 |
 |
|
|||
|
Home
| 5th
July 1996
| Issue 80 SchNEWS Special Report: Forest Gardening WHAT YOU LOOKIN' AT?Granada local TV news have a weekly 'crime watch' spot. This week it came live from the Police and Security Expo at the G-Mex exhibition centre; where we were informed the police forces of the nation and some 'overseas' visitors were inspecting the latest tools in the fight against crime. We were told that they included everything from CCTV equipment to Virtual Reality shooting ranges. Sadly, the Expo wasn't open to the public. Had it been, the good people of Manchester (still a bit nervous of things that go bang) would have been in for a bit of a shock. The TV presenter had failed to mention the following items pedalled by exhibitors at the Expo: riot control grenade launchers; leg cuffs; Howitzer laser rangefinders; PARALYSER tear gas; computerised battle management systems; armoured vehicles; pump-action shotguns capable of firing grenades, tear gas or shot shells; assorted miniature surveillance equipment; a complete 'Criminal Justice System' (?) courtesy of GEC Marconi; and best of all, a range of Masonic regalia and leatherware. The exhibitors at the Expo are a mixed bunch. Thames Valley Police are plugging 'Countrywatch', their mass surveillance operation which tracks the movements of ravers, travellers and eco-protesters. German arms manufacturers Heckler And Koch, a British Aerospace subsidiary, are selling pistols and machine guns at the Expo. Not only have H & K previously supplies arms to some of the dodgiest governments around, including Thailand and Indonesia, but are also allegedly negotiating a deal for the sale of 350,000 assault rifles to Turkey. As luck would have it, there is a delegation of visitors from Turkey at the Expo. Other wholesome entrepreneurs in town include Hiatt's, leading manufacturer of handcuffs, chains and manacles. They aren't selling leg cuffs this week because they are illegal in Britain. Instead they are selling 'Deluxe' handcuffs, 15% larger than ordinary cuffs, and thereby are suitable for arms so wide that could be classified as legs. A small demonstration outside the Expo on Wednesday were told to move on under threat of arrest. A large space of unoccupied tarmac outside the G-Mex was private property, apparently, and the demo was told to move onto the pavement 20 yards from the entrance. Later that afternoon Tim, an activist from Manchester Campaign Against The Arms Trade, blagged his way in with a local radio reporter. A brief stop at the Heckler and Koch stall ("sorry, we don't know anything about that") was followed by an aborted visit to Hiatt's. The security manager of G-Mex recognised him from the morning demo and told him "I'd kick your fucking head in" before throwing Tim and the reporter out of the building. The Expo raises some terrifying issues. It is organised by ACPO, the top brass coppers. Presumably they are unconcerned by the overlap between the arms trade, the private security industry and public policing. How many of the advances in high tech policing are brought about by manufacturers flogging their wares regardless of issues of civil rights or basic morality? But, most worrying of all, was the signing off line from the Granada News reporter. "And perhaps we shall be seeing some of these gadgets helping in the war against crime on the streets of our cities." Street spy cameras are the most obvious sign of the surveillance web enmeshing Britain. Simon Davies, of Privacy International, reckons that the awareness of privacy invasion is at the same level now that the environmental movement was twenty years ago. SchNEWS doesn't want to scare you, but.... More than a million people in the UK are employed full-time in the business of collecting our personal information. The average British adult is identified on 200 files. In ten years:* The DVLA and the police will have constructed a database containing the digitised face prints of most of the population. How? The new photo drivers' licences and benefit claimants ID cards will be digital. * Most public areas will be under the gaze of high-tech surveillance cameras. The images will be routinely matched with digitised facial images stored in police computers. * The two smart cards you use several times a day will act as a real-time tracking mechanism, following your movements and monitoring your transactions with banks, retailers, petrol stations and toll gates. * All government computer systems will have been linked through a national data matching scheme that commenced in 1992. An offence committed against one government agency (eg Social Security) will cause a domino effect that disturbs - or even suspends - your relationship with other government agencies. "The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state"- Lord Browne Wilkinson. * In Australia a plan to install video cameras at motorway intersections was greeting with demonstrations. In China, pro-democracy students who marched on Tianaman Square disabled the city's surveillance cameras before taking to the streets. In California, cameras have been placed in bullet-proof casings because people are shooting at them. * Baltimore prison officials are using supermarket style bar codes to process inmates, thus reducing the processing time of inmates. * Wanna find out more? Read SIMON DAVIES - BIG BROTHER - Britain's web of surveillance and the new technological order. Published by Pan £9.99 OPEN CAST HORRORMore action in South Wales where Celtic Energy want to lay waste to 880 acres of woodland and meadows at Selar Farm, Cymru and turn it into an open cast mine site. This will be visible from the moon! Workers are moving the slag heap from one side of the site to another. Only six protestors are there, and no security or police are present. Workers told the activists "We'll kick the shit out of you if you stop us from working". A Special Site of Scientific Interest water meadow that was 'relocated' last year (once home of the rare Marsh Fritillary butterfly) was filled in last week, in an admission of failure. Help! Call: 01685 873993.
|
|||||
FOREST GARDENING: a growing movement
Sometimes the world seems such a mad place, fighting against all the odds you can feel like burying your head in the sand. But solutions to the world's problems do exist and can be put into practice now. While SchNEWS might at times seem all doom and gloom, we thought it was time to report on one aspect of our lives where we can still have some control ... and if we are to stick two fingers up to our money-obsessed society, then surely we should be putting in place our visions of the future.
"We all have the forest in our blood. Deep down in the subconscious of each one of us race dim memories of a time when our ancestors were dependent on the wildwood and its inhabitants for the essentials of life - food, shelter, clothing and the soul food of beauty. Millions of people, when they can, seek solace in woodland areas away from the discords, artificiality, pollution and sheer ugliness of the urban environment. But, tragically, the numbers of such areas are declining throughout the world as civilisation, in its destructive march, fells more and more trees for motorways, airfields, housing and industrial estates, cornfields and cattle pastures, while exploiting the trees for timber and pulp. Such devastation, promoting the greenhouse effect and other severe environmental problems, threatens the very survival of humanity. Is there anything that we, the ordinary people, can do to reverse this suicidal trend?"
Robert Hart, pioneer of Forest Gardening
The forests of the world are fast disappearing. In 'The End of Evolution', leading world ecologist Norman Myers tells us "If present rates of destruction continue tropical forests have at most a decade of life left." Forests not only produce oxygen, increase rainfall, provide shelter for wildlife & prevent soil erosion; they can also provide us with all (or most) of our basic needs - foods, drinks, medicines, fibres, fuels, building materials etc. So why not reforest the Earth, while producing useful resources at the same time?
FOREST
GARDENING
A forest garden is a tiny imitation of a natural forest designed to achieve the utmost economy of space and labour. Like a natural woodland it has three layers of vegetation: trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. Once established it requires minimal work and provides fruit, nuts, salads, herbs and other useful plants and fungi.
Many gardens contain the same thing as a forest garden, but usually each is grown separately as a orchard, soft fruit area, vegetable patch and herb bed. What distinguishes a forest garden is that all are grown together on the same piece of ground, one above the other. This makes much better use of available resources because more niches are filled. So the potential yield is clearly much greater.
A forest garden will almost certainly yield less top fruit than a simple orchard, less berries than a pure stand of soft fruit bushes, and less vegetables than a simple vegetable garden. But it will produce more in total than one of the single layer plantings.
"From a town patio to a large rural area, it's our chance to restore some balance to the Earth and restore our relationship with nature."
"Make medicine your food, and food your medicine."
There are three main products from a forest garden: fruit, nuts and leafy vegetables.
Shop-bought fruit may look brilliant, but that visual perfection is a sure sign that it has been sprayed over and over again to prevent the slightest blemish. A typical commercial orchard may have been sprayed 15 times or more during the growing season, including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides, and the fruit itself sprayed again in storage. Much of this spraying is purely cosmetic and has nothing to do with increasing yield.
The fruit we buy in shops is almost all imported. Even the apples and pears that used to be grown in Britain are now mostly from overseas. By the time the fruit gets to us what vitality it ever had in its chemically cultured orchard is largely gone. In the past anything that was edible and green, cultivated or wild, was liable to be included in salads. John Evelyn, writing in 1699 listed 73 plants that were commonly eaten raw in his day and added that many more could have been included. The level of diversity sounds remarkable. But it is our simplified twentieth-century diet which is unusual.
Wild plants are on average much higher in protein, vitamins and minerals than conventional vegetables. They may also contain a variety of organic substances which are good for our health in ways which present-day nutritional science is not aware of. Most of the produce of a forest garden, whether fruits nuts or salads, can be eaten raw. Most of us would probably benefit from having a higher proportion of raw food in our diets.
SOD WIMBLEDON - HERE'S THE TOP SEEDS! |
THE EASY LIFE
According to Michael Guerra, his 10m x 4m garden in Herfordshire produces the annual equivalent of 15 tonnes of veg per acre - that's more productive than a field of wheat.Another reason for forest gardening is that once established it does not take much work:
"We are so used to the idea of ploughing or digging every piece of land on which we hope to grow some food that we think of it as the norm for productive land. But it never was the norm till we humans invented agriculture, and that, on the timescale of evolution, was an instant ago."
Food is one thing that we cannot do without, and one which many of us have some opportunity to produce for ourselves. We don't need to aim for total self-sufficiency, but every bit we grow means that much less passing through the destructive process of industrialised food production.
If you decide to grow your own be careful not to mimic the farming techniques that are so destructive. Patches of weeds? Before digging them up why not try to identify them to see if you can eat them or use them medicinally?
Gardening takes a lot of patience, knowledge and work. If you've never grown anything before why not get an allotment with a couple of friends? You'd probably be surprised how little allotments cost to rent (for example £9 a year in Brighton if your unemployed, £18 if you're working) Get in touch with your local Council to see what's available. And don't try and be too clever - just start with a few easy crops at first....
GLOBAL BENEFITS
Possibly the greatest single ecological problem we face is climate change caused by the greenhouse effect. This is no longer a threat but a reality; it has already started to disrupt world weather patterns. As it intensifies, not only will many species become extinct, but much of the worlds food producing capacity will be lost, as many present agricultural areas will become semi-desert. Growing new trees is one way to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
JUST DO IT...
* Recommended reading
'How To Make A Forest Garden' by Patrick Whitefield
* 'Forest Gardening'
by Robert Hart (Green Books)
* 'The Permaculture Plot' edited by Simon Pratt. Guide to
permaculture/forest garden sites open to visitors in this country.
* 'The Salad
Garden' by Joy Larkcom (Windward) mouth-watering encyclopaedia
of salad plants, herbs, edible flowers, wild plants how to grow
+ prepare them..
* Permaculture
Magazine £l excellent source of news + views + helpful tips,
available from Permanent Publications. For example, did you know
that beansprouts are the most vitamin and mineral -packed salad
vegetables you can eat, and that they can easily be grown at home?
See issue 9 for more details!
For a full list of relevant publications send a SAE to Permanent Publications, Hyden House, Little Hyden Lane, Clanfield, Hampshire, PO8 0RU (01705)59650.
Email permaculture@gn.apc.org (they've also got info for people who live in benders, trailers and trucks who don't stick around in places long enough for trees to bear fruit...)
If you live in the Brighton area
* Re-evolution are
a workers co-op developing a model sustainable community farm at
a 1.5 acre site at Moulescoomb Estate allotments off Natal Rd. Get
involved 01273 388673
* Justice? have
3 allotments practising forest gardening (when we can afford the
trees) open to everyone. Workdays Mondays 11 am onwards. Ring 01273
685913 for directions...
"Our patterns of consumption, transport and waste disposal all have direct and indirect impacts on wild plants and animals. In fact the need to create nature reserves is an admission that we have failed to keep the rest the land in a health condition, or our own appetites for material goods at a reasonable level."
Did you know there are more than 20,000 known species of edible plants in the world and yet fewer than 20 species of plants now supply about 90% of our food? As a result of this impoverishment we now have huge areas of land devoted to single crops and an increasing dependence upon chemical fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. With this comes the constant threat of new diseases or of chemical resistant insects evolving that could wreak havoc in such large areas of single crops.
PLANTS
FOR A FUTURE
Plants For A Future (PFAF) are a group of people based near Lostwithiel in Cornwall. SchNEWS and Conscious Cinema crew went to stay for a few days to check out what they were up to. Set up in 1989 in Cornwall by former London Bus driver Ken Fern. He told us: "I'd been growing traditional veg for a couple of years and found out what hard work it was. I was growing about an acre - it just tires you out. I was doing a full time job and trying to grow all this by hand - I thought there's got to be an easier way, then I came across a book by Robert Hart and James Sholto Douglas... so I started doing research on useful plants. We found over 6,000 useful species and we wanted to make those available to other people. So we decided to buy this land down here in Cornwall and start up PFAF".
The majority of plants grown are perennial - that is they will grow year after year, without the constant work of seed sowing, weeding, weeding and more weeding. It also means they will be a lot more resistant to the dreaded slug. They're currently growing 1,500 plants on the land. Aside from food some can supply medicines, oils, fibre, dyes, soap etc.
When we visited, the site was looking lush, but we were told it wasn't always so. "Six years ago it was a virtual ecodesert - there was no life soil in the soil, virtually no worms, no butterflies, bees or birds. Look at it now" said Phil. It was hard to imagine that just a few years previous it had been so barren. The previous farmer had tipped up all hedgerows that had made 13 small strips in order to make it more 'efficient' for ploughing. The result was disaster. In the first year after the hedges were removed, heavy rains washed hundreds of tons of soil and newly planted potatoes down the slope, flooding a nearby house, with some potatoes ending up in the stream half a mile away! Since then 20,000 trees have been planted, over half native trees that will give wind protection, halt soil erosion and create excellent wildlife habitats. The rest are traditional fruit crops such as apples and gooseberries plus 10 acres with other less well known hardy trees that will provide edible fruits, seeds, leaves etc.
Dawn emphasised that it wasn't just about setting up a little vegan community and saying 'we're alright jack.' "It's not about us being insular and living an idealistic lifestyle, its about promoting this lifestyle and saying that this is the way forward and saying that the farming that's used today is not sustainable at all - it's just taking and not giving back - this is about putting back in and re-establishing the wildlife. It gives me a lot of hope."
And of the future?
"I think the world is in a complete mess right now, but I don't think it's terminally injured. I think there's still hope - if people will adopt a low impact lifestyle, if people will take more responsibility for their own lives ... I think there are other possibilities, I think we offer one of those possibilities."
For copies of the Plants For A Future catalogue send a couple of stamps and SAE to The Field, Penpol, Lostwithiel, Cornwall, PL22 0NG (01208) 873554/872963
SchNEWS, PO Box 2600, Brighton, BN2 0EF, England
Phone: +44 (0)1273 685913
email: schnews@brighton.co.uk
@nti copyright - information for action - copy and distribute!