Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A new course in Sweden poses the question, “what will a self-sufficient Hällefors Municipality taste like in 2030?”
Students on the course act like talent scouts. They search for unrealised food-growing potential across the region – people, unused land, forgotten traditions.
This is how a future that includes me was created. This, place-based farming, is wisdom. And, I suspect that, in places like mine, this is the only path that can lead to another future millennium.
Cargonomia officially was launched in 2015. It came out of the idea: how can we connect the farm, bike messengers and a bike workshop?
To blow off a few cobwebs, I decided to spend a couple of days hiking a part of the Ridgeway, which has been in use for around 5,000 years and is supposedly Britain’s oldest road.
In the countryside, one lives on the means of production, making food and energy sovereignty that much easier to achieve.
Despite the warning signs — climate change, biodiversity loss, depleted soils and a shrinking supply of cheap energy — we continue to push along with an economy fueled by perpetual growth on a finite planet.We’ll need to reckon with this discrepancy.
Our increasing disconnection from our rural origins represents an increasing disconnection from ourselves, compromising our ability to flourish. Perhaps it’s time to rethink our disconnect with food and bridge that great divide.
Years of research in rural communities have convinced Ashwood–and she makes a convincing case–that the greatest enemy of rural America is what she calls “for-profit democracy.”
Truly, this isn’t much on which to build an optimistic view of the current rural-urban divide. Yet as I mentioned in my piece A Great Divide, the hard work of dialog will be left to us — town and country, middle America and the coasts — to create anew a language of respect and understanding.
Don’t get me wrong, there are rural investments and there are rural initiatives, but they tend to be sectoral – you can run a project for older people or younger people or business people or just about any other ‘people’ you care to mention. But it’s a hard sell to persuade those holding the purse strings that rural areas deserve an integrated, holistic approach, an approach based on geographies rather than targeted bits of the population. This piecemeal approach to rural development gradually undermines the sustainability of rural geographies and chips away at our understanding of geographical identity and belonging. As a result of this, power and money and skills and resources have haemorrhaged away from rural communities over the decades, to be only partly replaced by the energies and aesthetic of a legion of culturally creative incomers.
