On some days, the irony is thicker than others.
Yesterday, Matt Chambers, editor of The Dependent, sent along “Planting the seeds of a food revolution”:
“[Urban farming] seems a no brainer for me. All my neighbours come and hang out and meet each other. Most of my gardens are places that were a liability. They were just a
big weedy area or just a vast area of grass that was being mowed and costing the landowners money. Now they’ve got a garden, they’ve got some vegetables coming in.”
As I was reading it, the tweets came in on “NPA slams city’s vision of wheat in front lawns“.
City council will vote Thursday whether to spend $5,000 on a pilot project to show it’s possible to use grass lawns for small-scale grain production. “I thought Vision Vancouver’s homeless shelters for chickens scheme was as goofy as things could get,” said NPA Counc. Suzanne Anton, who’s running to replace Gregor Robertson as the city’s mayor in November’s civic elections.
From ‘provocative’ to ‘provocation’ at the speed of click.
$5000? That is outrageous! How dare the municipal government spend such ridiculous sums trying out new ways for people to get food? And to think that they are using the innovation and entrepenurial spirit of its own citizens to do it!
The next thing you know, they’ll be spending hundreds of dollars on some cockamamy clean water project.
If this continues, before you know it, several cents per year of my hard-earned money will be spent on ridiculous things like improving food supplies.
Think of how many metres of paint for dashed car lane dividers that money could provide!
Rather than provide my own thoughts, I recommend re-reading Augustin’s comment above. Spot on.
Speaking of re-reading, of course I meant Agustin.
As a local voter who supports building a Vancouver that can thrive in the face of peak oil and climate change I find it disheartening that part of the NPA election strategy seems to be to mock ideas that will help us do just that. I recognize that some of these ideas (e.g. allocating infrastructure and road space to increase bike commuting, encouraging local food production, loans for home energy retrofits) are new to a lot of us and may seem at odds with the assumption that globalization will continue to supply us with all the food, energy, and everything else our hearts desire, without interruptions. But, climate change is already raising food prices to record levels due to droughts and flooding around the world (e.g. Manitoba, Russia, France, Texas, China) and global demand for oil is for the first time in history outstripping supply (http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/06/oil-production-and-consumption), signaling further price rises in the coming years in terms of producing and delivering food to markets. In this context, it’s inevitable that we’re going to have to produce much more of our own food locally and doing so will require both trial and error and time. I assume Suzanne Anton understands this. After all, she mentions peak oil and climate change on her website, is an intelligent person and knows former NPA councilors Gordon Price and Peter Ladner, both of whom have spoken and written about the importance of making our city and region more resilient. But instead of speaking to this dynamic Anton appears to be choosing to capitalize on the lack of broad public awareness of the local implications of peak oil and climate change to score political points. It’s both sad and short-sighted in my opinion. Hopefully, she will choose a different approach in the coming weeks and start offering some serious policy ideas to address our predicament rather than mock those trying to address it.