10 minute read
shopping guide (page We hope you enjoy this, our 10th
LIFESTYLE / SHOPPING The anti-consumerism
shopping guide
Clothes are incredibly resource-heavy to produce, so good rules of thumb are to buy less and better quality, wear each piece more, and swap, sell, or donate items you don’t want. No longer wearable or repairable? Upcycle with these guides or makes, compiled by lifestyle writer Becky Blench.
BUY IT
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6 To cut your clothing footprint and save money:
1 Make a rag rug – a traditional, relaxing and resourceful clothes upcycling craft. Elspeth Jackson's
Rag Rug Techniques for Beginners is the perfect guide. 2 Create heirlooms from scraps with
Modern Quilting: A Contemporary
Guide to Quilting by Hand by Julius
Arthur of House of Quinn. A brilliant guide to making chic, minimal quilts, ideal for first-time crafters. 3 Other household textiles like cotton or linen sheets can be upcycled. In Grow, Cook, Dye,
Wear: From seed to style the sustainable way, Bella Gonshorovitz shows how to grow and cook five fruits and veg, then create natural fabric dye – even the dressmaking patterns are included.
The DIY edit:
4 Stretchy cotton clothing cut into thin strips is great to use in the garden instead of twine or wire. 5 Turn lightweight fabric into decorative bunting – make a triangular card template, 16cm for the top and 22cm for the sides, draw round it onto scraps of fabric, cut them out and sew the short edges at intervals along a piece of bias binding or ribbon. 6 Cut old t-shirts up into squares and use as washable multi-purpose cleaning cloths.
Practically Radical:
A new column by ecological grower and forager Poppy Okotcha on gardening and optimism.
@poppyokocha
Costing the garden
It's the end of summer and the garden is settling into her faded glory. It's been a hot, dry few months; while I’ve been travelling about giving talks on the power in our gardens, my own garden, left to her own devices, is growing beautifully wild and unruly.
The squash plants are reaching their long arms out of their patch and are now romping through the strawberry bed. The chicken mummas and their chicks have got loose and turned half the courgette corner into a dust bath, taking out a good few plants in the process. The cull was probably for the better though, since with what’s left we already have more courgettes than we can eat.
After turning the Bokashi (a process of air-free fermenting) compost into the compost heap, it’s time to sow the hardy veg seeds that will over-winter and give fresh greens through the darker months.
I settle down with my seed box, a collection of saved, shared, swapped, and purchased little nuggets of potential. I fill each tray with garden soil; perhaps controversially, I often don’t bother sowing into sterilised compost anymore. It does mean I have to be vigilant against the volunteer seedlings that pop up – but I don't mind that. I just pinch them out as they appear to ensure the intended seedlings aren't outcompeted. It’s nice to bring as few outside resources into my garden as possible.
As I sow kale, spinach, parsley, lettuce and coriander seeds, I mull over the number one most asked question I was asked while away: “Is growing our own food a good solution to the cost-of-living crisis?”
The answer was clear to me then, but being here in this wonderfully muddled little garden it is clearer now: no.
Throughout history, gardens have sustained us, offering food, medicine, and places to turn waste into a resource. For example, in a manual written in rhyming verse in the mid 1500s, gardeners are directed to empty their privies onto their veg beds in autumn, along with leaf mould, to maintain fertility. This practice also avoided the need for energy-intensive, industrial sewage processing.
Today, according to the report ‘Who Will Feed Us’ by the ETC Group, 70 per cent of people globally are still dependent on the ‘peasant food web’ – a network of hunters, gatherers, fishers, pastoralists, urban producers, and farmers working on less than five acres, for most or all of their food. And
as most of our gardens today are below five acres, they do invite us to explore creating and producing, rather than consuming.
However, our gardens are not a silver bullet solution to the complex, globalised supply chain, threatened by climate change and volatile politics, which has led to the cost-of-living crisis.
While I do see gardens as spaces that can support the vision of a more ethical paradigm, it would be naive to imagine a happy future in which those of us who even have gardens are dependent on these little patches of ground for food, while also working full time to pay the rent, energy bills, and everything else.
Growing much food at all takes time, space, resource, and is best done in groups.
The vision of individual self-sufficiency, to me, is a myth. We need one another and we need ethical, efficient networks of production that work well for us all.
Rather than hiding in a romantic vision of the past, we can use our gardens to inspire and connect us. Ecological growing is fertile ground for dreaming up ambitious visions for the future that honour the wisdom of past and present communities who knew or know how to live in a healthy relationship with the land.
Above: Growing food and biodiversity. Below: Blue sky thinking in the garden.
LIFESTYLE / ARTS Going visual
Art speaks where words are unable to explain.
Above: Lino print by Viola Ivanova.
POEM
On an English Apple
Ihold the orb of England in the palm of my still fleshy hand, unsullied by a callus or a cut or disappointment: tapered fingers curled round this scarred and severed fruit of Eden, contours of subdued vermilion with nostalgic pink and ochre, tainted by a jealous splotch of brown, elsewhere a tender skin spot large enough to fit my thumbprint.
Underneath the spots the tangy blood of Nature’s meanest daughter, plucked by me, her newest mistress, from a basket of her sisters, from the womb of Holborn market, brought out through a plastic exit into merciless December; my tongue’s ten thousand citizens rejoice in their discovery— unadulterated sweetness in a swollen, smoggy city and for one delicious instant I have known a day in Eden.
Cecilia M. Gigliotti | Published in Elements: REVIEW
Art can help connect people to nature.
What is the artist’s role in an ecological crisis?
By Victoria Holmes
This is the question being asked in Arts & Ecology, a new podcast about the vital role that art and culture play in creating a regenerative future.
As a species in the midst of a selfinduced climate crisis, it is essential that we re-think our relationship with the planet and our ecosystems. To this end, the podcast talks to a range of artists and curators, including Caroline Till, cocurator of the recent Our Time on Earth exhibition at London’s Barbican, Guardian columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot, and students from the Arts and Ecology MA course at Dartington, south Devon. It’s inspiring to listen to the wonderful work being produced, but also a narrative that is very much geared towards a positive mindset shift.
In episode two, Till talks about how art and culture has the ability to make issues like climate change tangible, to “bring it to life” and “experience it more deeply.” Often, environmental art and activism has taken a much more doom and gloom perspective, which is powerful in bringing an issue to our attention and, as Till says, “depicts the scale of the problem really well” – but it leaves people feeling powerless as to what to do about it. The podcast has a much more optimistic feel, talking to artists who are encouraging a shift in perspective, by engaging people to imagine a better world and inspiring them to do something about it.
Ultimately, we all need a deeper connection to nature and the non-human world. In episode six, hosts Mike Edwards and Natasha Rivett-Carnac discuss how students in Dartington are given the space to have ‘unusual’ encounters with nature, such as conversations with trees. Indigenous communities have understood this principle for millennia. Monbiot (episode two) says the “old narrative is destructive” and discusses the “mind-blowing” wonders of soil, its abundant life, and calls for a new culture that celebrates the world beneath our feet. Green MP Caroline Lucas said in her Letter to the Earth back in 2019 that “political failure is at its root a failure of imagination.” She called on artists then to “inspire us to believe it’s not too late to act and show us that each one of us can make a difference.”
I’d recommend this podcast for some much-needed creative hope and inspiration, and details of where to find the art to help us.
Arts & Ecology is available on
Apple Podcasts.
Out and about
Festival of Thrift 24-25 Sept | Redcar, North Yorkshire
Learn how to create on a budget with live performances, workshops and exhibitions. FREE.
Sustain annual summit: Meat debate 12 Oct | Coin Street Conf. Centre, London
Hear from leading voices in food, farming and climate on meat and dairy consumption. £15, low income FREE.
Resurgence Festival of Wellbeing 22 Oct | Online
A day of thought=provoking talks from inspiring speakers like Christiana Figueres and Naomi Klein. £20.
Evolving the Forest film festival 28-30 Oct | Devon, and online
An international film festival exploring how art, philosophy and science can connect to trees.
BBC Good Food Show Winter 24-27 Nov | NEC, Birmingham
TV chefs like Nadiya Hussain host festive kitchen demos, plus hundreds of products to taste. From £25.
LISTEN
Where food is a way in...
Catch up on episodes with Poppy Okotcha, Melissa Hemsley and Ixta Belfrage.
Available on Spotify and Google Podcasts.
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Crossword | Answers on pages 4-34...
ACROSS
1. An antidote to eco anxiety (6) 2. Traditional English fruit in season (5) 4. Countryside living (5) 6. Turn old t shirts into this (5) 8. Food and energy inflation is making this rise (4, 2, 6) 10. Biggest outgoing spend (7) 13. Hard to measure on farms, greenhouse gas emitter (5) 14. Daily staple (5) 15. Bristol artist (6) 16. Human cost of engaging with climate and nature collapse (7) DOWN
1. Group of businesses selling pesticides, fertilisers and seeds (12) 2. Subject of new eco podcast (3) 3. Communities can generate this (6) 5. Add jalapenos for a spicy tipple (4) 7. Soft edible part of an apple (5) 9. Legendary eco activist and academic (7) 11. British culture defined by mining and community spirit (12) 12. Home city of Vandana Shiva (5)
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