garden@risc.org.uk

Introduction

Story of the Roof Garden

Plants

Food Issues

Permaculture

Forest Gardens

Visits: Schools and Groups

Open days and Volunteers

Photo Albums:
Peter Savage Garden Photography

Construction

Plants

Vistas

Relocalisation of food

Industrial agriculture has certainly brought the world a cheap and plentiful food supply, but we learn more each day of the huge consequences this type of farming is having on the world. Global food production and trade, as well as intensive mechanised agriculture consumes very large amounts of energy and is mainly driven by fuels and chemicals derived from oil. In fact 5 calories of energy are used in the production of one calorie of food energy produced by these methods. Furthermore poor practices are decimating wildlife, lowering water tables, salinated cropping lands and suffering from widescale soil erosion. What seems to be cheap actually hides many hidden costs.

Relocalisation

Essay from CAT team

Fastfood Nation
A critique of the Food Industry :

The case for local food
The food on your plate travels 50% further than it did in 1980, maybe as much as 2,500 - 4,000 km. This essay argues a comprehensive case for more local food production
(pdf 336kb)

Risking corn, Risking culture
The impact of GM corn in Mexico's Oaxaca region, home of the maize plant (pdf 573kb)

Birds under threat
Changing landuse, agriculture and pollution is devastating world bird stocks, the solution to saving the birds seems to be the same one for saving the humans (pdf 1,724kb)

Although trends like organic foods try to address some of these issues One shopping basket of organic food products could have travelled 241,000 Km and released as much Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere as the average home, cooking meals for 8 months.

• In 1998 the UK imported over 60,000 tonnes of Poultry meat from the Netherlands. In the same time we exported 33,000 Tonnes of our own poultry back to them.
• For every calorie of carrot flown into the UK from South Africa we use 66 Calories of fossil fuel.
• Barely 5% of fruit consumed in the UK was produced domestically

Clearly something will have to change if the UK is ever is to reduce dependency on imported foods and the fossil fuels needed to do so. In the late 1970's a new word was coined to describe a new approah to living in a partnership with both nature, and our fellow global inhabitants: Permaculture. Although it originated in Australia and mainly applied to food production it has given us some very useful ideas and strategies of how everyone might work to live in a more harmonious partnership with the wider world.

Some links to Permaculture in Britain

• Permaculture Association (UK)
• Permaculture Magazine

The Roof Garden at RISC aims to be a focus point to highlight and explore these issues, and to help formulate and stimulate local responses to this global problem.