David Holmgren speaks with GPM’s Julian Darley (transcript)

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  • Growing your own food as a political act | David Holmgren
    http://old.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/487

    Growing your own food is a political act because it contasts with the way most people get their food which is through huge food supply chains that basically involve earth destroying practices. Especially when we’re talking about perishable food: Fresh fruit and vegetables, small livestock products like eggs, and meat from chickens. This type of food uses far more embodied energy through pesticides, through fertilizers and transport miles (transport miles often in refridgerated trucks), much higher wastage because of the perishable nature. The requirements for cosmetically perfect food means there’s huge wastage. So this end of the food production system compared with the production of staple grains which people are less likely to grow in gardens. So recognising that that perishable food is enormously destructive in the way it’s produced, when we grow it in the garden we bypass virtually all of those systems. And at the same time we are becoming, to a degree, autonomous. And political independence and the ability to engage in society in a lot of ways is to do with from what position of autonomy do we stand. And if we stand totally dependent on a one or two or three day food supply chain we don’t really have any position of political autonomy . So I think there’s many different ways. The other way we can see it is that a lot of the supply of the food we can grow in the garden is also grown in ways that exploits other people. So we’re also disconnecting from systems of unjust exploitation of other people.

    #permaculture #autonomie #alimentation #agriculture #industrie #biotechnologies #hétéronomie #multinationales