Diggers

“Come and get evolved” beckoned the sign. Amazing when you think about it: knowing how messed up the sign reader would be and offering a superior life. It’s a combination I’d only seen in ads on the sides of religious buildings. A second sign gave a thumbs-down to cars and a big yes to bikes. The camper vans parked on Rotten Row looked like they shared a few million miles between them. Still, it was reassuring to know they wouldn’t be trashing the planet further by hot-rodding up the 20 yards of driveway from the gate.

The occupation of the old St Anne’s School site in May and June this year already feels like a hallucination. Walking by now you only know it happened because of the new fences and trespass warnings. I’m left wondering though what it was all about. What did the St Anne’s Diggers, self-dubbed “STAND”, actually achieve before they were removed? What, in short, did STAND stand for?

They did of course highlight the neglect of the St Anne’s site and pose the question of what to do with it. (What do you do with land in Lewes if flogging it off for housing isn’t an option?) Local blogger Dave Bradford provided a good summary of the history here. It’s led to a public consultation and open day. Raising awareness of environmental issues was also a given, but with an interesting twist. When I trotted up there for some digging myself (of information rather than soil) I encountered more scepticism about our local environmental movement than I was expecting. The flagship initiatives -Lewes Pound, solar panels, organic veg boxes and the like- seemed generally considered the blingy trappings of the rich who can “buy green lifestyles”. Which of course they are. You don’t hear much about poor people in environmental debates, unless it’s contempt for their love of cheap flights or of shopping at Tesco, so this was quite refreshing.

The broader agenda of the Diggers themselves on the other hand seemed less coherent. Beyond testaments to how well behaved the protestors were (and indeed everyone was incredibly polite), the main point seemed to be to demonstrate sustainable, self-sufficient living by gardening. Just exactly how this was going to work was unfortunately never made clear and, judging by the number of commodities in evidence not grown on site (tins, tents, stoves etc), that old devil money had already crept into the Garden of Eden. The point has been made in these pages before that the trouble with everyone returning to the land to save us from environmental catastrophe is that it’s an idea belonging on the compost heap of heroic failures.

In a link to history, the Diggers of St Anne’s identified themselves with the Diggers of the 17^th century England. These were an interesting bunch who envisaged us all living in a network of egalitarian communities, tilling the soil in harmony. While they were basically crushed by bigger landowners, there also wasn’t much of a popular wave behind those Diggers either. Our society elected instead to have private property, consolidated estates, spices, tea, coffee, industry, iPads and a global economy. You may question whether that was the right choice but we managed several hundred years of prosperity on the back of it. For most of us that was considerably more appealing than the alternative of spending our short lives in grinding poverty. One of the troubles with taking your cue from history is that ideas which flopped back then don’t necessarily get any better with time.

So now we’re left thinking what to do with the St. Anne’s site. What the Diggers have at least shown is that it is easy to point out what our council have done wrong. Balancing public obligations, safety concerns, what’s useful and (crucially) how to pay for it is considerably more difficult. However, the public consultation is giving everyone a chance to get involved. There are some good ideas there. Some nonsense too but well worth a look.

As Josiah Bartlett, the fantasy U.S. President for all who are liberal at heart, said “Decisions are made by those who show up”. Don’t think we need more allotments? A green burial site? A wild space? Perhaps you have a better idea? And perhaps some thoughts on how to pay for it! Now it’s over to us.

The old St Anne’s School site will be open to the public for consultation on Saturday 13^th August, 10AM- 4PM.

Growing Your Own Vegetables

“If I could show you the cabbage that I planted with my own hands”

Thus spoke the Roman Emperor Diocletian, more famous for chucking Christians to the lions, but also someone who gave up ruling the world for the pleasures of his allotment. There are days when I fantasise about following his example, especially as it involved a palace in Croatia and a load of slaves. As well as the other pleasures of growing your own, it seems that it can end the careers of tyrants. What could possibly be the trouble with it?

It turns out you don’t have to look far. Only in fact to Lewes’ own Seedy Saturday. This is an event where you can think about interesting things to plant, the more sedentary joys of others planting things for you, and listen to Marguerite Patten reminiscing about digging for victory. Then you turn into the bookstall and find yourself in a survivalist fantasy land. Wall-to-wall self-sufficiency manuals full of advice on preparing for the apocalypse by getting in your brassicas.

The idea of us producing our own food to protect ourselves is an important part of many responses to current environmental concerns. For example the magazine “The Land” envisages an agrarian idyll where, following the collapse of capitalism, we return en-masse to growing food. An increased emphasis on food self-sufficiency is also a staple of our local Transition Town movement (they like the word “resilience”). The recent Climate Camp even invited me to “Grow my own Future”. Though I’m as fond of a metaphor as I am of a ripe Ailsa Craig and realise I won’t be picking juicy futures directly from my cold-frame, the implication is once again that growing your own is the way forward.

While this reasoning is seductive quite a lot is missing. For one thing food self-sufficiency leaves populations grubbing out a precarious existence vulnerable to climatic variations or crop failures. The opposite of resilience really. We protect against this by buying food from a number of sources and countries. We can do this because for 7,000 years or so (and especially since the industrial revolution) human society has been moving away from the mass of the population being involved in food production.  This fosters the development of income-earning and more diverse skills. We have modern medicine and science and art and philosophy and a reliable food supply because primarily we’re not all stuck on the land.

If you think the fossil fuels of capitalism are going to run out soon (though a more likely danger for our environment seems to be that they won’t) a kind of post-apocalyptic subsistence life might be one way to go.  At times it’s hard to avoid the impression that vegetable gardening has become the latest meaningless gesture for the environmentally pious. While home grown food can be great the benefits of not relying on it are even greater. So, while I’m going mulch spreading soon, I have to do a quick shop at the greengrocer first and strike a blow for a better world.

John McGowan, 5^th May 2011