I had an interesting conversation with my daughter today. It started on the subject of CRISPR. For those who may not have come across this before, it's a fairly recent breakthrough in genetic engineering. GMO is not an area I'm particularly very confident in, but as she pointed out, the question still remains, ‘how do we feed a growing population cheaply?' With fish stocks having plummeted in the last ten years and fisheries going out of business across the world, the food crisis is really starting to hit home.
I mentioned that many permaculturists have been trying to show us that with these regenerative farming practices, like food forests, it should be entirely possible to provide enough food for the current population and more. Her reply was to query why we don't hear about it; after all, we've got Greta Thunberg as a figurehead leading the way for climate demands, why isn't there someone like that for the permaculture movement?
Well it's certainly not for want of trying. People like Geoff Lawton and Peter Andrews, with his natural sequence farming, have been trying to get people’s attention for a while, but they're garnering little support. So what's the difference between them and little Greta? Well for a start, their information is not that simple to impart. While people can use a figurehead like Greta to make certain demands of governments, how do you demand that all farmers start growing in a regenerative way? You can't exactly demand the government make a regulation for everyone to farm that way, particularly as most wouldn't know how to.
People like Geoff and Peter are educators and lead by example, but you would have to want to learn from them to farm that way. Add to that, most of the methods they use don't fit into all the current agricultural regulations. Peter spent decades running into trouble with regulatory authorities because the methods he used went against their idea of best practice. Yet the proof was in the pudding, because he brought the water back to the land, raising the water table again and sorting out the salt issues. However, even now, after finally getting support from people in higher places, his methods are still not being put into practice to save our drought ridden farmlands and I suspect regulations haven't changed either.
The truth is that making demands of authorities is the easy part, encouraging others to make changes and act themselves is not so easy. We are simple creatures and will take the easiest path. Change can be an incredibly slow process.