Across the world there is growing concern about how we can ensure greater levels of protection of the natural environment, and at the same time move human society towards more sustainable way of living that is more in keeping with available planetary resources. This concern is being demonstrated through new demands being placed on business, services and communities to ensure that they adopt a benign if not positive environmental footprint. It represents an immense educational challenge, to learn how to move our habits of consumption and waste into a new era, where our activities are much more harmonious with the natural world upon which we depend.
The responsibility to achieve this transition does not just lie with governments, corporations and public bodies. It can also be applied to each of us, to begin to change how we live through the choices that we make in our daily lives.
The Incredible Edible project is a community food growing programme which explores this challenge in innovative and imaginative ways. Based in Todmorden, the border country of the Pennines where Yorkshire meets Lancashire in the UK, the programme is rapidly expanding across both rural and urban communities as they use the basic ideas of our programme to demonstrate publicly how we share a common interest in sustainable living. In Incredible Edible we begin with the simplest of starting points, growing food.
Growing food serves as a practical and literal metaphor for naturally focused sustainable development. The Incredible Edible project brings people together to plant food in all sorts of different places, ranging from back yards, to community land, to the creation of edible schoolyards and using redundant land owned by the council. Our programme is action-oriented – we do lots of planting, seasonal and perennial, it is non-judgmental and inclusive – anyone can get involved and as long as there is a sustainable living component to their plans we try our best to support it, we believe that everyone can be part of the sustainable community solution and that everyone can bring ideas to the table.
At present we focus our efforts on the connections that food can bring between community, business and learning because there is simply such a great web of connections to deepen and establish. It is through our recognition of the importance of connecting these different dimensions of sustainable living within a local environment that we are rethinking the whole way we go about reform and regeneration of community, recognizing that sustainability is as much a cultural challenge as it is a technical response to a changing environmental setting.
An example of this programme in action is the community interest company, set up by Incredible Edible in partnership with the local high school and the council. This part of the programme has taken over a section of the high school grounds to establish a sustainable community food hub. The new site, funded by the lottery fund will include a hydroponic fish and vegetable farm and goes live in January 2011. The food hub will provide an education base for sustainable growing for the community, it will generate new jobs for young people, and host a community café that will offer courses in preparing and cooking food.
The programme has won a number of awards including the Breakthrough to the 21st Century award from the Sustainable Development Commission. As part of our current work we are engaged in outreach to many different groups across the UK and beyond, our website www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk has more than 1500 hits per day from around the world.
We have learnt, in a very short time, that growing food can serve as a starting point for community regeneration and aspiration, our goal is to design and develop activity that can exemplify a community that is built around a low carbon, renewable energy, and sustainable jobs culture to ensure healthy people and healthy ecosystems. This is a way of knowing that embraces natural abundance, human ingenuity and positive aspirations and actions for a healthy environment.
We connect with a global network of micro-communities of learning (education, health, built environment and enterprise) that are exploring similar concepts in their own settings and we use this creative abundance of knowledge as an energy for transforming the present and changing the future to add value to the natural ecosystem.
We work, in the Incredible Edible project to grow a form of community that will purify the air, water and soil, retain valuable materials for perpetual, productive use, and enhance nature’s capacity to thrive, grow healthily, create a meaningful form of wealth and create useful resources, generate value and opportunity for all. All this is starting to happen from the simplest of things, planting a seed, weed it and reap…just imagine…
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