Community Action Plans - Food & Water

This is the first of a series of essays about what communities need to be doing to get ready for the future, considering the various economic, environmental and energy-related problems our civilization is facing. Be sure not to miss upcoming installments by subscribing to the Sustainable Future website (it is free, of course). The sign-up box can be found at the top of the right-hand column.

Local Sustainable Agriculture

Most of the food that citizens of Western nations eat is trucked or flown in from all over the world. For many people, the piece of fruit that they will eat today is much more a world-traveler than they are. In my local grocery stores (I'm in NC, USA) there are fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as frozen and canned goods, from places as far away as Chile, Peru, Argentina and the Philippines.

But what if you suddenly couldn't import your community's food from all over the globe? Could your community survive on only the food produced locally? The fact is there are many reasons why you may not be able to import large quantities of food in the future - everything from peak oil and sky-rocketing energy prices to world-wide food shortages to crop failures caused by disease or drought.

Communities should encourage people to produce a portion of their own food. This can be done by reviving the Victory Gardens idea of the first two world wars. Communities should also do everything possible to promote local sustainable agriculture.

Ways to Encourage Local Food Production

1. Promote the idea Victory Gardens (both private and community-based) and food co-ops.
   
2. Provide training courses in gardening and permaculture through local community colleges and agricultural extension offices.
3. Remove unnecessary restrictions on people growing their own food (maintaining needed restrictions to promote health & safety and prevent animal cruelty).
4. Remove unnecessary restrictions on local farmers selling their crops to local markets (often put in place due to lobbying by big agri-business).
5. Require that government food services (such as school lunch programs) spend an increasing portion of their budgets on locally produced food.
6. Encourage the formation of farmers markets.
7. Local relief agencies should provide vouchers or special debit cards for use at local farmers markets as part of their assistance programs.
8. Promote the health, economic and environmental benefits of low-meat diets (educational programs only - what people eat should be their choice).
9. Public tree-planting programs should include fruit and nut trees.
10. Support programs to capture organic waste (food scraps, animal & human manure, leaves & other yard waste, agricultural waste) for composting to improve soils.

Water Systems

Clean water is the invisible crisis and providing continuing supplies of clean water for local communities is perhaps the biggest challenge of the 21st century. Did you know that as much as a third of a typical city's water usage is flushing toilets? Various types of dry and composting toilets can greatly reduce this inefficient use of clean water. One of the shopping malls in my local area recently installed dry-flush urinals in its public restrooms, and they seem to be working perfectly.

Leaking pipes, not just in homes and businesses, but in the local water systems themselves, is a major problem that wastes huge amounts of water. Detection and elimination of such leaks should be a high priority. (Water conservation is the theme of two editions of my Resource Miser newsletters, RM #004 and RM #011.)

Local governments can also encourage water conservation by charging less per gallon to customers that use less water. In other words, a household that uses 100 gallons a month would be charged less per gallon than a household that uses 1000 gallons a month.

In my area, the water supply comes from two main sources - a lake and an nearby river. Local governments have actually been fairly pro-active in protecting these sources. Over the years they have surrounded the lake with a large municipal park, protecting it from development and pollution. And they have worked diligently protecting the river through a series of parks and conservation easements. Local governments depending on the river for water have come together to hire a "River Keeper" whose job is to patrol the river looking for illegal dumping and other threats.

Also in my area they are a couple of days a year (one is typically Earth Day and the other in the Fall) that are promoted as "waterway clean-up days". Individuals and community groups are encouraged to clean trash out of out local ponds, streams and wetland areas. This is heavily promoted in the local media, and local governments provide trucks and workers to haul off the trash that is collected.

Organic gardening, lasagna-style gardening, forest gardening and similar techniques utilizing compost and natural soil amendments instead of chemical fertilizers will protect local water supplies from dangerous chemical run-off. Also, these techniques typically utilize mulch and other ground cover which greatly reduces surface evaporation thus reducing the need for irrigation.