The Sayings of Abu Francis
I say, if you really want to start a revolution, grow your own food.
Growing your own food is a revolutionary act. It's declaring and manifesting your independence. It's like Gandhi making salt or American colonists growing their own tea in 1773 – far more radical than throwing British tea into Boston harbor. Permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison once called self-reliance “peaceful sedition.”
“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production,” Mollison wrote in his autobiography, Travel in Dreams. “Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”
For the past 248 years, Americans have been marching away from independence. We have become increasingly dependent on large corporations and centralized systems to meet our basic needs. To visualize our current state of utter dependency, consider this diagram (pictured below) of our food system published by Yes! Magazine in 2009. As the accompanying article stated, “It begins with small farms working with natural cycles and ends with fresh food and stronger communities in nearby cities.”
The underlying paradigm is that it's the job of farmers to feed the rest of us. Yes! envisioned that it would be more enlightened to depend on small farms powered by wind, solar and biogas energy than on fossil-fueled corporate farms – but they didn't shift the dependence paradigm.
In the middle of the diagram we have money changing hands with the hope that local markets and regional processing will get more of the cash. Then, on the far right, we the people eat at our tables with some garden goodies to garnish the meal. (The caption under the “Grow Your Own” blurb states that World War II-era Victory Gardens produced 40 percent of American vegetables.) A permaculture view would flip this flowchart upside-down.
In the Zones
In permaculture design, we find the concept of “zone analysis.” Typically applied to single-site design, zones are numbered 0-5 for the purpose of putting elements of the system in the right places for energy and time efficiency. Zone 0 is your house and Zone 5 is unmanaged “wilderness.” For example, you might want to place your compost system near the house so you don't have to truck kitchen scraps to a far corner across the property.
Revered American permaculturist Toby Hemenway applied zone analysis to the question of local food systems his final book. If you only read one section of The Permaculture City, read Chapter 5, “Strategies for Gardening in Community.” Here, Hemenway invites us to map our foodsheds. Zone 1 would be food that we grow in our own gardens. Zone 2 would be community gardens or neighbors within walking/cycling distance where you could obtain food.
Food you can buy from a farmer’s market or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) scheme falls into Zone 3. The next zone represents grocery stores or other retailers that sell locally produced food. Finally, Zone 5 includes corporate chains and big-box retailers selling food from all over the world. Hemenway advises, “Get as much of your food as possible from zones 1 to 3. The leap into a nation- or planet-sized foodshed occurs at zones 4 and 5, with industrial-processed and out-of-season foods bought at retail stores.”
Most of us find our eyes glazing over! Our food systems are completely upside-down, with very little coming from the inner zones and most of it from global, corporate sources. And most of us couldn't imagine the paradigm being turned upside-down. That's why I say growing your own food is a revolutionary act – it plunges you into a world of community-independence where most of us are too scared to live.
A Strategy for Hope
Perhaps America grew up with a kind of Second Coming Scenario in the back of our mind: no matter how bad the tribulation gets, Jesus will zoom down in the nick of time to whisk us off to a new heaven and a new earth.
I say, don’t wait for either the best- or worst-case scenario to unfold. Let’s get cracking on the new earth part. I call it a “Personal Transition Plan” and have been working on mine since 2013. Wish I’d started sooner, but better late than never. We may not survive climate change, but we don’t want to spend our last days in a high school gymnasium waiting for Jesus – or FEMA – to miraculously to save us.
Mollison actually planted the notion of a transition plan in his 1991 documentary series, “Global Gardener.” He took his camera to a small village in India where he had taught permaculture in the late 1980s. The villagers had been trapped in a cash-crop economy – just like the rest of us – in which they no longer grew their own food.
Dr. Venkat (left) with Bill Mollison during a Permaculture Design Certification course in India, 1987
Instead, they cultivated sugar cane, cotton and rubber for market, struggling to earn enough money to turn around and put food on the table.
India’s village system, purposely destroyed by the British Raj, had never been rebuilt despite Gandhi’s success in evicting the invaders. Mollison offered permaculture as a tool to design self-reliant villages, but how could Indians suddenly stop growing cash crops and switch to their own subsistence crops? (What American could quit his or her job and suddenly survive on their own garden?)
India permaculturist Dr. Venkat explained on camera that villagers in the Hyderabad region worked on a transition plan – switching 10 percent of their land from cash crop to food each year. “We told them you don’t have to stop totally what you are doing now,” Venkat said. “In the course of 5-7 years, you will transition from an unsustainable system to a sustainable system.”
Mollison’s visit after only four years showed a rocky, dusty village transformed into a lush plantation for fruits and vegetables. I call it the “Ten-Percent Solution.”
As climate change continues to be a disaster, we all need to build self-reliant local food systems and transition out of our present global, corporate, fossil fuel-driven food chain. We have the tools to turn the world upside-down, we just need the foresight to use them while we still can.
I say, if you really want to set off some fireworks, grow your own food.
What say you?