Plants for a Future UK - What is the 'New' PFAF?

Plants for A Future, UK

What is the ‘New’ PFAF?

Chris Marsh, Trustee, 19 August 2008

Quite a number of people have already come forward in response to my requests for help with the new phase of Plants For A Future (PFAF), and they have asked quite a lot of questions, so it seems important to say what we’re about and where we hope to go.

Origins and Aims of PFAF

The first thing to say is that the ‘new’ PFAF is no different from the original PFAF. In the first piece in ‘World Change Visionaries’, which is by Ken Fern, he says: “We aim to become self-sufficient in food, fuel etc; and to show others that these can be derived from the plant world without recourse to animal exploitation or environmental damaging methods. We feel that human survival depends on this, and on the use of a wide variety of plant species, especially when there is a threat of rapid climatic change.”

It is equally important to understand that PFAF came out of the permaculture stable. See the second piece in ‘World Change Visionaries’, which is by Bill Mollison, and it becomes clear that Ken was aiming for a practical solution to two of Mollison’s points: “Establishment of plant systems for our own use on the least amount of land we can use for our existence” and “create our own complex living environment with as many species as we can save, or have need for, from wherever on earth they come.”

Lastly, PFAF is about addressing ‘human greed’ (which is not our fault really; an excellent book on this subject is Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, by Carolyn Steel ( London: Chatto & Windus, 2008)). The final, short but crucially important, piece in ‘World Change Visionaries’, is a quote from Rabindranath Tagore, who says: “Mother Earth has enough for the real needs of all her children … but she has not nearly enough for a whole generation of greedy children who know no limit to their desires.” The Quaker Gandhian, the late Marjorie Sykes, wrote that quotation in my copy of her book, and she told me that by ‘greedy children’ Tagore meant the human species as a whole, and for Tagore, the solution was local self-reliance, which he put into practice in his work on rural reconstruction.

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Current Plans

What is ‘new’ about the current phase of PFAF is that we are taking advantage of a windfall. Ten years ago, PFAF embarked on an eco-village initiative, which sadly ultimately failed, but which resulted in us currently having some money in the bank from the sale of a plot of land acquired for that project. With those resources, we aim to develop the following activity strands:

research surveys of sites with self-reliance aims, starting with the one on The Field, see http://www.plantsforafuture.org.uk/researchTOR.htm ;
website and plants database development, along the lines of the proposal we've asked for: http://www.plantsforafuture.org.uk/websitedatabaseproposal.htm ; and
the office admin and membership function; we have no firm plans on that as yet but people are coming forward with offers and ideas.

We are at the planning stage of the Research and Survey project focussed on The Field, Ken Fern’s experimental site in Cornwall, and a team of people is being assembled. It would be good to get started on similar projects focussed on other alternative land use sites. What we need for that is for people to come forward who have plants expertise and experience of conducting field trials, and we also need suggestions of interesting sites we could study.

We’ve had quite a number of people with very relevant experience come forward with offers to help out with the website and plants database. We have asked two people with complementary skills to draw up a proposal, and we have offered a small fee to each of them to develop a proposal, and they have accepted. But if anyone else thinks they could assist with redesign, or potentially take over the running of the website and database, do please email me. This is a big job and will require a team of people with different areas of expertise so having alternative proposals to consider would be welcome.

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Frequently Asked Questions

People who have got in touch have had some questions about getting involved, one of which is ‘Do I have to be vegan?’ Linked to that is the question: ‘Why is the PFAF Charity about “vegan-organic” (stock-free) horticulture?’ My answer to the first question is ‘No, you don’t have to be vegan,’ and to people who are vegan I’d say they are welcome to become involved as long as they are not fundamentalist about veganism or animal rights, wanting to convert everyone to their view.

But to be part of PFAF you do have to be committed to the promotion of wider adoption of vegan-organics, which we see as a vitally important practice if we’re serious about food security, in Britain in particular. Probably it is possible to feed 60 million people eating exclusively vegetable foods (maybe with a tiny amount of dairy, meat or fish) from 60 million acres of land, but there isn’t enough land to feed 10 million cattle – the size of the UK herd – and goodness knows how many other domestic livestock as well. The idea that these animals obligingly turn grass and food waste into fertiliser is, of course, a myth: the myth that sustains the ‘all muck and magic’ kind of organic growing. UK livestock consume grains and oil seeds in vast and unsustainable quantities, sourced from all around the world, which is exploitative and a largely hidden threat to our food security.

The other question that’s often asked is: ‘Do I have to live near you to be involved?’ and my response is to say that the new PFAF is moving beyond the South West, and needs to have a Britain-wide focus, so people living anywhere in Britain are very welcome to become involved. In fact, via the plants database, PFAF is already international, and Ken Fern is actually working on a tropical plants database. PFAF has always had a local and a global perspective, but we do want to encourage rootedness, where the message is: ‘Wherever you are, know the land around and under your feet, live on and by it, nurture it and love it, and become part of the human, plant and (mainly) wild animal community which shares that land with you.’ I don’t mean to sound preachy but I do believe that this is the only reliably sustainable future, and that piecemeal fixes like fair-trade, and carbon footprint jiggery-pokery will just be swamped by capitalism, supermarkets and pressures to maintain business-as-usual.

It can be argued that food flown in from, say, Kenya, can release less CO2 than food grown in heated greenhouses here (see Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From, by Fred Pearce (London: Transworld, 2008), pp. 100-113). For me though, that’s not the point. People in the developed world are alienated from the land, and have been for centuries, as Steel and others explain (suggested reading list on request), and we have to address that, because living from the land and resources around us is the only way to be sure we’re not abusing them; it’s the only total solution to the ‘greedy children’ problem.

Another question that’s been put to me is: ‘What has permaculture been doing for twenty years?’, this in the course of a discussion on how to achieve food security in Britain. I didn’t actually answer that question when it was put, because it’s a tricky one, and somewhat sensitive. Given that the aims of PFAF can be considered as a sub-set of permaculture ethics and principles, it is relevant to take stock of where permaculture is, particularly in relation to alternative land use: its ‘permanent agriculture’ aspect. I can tell you something about that from my own experience.

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About the Author

My own history on all this is that I ‘discovered’ worldwide land degradation and its historic link with urban living twenty five years ago, and I gave talks and workshops on the subject during a period of eight years in the late 1980s and early 90s. Part way through that I heard about permaculture, and latched onto the side of permaculture expressed so neatly in the piece by Mollison I included in the three extracts in ‘world change visionaries’. Then I discovered that the early adopters of permaculture in Britain were engaged in giving courses in permaculture design, in teaching design course teachers, and in community-building amongst disadvantaged people and in inner cities. Some were engaged in land-based projects, particularly on small-holdings in the Celtic fringes, and later in campaigning to get planning consent to live on such sites. But it concerned me that they were not in any thoroughgoing way promoting permaculture gardening, which I hoped would have focussed on the one million or so acres of home gardens in this country, so that by now ‘permaculture’ would have been a household word. That sounds critical of the early adopters, and it is, but not in a negative way, more as an observation. What they were doing was valuable.

However, the time has come to put more effort into research into alternative land use methods and models, and different kinds and approaches to plants and plants assemblages. That is not because there is anything fundamentally wrong with conventional organic horticulture and agriculture, with their dependence on animal manure. Such systems can be very productive and are fine on a small scale. But they cannot be a total solution, because there is not room for all the livestock to produce the manure unless we exploit land elsewhere in the world to produce the fodder crops they require – and then we wouldn’t be self-reliant; we’d still be ‘greedy children’.

Finally, I’ve written this piece and set up the PFAF in Transition website, and organised the recent ‘next steps’ meeting in Cornwall, and issued requests for people to get involved, and prior to that I wrote the Terms of Reference for the Research project. I did all those things because I was involved in rescuing the PFAF Charity when it was in financial difficulties, and I could see that the income from the sale of our plot of land provided new opportunities. It is already becoming clear that other people are going to be getting involved, and I shall be able to take a back seat, which is what I’ve been hoping for because I’m about to embark on some academic research for three years: on Rabindranath Tagore.

One further thing I should like to do before I retreat to the back room (I’ll still be Treasurer and Secretary and a Trustee) is start up some kind of magazine or newsletter, probably on-line, with a printable download. So please, those of you who like to write, do send me news, articles, book reviews, or whatever, and let’s see if we can get the first issue together.

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