Seeing the Big Picture

Trying to make a positive change in a toxic world can be frustrating. There are just too many different problems, it seems. For years, I felt useless and truly hopeless about ever being any help at all, and couldn't see how anyone could make a difference with the range and scope of the issues: pollution, climate change, environmental destruction...there was just too much.

It wasn't until about six years ago that I had a change of heart. One video helped me put the big picture together, seeing how all the issues that I felt so strongly about linked together. I owe this revelation to a simple, powerful video, The Story of Stuff.



The big picture now seems very obvious and so simple. But having learned the linear production cycle in school, and being brought up in a consumer culture, it can be hard to see the full issue and the possible solutions until it's quite literally drawn out for you.

Since this video was made, Annie Leonard and her team at the Story of Stuff Project have made numerous other videos that expose and explain social and environmental problems. The underlying message in all of them is that there are many ways to help, and that the efforts being made ARE actually helping. This message was powerful enough to get me looking into new ways to produce and protect our most basic needs: food, water and living materials.

It wasn't long after I saw the Story of Stuff that I stumbled upon Permaculture and saw the ways that I could help build healthful, life-promoting production and consumption patters for myself and my community.  

World Environment Day: Promoting Permaculture

WED 2013

Today is World Environment Day, a time set aside in 1972 by the UN General Assembly to bring worldwide awareness and political action to bear on environmental issues. 

Think.Eat.Save.

This year's theme sounds a whole lot like permaculture: "Think.Eat.Save." It's thinking about how and where you source your food, eating responsibly, and saving our planet's ecological and human resources from the ravages of a wasteful food supply chain. It emphasizes the permaculture ideals of providing food security care for people coupled with care for the environment.

The Permaculture Approach

No More Food Waste

Much of the emphasis of this year's World Environment Day is focused on reducing food waste...one-third of the global food supply generated is wasted...no one eats it, it becomes trash. But in a permaculture system, the food grown is not wasted. What's harvested is eaten, and anything not eaten goes back into the system: something designed into the system consumes it, wildlife eats it or it becomes compost. The methane produced by rotting food in landfills is mitigated in the food forest by the natural decomposition cycles. 

WED 2013 Food Losses Worldwide

Keeping It Small and Local

There's also a lot of emphasis on supporting the small, family and community farms that actually provide most of the food for the world's population. No matter what the marketing of Big Agriculture preaches, they're not the ones truly addressing the world hunger problem. Most of their products go to the most profitable markets in countries that are already food secure, where much more of their food than the world average becomes waste in the production, refinement, shipping, marketing and waste cycle of the food supply chain. Small farms, however, are. Using permaculture techniques to farm sustainably and regeneratively provides food security coupled with environmental rejuvenation.