkets. I’m also delighted to withdrawing my support of the industrial food system with all its own fat cats and hidden costs to the earth and people.

Most importantly, people I know who are shopping this way say they like putting their positive energy and money into systems worth supporting: local farmers and shopkeepers, wholefood coops with strong ethics and a resilient food system that is fit for purpose.

Photo by Emily Faulder

bye buy

A few years ago a group of friends in San Francisco formed The Compact. Their quest was to buy nothing new for a year. Inspired by them, some of us here are inviting others to join us in A Year of Buying Nothing New. Our plan is to limit our shopping during 2012 to essential consumable items such as food, drink, vital health items and certain necessary things we can’t fix, get second hand or do without.

So yesterday I bought some stamps at the post office but  packed my parcels in old cardboard as I’ll not be buying brown paper this year for packaging. Nor will I buy a food dryer I’ve been coveting or a new pair of sandals this summer; the old ones will do. Perhaps for me the challenge will be not to buy newspapers or new books. But maybe not: there is so much you can get for free.

Call me a domestic extremist, but this kind of exploration excites me. It feels good, and like an appropriate response to our broken civilization. We all now know that our level of consumption is fast eating up our non-renewable resources, including minerals, topsoil and water. Making new things uses fossil fuels that have become so scarce that we’re turning to even dirtier means such as tar sands and fracking. And the waste creates toxic landscapes and, worst of all, CO2 which threatens runaway climate change in our time.

The Story of Stuff is a lovely little film that explains all this quite simply and why buying less – much less – is necessary. It’s pretty obvious now that our leaders, our corporations and our media are not going to encourage this behaviour – it’s almost unpatriotic to not help our economy grow. But in this time where we’re having to choose between economic growth and life on earth, I know where I’ll be placing my vote.

Perhaps the most persuasive reason to live with less stuff is that we’re heading in that direction anyway. It may be better to ride the crest of a wave of change than be sucked under it.

this land is your land

I heard on the grapevine that the North Street area of Lewes has been sold to a foreign buyer (subject to contract). Its previous owner, Anglo-Irish Bank, who had loaned a ridiculous sum to Charles Style of Angel Properties to develop it, had repossessed it when Angel Properties went into admin. The Anglo-Irish Bank, which was heavily over-extended, in turn, went bust and was nationalised a couple of years ago so the land was until recently being held by the Irish government.

News of its new ownership must come as a blow to the Lewes Community Land Trust, which had created a consortium of social developers including Guinness Trust, to bid for the land. Their bid, however, was conditional and was probably underbid by an unconditional offer, which the Irish Government had been requiring.

What upsets me is that someone can simply buy a piece of land that’s essential to a town’s infrastructure, and then attempt to make money out of it, with little reference to the people who live and work there, this history, the culture, such as we saw with Charles Style’s bizarre Phoenix Quarter – brilliantly subdued by Lewes Matters five years ago.

At the moment, North Street is experiencing a small renaissance, with individuals and small groups of people renting the warehouses to make goods and run services. It’s probably quite a significant source of self-employment and employment in the town, precisely because there are no corporate logos to be seen, but under-valued as a result. The myth still prevails in town planning that large employers are the biggest source of revenue for a town, when the opposite is often true.  

Is the 22-acre land being landbanked as part of a wealthy foreigner’s property portfolio with the tenants in long-term uncertainty and unable to invest in infrastructure? Or will Lewes residents once again be faced with staving off someone else’s self-wealth-creating ‘vision for North St’? We shall see. I look forward to a future where once again Lewes is run by and for local people, looking after each other in the complex web of interconnectedness that creates real abundance and resilience. 

well-fed neigbours

I don’t want to scare you but I think it’s time we started to store food. It looks as though we could be in for quite big changes in the coming decade. We might be looking at the Long Emergency and we might be facing some sudden changes. These could come from one or several areas: economic, energy and climate. Most pressing is the recent news that British government is planning for the possibility of economic collapse following the now-almost-inevitable collapse of the Euro.

When change happens, we’re all better off if we see it coming. There’s nothing more conducive to panic and bad behaviour than being badly prepared. You only need to visualise the Christmas rush at Tesco or the empty shelves in the fuel strikes in 2000 to get my drift. Or, as the article above describes, banks being unable to give out money and destroying companies dependent on bank credit.

But you don’t need a national crisis to justify storing food. Friends of mine who are going through financial troubles say that they feel so much better knowing they have a few sacks of rice and pulses in their store cupboard. And such things were totally normally in our grandparents’ day before the just-in-time brittle corporate food chains were established.

As I see it, there are three main ways to build food resilience. The easiest is to simply build up your own stores. Aim for a couple of months’ of your usual staples at any one time, then just get used to rotating the food as you eat it.
For a decade now we’ve been ordering our bulk food from Infinity Foods, a co-op that’s cheaper and more convenient than supermarkets. They deliver free to Lewes on a Tuesday if you buy over £250-worth. We order every four months, storing the 5kg bags of rice, oatmeal and pulses, tins, oils and jars on top of our cupboards and in our basement. There’s always a bit of space somewhere to store food. I know people who group together to share orders and others who buy Infinity food from Just Trade, a brilliant Lewes-based non-profit co-op that runs a drop-off  at Lewes New School (next delivery 9 December).

Some people feel afraid at the mention of food storage, projecting out that it’s about being selfish or fear-mongering. And though it’s true that denial is a first cousin of fear, it’s best to get over that fear and be practical. The more of us who are storing food, the better. As they say, our best defence is a well-fed neighbour.

hook, line and sinker

I know I’m going to dream about fish tonight, after a day of mackerel fishing on the sea.  It feels as though my kitchen is rolling on the swell and the Easterlies that rocked our boat, the Ocean Warrior 3 all day.


We set off from Newhaven harbour at eight in the morning on what is, despite its name, a small chartered fishing boat. The skipper, Dave, took us straight out to some wrecks where he located fish on the screen in his cabin. Once anchored over a shoal, the mate, Steve, put on the tackle and bait on to our rods and off we went.

I’ve never caught a fish before but I had asked for a rod for my birthday two years ago as I wanted to develop what is a crucial skill for feeding ourselves. I’d been occasionally fishing off Seaford Head since then. Even though I’d accepted that I might not catch a fish today I was really excited when the first took my bait - a mackerel whose doleful eyes stared at me as I pulled the hook out of its mouth and threw it in the box to suffocate. Then another, and another. One of the men on board, Ron, lent me his mackerel tackle, which consists of six feathers and hooks that the mackerel seemed to love, because I immediately caught six on one line, almost as soon as I threw the line in the water.

When I caught two dabs on one hook, Steve told me I was a ‘dab hand’ at this. I was happy at that and also happy to move and roll with the boat. We all caught many fish between us. After a while, though, I stopped, though, as I felt that would easily do for my dinner, my friends and my freezer. It almost seemed unfair to the fish for the fishing, and their death, to be so easy. I felt grateful that these gorgeous grey-green dappled mackerels and the white, soft bellied whiting were giving their life for me. I said a little prayer as I put each one away and thanked them as I was gutting them back at home.

I now understand the lure of the sea, the magic of that suspended time with the wind, the waves and the fish. I hope that dreamy state will stay with me for some days yet.

blessed are the bread makers

There’s a big discussion going on in our house and it’s all about bread. It started during my week of being a locavore, eating within Sussex, when I discovered that the artisan bread sold in Lewes is made from flour from the other side of England (plus at £3-ish a loaf, it’s expensive). During that week I started making sourdough bread from locally grown and milled flour. An authentic Lewes loaf.

But my children don’t like the sourdough. The crust is too hard and they don’t like the slightly sour taste. So I got a toaster from Freecycle, hoping that would entice them. But they’re still complaining and are now asking for lunch money on a daily basis, not feeling like eating the bread on offer. Despite being hardy in terms of my own food choices, I do sympathise. So we’ll probably continue with both artisan and sourdough, at least until I manage to make an acceptable loaf.

There are now four households cooking sourdough on a regular basis in my area of Lewes. We’ve started to wonder whether we should investigate building a community oven, much like the new one at Wowo campsite, which can hold 40 loaves at a time, maybe at Lewes New School? My friend Grace and I went to the brilliant Baking Communities event at the Town Hall last night. While munching on goodies spread on bread from our four artisan bakers – Flint Own, Lighthouse, The Real Patisserie and Infinity Bakers – we started to mull it over with a baker – Michael - who also builds bread ovens and helps groups of people learn about baking. I can’t wait to get started!
 

Later in the evening Andrew Whitley, author of the bread bible, Bread Matters, and Real Bread Campaign co-founder, described his vision of 25,000 bakeries (we currently have 3,000), supplying bread through all sorts of supply chains across the country. Real bread is a far cry from the industrially grown, Chorleywood process-enhanced bread that makes up most of our loaves in the UK. And it’s hard to see how a real bread culture can take off when so many people are still so wedded (or should I say addicted) to supermarkets.
 

But as Rob Hopkins says in this fascinating article about the connections between Transition and the Occupy movement, transition is about occupying our own lives, our own communities. Reclaiming abundance, skills and relationships back from the corporate sphere is something that we can each do in tiny steps. And bread is a good place to start.

fuel for thought

I’ve spent much of the last week researching Canadian tar sands and Norman Baker’s alleged attempt to derail a flagship environmental fuel standard being set by the EU. Canadian tar sands are the second largest oil reserve – after Saudi Arabia – in the world. Allowing them to be burned will mean, according to James Hansen of Nasa,  ‘game over’ for the climate.

The research has caused me to feel thoroughly emotional and it was in that state that I went to see Norman in his Newhaven surgery last Saturday to ask him what he was up to. He spent 20 minutes with a group of us during which he confirmed the facts but was unable to explain his stance in a way that I could accept, given the MEP briefing papers I’d read. So I continued my research.

In December member nations will vote on an amendment to the Fuel Quality Directive that aims to reduce European transport greenhouse gas emissions and will effectively price tar sands, shale oil and other ‘dirty transport fuels’ out of Europe’s forecourts.

Norman, in his role as Transport Minister, initially supported the amendment as it was in line with Britain’s commitment to CO2 emissions reduction. However, intense and aggressive lobbying by the Canadian government and energy companies, as shown in this comprehensive Friends of the Earth report, has caused the government to backtrack. Now Norman is now not only blocking this important initiative but has also stated he is lobbying his equivalent Ministers of Transport across Europe in a hope to quash the vote in December.

Friends of the Earth and the Cooperative say that Norman’s volte face coincides with a visit by David Cameron to Canada, where our PM opened Canada’s fourth Trade Consulate in the offices of  Suncor Energy. Suncor’s website claims it was the first company to develop the tar sands (they call it oil sands). Norman told me when we met that he’s had no direct contact with David Cameron or the Canadian government on this issue.

Although the amendment is supported by all the Lib Dem European MPs and many others, both Norman and the Canadian energy company lobbyists say it is discriminatory. It doesn’t include other kinds of fossil fuel which, because of the energy, pollutants and environmental ravage required to get them to the pump, are deemed to be more greenhouse gas intensive. Norman’s department instead proposes a new measurement methodology. The Cooperative and other NGOs say that this ‘discrimination’ tactic is untrue: other kinds of heavy fuels such as shale oil are already included and more can be included as research is finalized. They say this new methodology proposal is a ‘wrecking’ tactic that could set the initiative back years.

I think part of my strong emotional response to this has been because I’ve fully realized that we’re not going to make a calm transition to renewable energy now that we have reached peak oil. Instead, there is a powerful, dirty lobby of energy corporations and government which, now that unconventional sources of energy are now economically viable, is gearing up for a race to the bottom in the name of energy security. Tar sands, gas shale through fracking, underground coal gasification: there is plentiful dirty fuel - Extreme Energy as some are now calling it - out there that will kill our climate many times over. We need to all wake up to this issue, just as we are waking up to the role of the bankers in wrecking our economy.

The front page of yesterday’s Independent wrote of a Cabinet split as to whether to prioritise economic recovery or the environment. And while I realise that Norman’s under enormous pressure to toe the party line, I know he’s a man of conscience and trust that he will, ultimately, do the right thing.

Photo courtesy of the Pembina Institute. More here.

oats and beans and barley grow

It’s fascinating to see what happens when you step out of your comfort zone. Eating locally from within the borders of Sussex has thrown up all manner of experiences. My kitchen has turned into a laboratory as I incubate new skills, literally new cultures. Sourdough bread and cider are two, and I made my own salt from the sea.

It’s clear that we can eat a healthy, mixed diet from within the borders of Sussex. Meat and dairy abound, as well as vegetables of all kinds both from the fertile greensand soil of the Downs and the glasshouses of Fletching and beyond. Boathouse Farm has its own potato fields, and pumpkins grow well in a good year. Apples and other fruit of course are traditional from around here. Sussex is covered with wheat fields and there are farmers who grow grains and pulses such as barley, oats and field beans for their animals, so the skills and equipment for growing all our food needs are there, in the heads and hands of Sussex farmers.

But. And it’s a big one. Our infrastructure for bringing this food from field to fork is woefully lacking. As I wrote last week, wonderful Plumpton Mill is only one of three flour mills left in Sussex, with a capacity of 50 kilos of flour an hour. Abattoirs have been closed in the last two decades by red tape, so meat is harder to manage at a small scale. Smaller farms, providing dairy, meat and veg, close through lack of customers. 

The biggest barrier of all is in our minds: the way we source our food. People have become utterly dependent for feeding on big daddy supermarkets, with their grotesque money-based way of pushing farmers, nature and all the living beings that nourish us to their limits. And sorry, but Waitrose is only better by a small degree than any other supermarket; there’s no real ethical refuge there behind the tasteful marketing.

I find myself raging about this, about the stupidity of people all around me who just want to go on with the dream – or is it a nightmare – of convenient industrial food and who at our collective peril neglect the farmers and the shop keepers, the wonderful land, sea, food and drink around us that are our true ecosystem, our resilience and our real sustenance.

  Picture by Erma Shutter

salt of the (sussex) earth

It’s day six of the Lewes locavore diet. Always one to jump in the deep end I decided to see if I could eat a normal diet just from Sussex. Since then, only food and drink from Sussex have passed my lips. I have to admit, it’s been tough. I have risen to the challenge and made my own salt; I’m starting to like its bitter taste. I miss pepper. And I’m getting physical withdrawal symptoms (headaches, aching joints) from the green tea I thought was so healthy. I can’t make salad dressings without lemons or vinegar, which as far as I can tell, is not produced in Sussex. And I simply can’t find anywhere that grows oats, which makes life rather sad, without oatcakes, porridge, muesli etc. Without imported rice and pulses, my mainly vegetarian diet has become more animal-protein based, so, lots of eggs.

When you start to break down the food you eat, you start to realize how much we depend on imported food and also preserved food, and unconsciously become part of the corporate food chain, which really doesn’t exist to feed people as much as to make money.

I managed to track down Sussex flour, though, from Plumpton Mill - restored by its owners; it was cited in the Domesday Book a thousand years ago. This water mill is a wonder to behold, one of only three now milling flour in East Sussex. It can produce 50 kilos of flour an hour; I strongly encourage people to buy this lovely flour, whose wheat is biodynamically grown at Plaw Hatch near Forest Row. Appallingly, though, despite half of Sussex seeminlgy growing wheat, it's all part of the industrial food machine: Plaw Hatch, I believe, is the only farm to grow wheat for local consumption. 

To complete the local cycle, I got some sourdough starter from my friend Grace and have made two handsome loaves of sourdough – it’s so easy. As I write I’m mentally peppering this with exclamation marks. I suppose what’s emerging from this diet is that despite the hardships, I’m also finding that eating from my terrain is terrifically exciting.

going locavore

I’ve decided to go Locavore. Just dipping my toe into the water, for the 10 days of Lewes’s Octoberfeast, starting tomorrow. This means sourcing all my food and drink from my East Sussex terrain.
Most of my diet is already based on the animals and vegetables that grow plentifully round here. Local farm shops provide lamb reared on the South Downs, biodynamic eggs, organic veggies from my allotment and several local farms, Golden Cross goats cheeses, and I can get delicious unpasteurised milk and even Sussex Downs butter in paper wrapping from the Lewes Friday market.

Starch-wise I’ve ordered a sack of Boathouse potatoes from the Ashurst veg box and I’m going to drop in on Plumpton Mill later today as I hear they mill wheat and rye grown by Plumpton College. Interestingly, a lot of the real bread we eat locally is made from wheat from Shipton Mill in the west country. I’m finding it much harder to source oats, which we eat daily in porridge, muesli and oatcakes. Dried beans, too are almost non-existant in Sussex; in the longer term that would affect the diet of the vegetarians and even more so the vegans in our family. I’m not sure one could be a vegan locavore in Sussex.
 
In terms of drink, there are several local wines, I hear, though Harveys sadly won’t be included, as the malt and most of the hops come from out of the region. I drink green tea, and will have to give that up in favour of the herb teas I’ve been collecting this summer. That’s probably my only real sacrifice.
As far as condiments grow, I’ll sadly have to do without pepper. Which would be hard long term. For now there’s horseradish ready to harvest from my allotment, dried herbs and chilis I got at last weekend’s great ChiliFest in Southease – Adrian there grows dozens of varieties in his unheated greenhouse.
 
The one and only thing I could not do without, even for a week, is salt. I’ve researched the matter and realised that there is no place in Sussex that creates its own salt. So I set off on yesterday’s Indian summer day to Bishopstone to collect 10 litres of sea water.
 
I strained the murky water through three layers of muslin before setting it on to boil on a charcoal/wood burning stove set up outside my back door.  After about five hours, the salty water was reduced right down and started to gloop and spit. I transferred it to a shallow bowl, where it’s sitting in the sun, turning into salt. It’s a bit grey, and strangely bitter. But it’s about a cup’s worth, plenty for my 10 days as a locavore.

life preserving

Boy, I’ve been working hard! I’m spending all my spare moments storing food for the winter. All the apples, pears, plums and quinces from the allotment, the runner beans, courgettes, tomatoes, onions, beetroots, and other people’s windfalls too, as well as foraged berries, are being wrapped, chopped, boiled, pickled, jammed, brewed, frozen and stored away for the winter months. Why? Perhaps because it’s been an abundant harvest, perhaps because I’ve reached a new level of competence/obsession. It’s extreme.

As I spend yet another evening with my face over splattering vats of vinegar, I often ask myself whether it’s worth it. I can pop down to the shops and buy this stuff, for not much more than it costs me. Certainly, if you build in my time, it’s not worth it at all. So what’s it about? Part of me wants to develop skills that I feel we’re going to need some time soon. Part of me is almost invoking the spirit of my pre-supermarket forebears, who had to do this to alleviate winter food boredom, and I can also feel their joy and gratitude for the food that sustains our lives. 

But mainly, increasingly, I want to preserve food for its own sake. As we live more and more from the food I grow on the allotment I can feel in advance the taste of sunshine in the autumn raspberries taken from the freezer in February. I can taste the summer echo in my tomato pickle eaten with a root stew in March. The damson jam will be brilliant on hot toast on a cold day. And of course some of it will go as presents.

Really, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Next year I’ll just have to make sure I set aside time in September to focus on preserving, just as I prioritized vegetable growing in March and April this year and bees in May and June.
Such deep pleasure, even just in anticipation! Is it possible that by simplifying we are inviting more abundance and happiness? It’s all a great mystery.

Pic by MG Montoya

finishing touches

I’m just putting the finishing touches to my permaculture diploma, which I’m presenting for accreditation this Sunday. It’s the culmination of nearly five years of work, during which I was designing and creating resilient systems in response to climate change and peak oil. When I took the introduction to permaculture course about 25 years ago, followed a few years later by a two week design course, it revolutionised me. Here was a holistic, systemic approach to life that had a brilliant ethos at its core: earth care, people care, fare share. That ethic applies even more today when the problems identified then are now threatening life on earth.

Five years ago, when I left Lewes New School, which I’d co-founded, I wanted to devote myself as a permaculturalist to the urgent issues of the day and decided to take on this self-managed learning course, which includes meeting with tutors and fellow designers. In five years I’ve helped establish Transition Town Lewes, and have been deeply involved in several of its projects, including the Lewes Pound and communications. In that time I’ve also co-started a community car club, made our house more energy resilient and also a generator of both heat and electricity. I’ve established several growing places, including my allotment, woodland and small forest garden near our house. I’ve become a natural beekeeper. And I’ve written about all this for Viva Lewes online. It’s been fun.

I’ve been able to focus on this work mainly without pay by reducing our costs –  we buy very little stuff any more – to the point that we can live on one income. For me, whether I’m paid or not, recognised or not, successful or not, it’s my path. I’m deeply grateful for permaculture as a practical way of making sense of life.

Three people are accrediting in Lewes and two in Worthing this weekend – all leaders who are helping design resilient communities. You are welcome to attend. 2 – 5.30pm this Sunday 4 September at Lewes New School. You can read my 10-module diploma here.

nature is my cathedral

I’ve been on a quest all year for silence, the natural kind. I found it on midsummer night on Mount Caburn, in a bivvy bag surrounded by rain and wind and a host of fireflies. I found it on the Isle of Wight in a hotel on the beach, waking up to the sound of waves and sea. Then I had a whole glorious week of it in a secluded, off grid, yurt in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees, with only my family and cicadas for company. We swam in the mountain rivers, we bathed in the intense heat, showered with water pumped up from the spring and cooked together in a simple outdoor kitchen overlooking a valley. Graus, the nearest town had only Spanish people in it; the sound of Spanish people chatting over a beer in the square in the coolness of the early evening is somewhat like a natural sound and it rang in my ears for some days. We visited hillside towns that had been abandoned, and some that had been squatted or reoccupied by young people starting a life on the land.

It was a little shocking to return to Barcelona to catch the wonderful and inexpensive overnight train hotel back to Paris. So many tourists visiting the Gaudi places, his work is impressive, particularly the Sagrada Familia with its architecture and decorations inspired by nature. But, personally, nature herself, especially wild nature, is my cathedral. 

I’m off to Sunrise Off Grid festival in a mo, where I will be offering a workshop on low-carbon food storage and preservation in the ‘Off-Grid College’ - a 13 module series of presentations and talks looking at various aspects of sustainable, locally resilient, low impact, off-grid living.

nutritious soup

I was reading a permaculture manual last night in which the author describes needing to put some time and effort (and muck) into a new food garden before things went ‘pop’. I laughed as I realized that this describes what has just happened in the forest garden that takes up a third of my allotment. In a permaculture design you’re advised to put 80% of the work into the design and initial structure so that you only need to put in 20% of your energy into maintaining it – unlike most systems which are the opposite. After two and a half years (and some before that by Chloe and Tilo, the previous owners of the allotment) of mulching, feeding, planting and weeding, I now have a garden that is more of a steady state, where weeding will become reduced as the perennial clovers and self sowing bee-attracting understory of phaecelia, annual clovers, borage and poached egg plant have settled in.

That ‘pop’ view of systems reminds me of my friend Mike Grenville’s talk to Transition Town Lewes last week. Change doesn’t happen slowly, incrementally along a timeline, he told us. Rather, the pressure to change builds up when an old system resists change. The more it resists, the more the pressure builds up, until it can’t resist any longer and it inevitably ‘pops’ or flips into a new state, with a period of turbulence in between. So Transition, he said, is totally different to the old environmental model of trying to persuade more and more people to change. That doesn’t work. Most people don’t want to change until they are forced to. Transition Towns are about engaging people, when they want to, to help each other create resilience in their own communities: preparing for the pop, so to speak.

He told us a story that’s apt for this time of sudden and unexpected change: The Hungry Caterpillar. When a caterpillar is nearing its transformation, it begins to consume ravenously (sounds familiar?) It becomes bloated, shedding its skin many times and, unable to move, attaches itself onto a branch, forming a chrysalis. Within the chrysalis, cells which biologists call ‘imaginal cells’ begin to appear. These are completely different to caterpillar cells. At first the caterpillar perceives these new cells as foreign and attacks them. But the imaginal cells increase, bonding and clumping, until the caterpillar’s immune system is overwhelmed. The caterpillar’s body then becomes a nutritious soup for the growth of the new butterfly.

trouble in store

I’ve started to store food. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit this, because it’s  not normal behaviour. Last year our family waterproofed our under-street coal hole, turning it into a dry, cool store for both fresh and dry food. In the autumn I stored 12 squashes from the six plants on my allotment. This year I’m growing 15 squash plants for the winter store: Uchiki Kuri, Potimarron, Turk’s Turban, Butternut, Crown Prince. They’re as exotic to eat as they sound, making golden, warming, nutty soups and pies all winter. 

But why, when you can simply feed your family for fifty quid from the supermarket? Because big change is ahead andThe World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Assessment shows that the greatest risks facing us in the coming decade are climate change, ‘extreme energy price volatility’ and fiscal crises. Some say that high food prices are here to stay. I’m not saying that we’re going to go hungry in the south east of England, but I do want to live in a world where responsibility for feeding ourselves doesn’t lie with multinationals; I want to get more food skills under my belt; and  as food prices rise and our income is vulnerable, we might just be happy to have some hearty food to hand.

So, it’s time to get resilient, no matter that the politicians, corporations and popular media would prefer us to be shopping. Over recent months I’ve deliberately created more time for growing food and learning how to preserve it. I’m growing most of our vegetables for about ten months of the year from my allotment (apart from potatoes, onions and carrots, which can be grown in fields and stored in sacks in my basement). Now, as summer brings abundance, I spend some time each day growing, harvesting, drying, pickling, fermenting, freezing and storing.

And I’m about to take another step: next time I put in my bulk order with Infinity Foods, instead of a five kilo bag, I’m going to order a whole sack each of rice (25kg for £28), chick peas (£35) and lentils (£36) – all from Europe - and I’m going to store them in our food store. I know that I’m only as resilient as my neighbours are, and I'm not planning on defending my stash. Maybe I’m mad, or a decade ahead of my time; maybe in ten years our town will have a huge food store under the castle. Who knows. But my gut is telling me to do this and it feels really good.

this is evolution

There’s talk about a change of consciousness ahead that will help us humans move to a new way of living. It seems popular to imagine that a ‘rapture’ type of experience will happen on 21 December 2012 and until then we can talk and read about it and speculate, in fear, hope, whatever. There’s a whole new age industry focusing on these transcendent ideas, and I view this as another form of escapism and denial of the real issues facing us. 

But what if a change of consciousness is already happening? I was having tea with my friend Jemma recently and she told me about a recent article stating that Ikea’s 2008 cotton harvest in Pakistan used the equivalent of the drinking water of Sweden over 176 years. Such shocking information had led her to question her use of cheap cotton products, just as watching Food Inc had led to her changing her diet to one that’s more local and healthy. Yet, she said, many of her friends had the same information but didn’t choose to do anything about it, often saying that one person couldn’t make a difference. Maybe Jemma's consciousness is changing. She reads information and she takes personal responsibility by acting on it. 

It’s not a high-faluting spiritual thing, this, but it’s based on common sense, ethical imperatives and a feeling for the collective, the whole. Perhaps we are moving to a more global, tribal mind, where it’s widely unacceptable to live in a world where 15% of the world’s population use 85% of the world’s resources, and where we see every living being on this planet as an Earthling. 

Although it can be isolating and even confusing at this time to be undergoing the consciousness shift to a global mindset, it also helps to make sense of what’s happening. As this Hopi elder says in this short video, ‘America is dying from within because they forgot the instructions for how to live on earth. It’s not negative to know there will be great changes. This is evolution.’

queen of the sun

We’re coming to the end of the lime blossom nectar flow, with the trees casting their heady scent across Lewes. With friends I’ve been gathering the flowers to dry for my winter linden teas – great for calming nerves and for heading off colds. Part of the heavenly experience of harvesting the blossoms is the intense sound of the bees that cover the trees during the short nectar flow. Lime blossom is a major food source for honeybees during a hungry gap between the spring spurt of blossom and the long-flowering brambles and ivy that they forage for winter stores.

It’s great to connect with all the bees at this time of year – their intensity seems to match the height of the sun. I can and do sit for hours watching the entrance to the beehives I keep in Lewes. Unless the weather is making them agitated, they let me sit nearby because as a natural beekeeper I don’t interfere with them – basically we see the hive as their home, as though a body – to be left undisturbed. And once a year, if there’s enough, we might take a few combs of honey, for medicine.

I’m delighted that the Linklater Pavilion is promoting the marvel of the honeybee and to see so many visitors at their recent Bee the Buzz event. But why are the bees being kept in such an artificial ‘observation hive’ with their frames laid out in two dimensions and with sugar syrup being permanently fed to them? There are more indignities I won’t go on about, because I feel strong feelings of outrage, despair and shame when I think about that hive. Surely a centre of ecology should be modelling the natural, holistic approach at all times? There are other ways of observing bees that don’t involve sacrificing them to the cold glamour of science.

In a lovely film I are hoping to show in the autumn, Queen of the Sun, biodynamic beekeepers point out that we owe our very lives to the honeybees, as they pollinate most of our food. Most ancient cultures saw bees as sacred beings, not just for the work they do for us but because, as anyone who has encountered bees on the bees’ own terms will know: they have so much to teach us.

be not afraid

Over in St John's Sub Castro’s churchyard a little area of wild is regrowing, protected from strimming. It’s where I keep my honeybees. All around them grow wild grasses, flowers and weeds, tall and lush despite the lack of rain for two months, where many other beings live: small insects, birds and mammals. At the other end of the churchyard, only daisies and lawn-level grass are allowed to grow. The few trees remaining when a dense copse was thinned a couple of years ago have now died, the soil around them dried out from the lack of shade, their leafless branches bearing witness to an act of pointless interference.

Alan Watts once wrote: ‘You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.’ This terrain, my body, is not only interconnected with but continuous with all other beings. The Lakota native Americans acknowledge this in their prayer Mitakuye Oyasin - ‘all our relations’.

I’m still struggling with feelings of outrage and grief from the dire news this week, including the announcement that the world emitted more CO2 last year than ever before. Being alive today is a challenge to my sanity and my physical health, and I know I’m not alone. Sometimes I just need to return to the wild places around Lewes, such as the rewilding church yard over the road.

As Wendell Berry writes in The Peace of Wild Things

‘When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.’

swarm catchers

Last Saturday I was working on my allotment, near my bees, and heard a loud hum. I looked up and saw a swarm of bees that quickly moved over my head towards the woods beneath Landport Bottom. I jumped on my bike and tried to follow them but they were too fast and disappeared quickly towards their destination. They were not my bees but from another colony, excitedly and purposefully creating new life.

The air is warm, the nectar flow is on and swarming season is upon us again. Perhaps because of the decline of the honeybee, we now have over a dozen new natural beekeepers in the Lewes area. They keep their hives, often home made, in gardens, allotments and on roofs. Seeing themselves as ‘bee guardians’ rather than ‘honey farmers', they work on a very different basis to conventional beekeepers. They leave most of the honey for the bees to overwinter on, they try not to open up the hive without good reason – especially taking care not to disturb the brood chamber - and allow their bees to swarm as a natural part of the cycle. As a result, swarming is on the increase, thanks to natural beekeeping, as well as from the increasing number of wild bee colonies in Lewes trees, chimneys and eaves. So swarming in May and June will become a more common occurrence.

There’s fear and projections attached to swarming bees but really they are almost always docile. For example, last year I captured with my bare hands a perfect swarm hanging low from a small tree on Talbot Terrace; the children loved watching me do that; it was a community event. Swarming is abundance itself, the honeybees’ natural way to reproduce and break disease cycles. So if you see or even hear about a swarm of bees, stop to celebrate and marvel at them, and note where they land. Then ring one of Lewes’s swarmcatchers, who will transfer the bees to one of the many Lewes people who are waiting to start keeping bees naturally. Write these numbers down: swarmcatchers Adrienne Campbell 07774793158 or Mike Millwood 07971216075

photo: Natural Beekeeping Trust