Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World

by Carolyn Steel

This idea isn’t new; it was first proposed more than a century ago by the Scottish geographer, biologist and father of regional planning, Patrick Geddes. Human development for Geddes was all about the natural landscape, the ‘active, experienced environment’ that shapes everything we do.106 Like Howard, he deplored urban sprawl, in particular the tendency of cities to merge into one continuous metropolitan splurge, a phenomenon for which he coined the term ‘conurbation’. His solution was to protect rural areas close to cities, not by a green belt but with a series of rural ‘fingers’ radiating out from the centre, making the city form a star shape as it expanded. By this means, he hoped to create cities truly in touch with nature: ‘Towns must now cease to spread like expanding ink-stains and grease-spots: once in true development, they will repeat the star-like opening of the flower, with green leaves set in alternation with its golden rays.’107

An anarchist society, he believed, would adapt just like a natural ecosystem.

One third of all land in Britain, for example, is owned by the aristocracy, one of the factors that perpetuates the structural inequalities of our society.135 If we are all to thrive in the future, it’s clear that we shall need a radical reform of the ways that we use, share and inhabit land.

With this simple idea George came up with a way of neutralising rising inequality at a single stroke: a land-based wealth tax. By taxing the value of land – effectively charging a community rent for it – society could both share its wealth far more equitably and make better use of the available land.

Julie Brown’s social enterprise, Growing Communities, in the London Borough of Hackney combines an organic box scheme in some of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods with volunteer food growing and an educational programme that teaches people how to help build a more sustainable, ethical food system ‘one carrot at a time’.152

with the loss of some 200 vertebrates over the past century alone, the current rate of extinction over such a period is one hundred times greater than the average for the past two million years.

With their favourite food disappearing, it’s no surprise that birds are following suit. In 2017, the French Museum of Natural History reported that farmland birds in France had declined by 33 per cent since 1989, a finding mirrored by a UK Defra study reporting a 55 per cent loss of birds since 1970.

to live, we must manipulate nature, yet must seek to do so without diminishing it. Farmers have always manipulated nature, of course, but only recently has this interference threatened global ecosystems. This is, of course, partly to do with scale, but it is also to do with the nature of the disruption.

Nature builds resilience through complexity, yet simplifying it has long been the aim of farming. Of the estimated 300,000 edible plant species on earth, just seventeen now provide 90 per cent of all our food.

With his unique blend of craggy woodsman and mystic poet, Muir fused environmentalism and Romanticism into a seamless whole. His carefully constructed fantasy of pristine wilderness completed what the Old Testament had begun, placing humanity firmly outside nature’s frame.

We forget, says Berry, that the source of all flourishing is wildness: ‘A forest or crop will be found to be healthy precisely to the extent that it is wild – able to collaborate with earth, air, light and water in the way common to plants before humans walked the earth.’58 To live in balance with nature, we must therefore ‘find some peace, even an alliance, between domestic and wild.’

Living in harmony with nature, in essence, is the wisdom of local tradition: ‘The only thing we have to preserve nature with is culture, the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity.’

‘Business as usual … is not an option.’65 Instead, what is needed is ‘a transformative process towards holistic approaches, such as agro-ecology, agro-forestry, climate-smart agriculture and conservation agriculture, which also build upon indigenous and traditional knowledge’.

Methane is an invisible menace common to all ruminants, estimated by the FAO to account for 5.4 per cent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Yet reducing such emissions isn’t as straightforward as it may at first appear. While removing domestic bovines from the landscape may seem an obvious move, it would also come at an ecological cost. As regenerative ranchers Allan Savory and Tony Lovell have shown, the properly managed grazing of cattle on marginal grasslands can reverse desertification as well as act as an overall carbon sink.81 The removal of all livestock from grassland also raises the question of what would occupy all the abandoned territory. If wild ruminants were to reclaim the world’s 38 million square kilometres of pasture at the rate they’ve re-inhabited parts of the Serengeti, Fairlie reckons, they would produce an estimated 52 million tonnes of methane, five eighths the amount emitted by the current domestic herd.82 While this would clearly represent a major reduction, it raises the question of how, if we were to go vegan, we would handle the wild game that would naturally proliferate on our rewilded farmland. If we decided to hunt and eat the beasts in order to control their numbers, we would find ourselves back where our ancestors started millennia ago. If we chose not to eat the animals on ethical or other grounds, however, we’d be wasting a valuable food resource, for which we’d need to compensate by growing more grains and vegetables, foods t...

What we can do, however, is seek to minimise our agricultural impact, while sharing our resources equitably, objectives that ‘business as usual’ will never deliver. Such aims suggest we should adopt a more integrated, low-input, vegetable-based existence – a sort of vegan-with-benefits lifestyle, if you will. To help the more committed carnivores among us to cut down on meat, we might start by internalising the true costs of factory farming.

Apart from confirming that organic farming is radically less harmful than conventional, the study found that, were we to halve our food waste and stop growing specialist animal feed (thus adopting Fairlie’s ‘default livestock’ approach), we could feed ourselves 80 per cent organically using no more farmland than would be needed for the status quo.

Mycorrhizae are now known to occur in some 80 per cent of flowering plants, including all major edible human crops, playing a crucial role in the vitality of both plant and soil.103 In exchange for the mineral-rich nutrition that plants receive directly from fungi, they provide carbohydrates in return, in the form of sugary exudates secreted from their roots. Mycorrhizae thus represent a nutritional exchange in which plants and fungi trade sugars and minerals to their mutual benefit.

The rhizosphere (the zone surrounding a plant’s roots, named by the German agronomist Lorenz Hiltner in 1904) is swarming with beneficial microbes, deliberately recruited by the plant with specific exudates.

Such discoveries challenge the foundational principles of industrial agriculture. To begin with, they show why ploughing – practised by farmers since time immemorial – is so damaging, since it breaks the mycorrhizal networks so vital to both plants and soil.

Although plants do need plenty of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus in order to thrive, feeding them doses of NPK disrupts the natural balance between plant and soil. Indeed, plants given regular shots of free chemical nutrients switch off their flow of exudates, no longer bothering to recruit microbial helpers to their aid. The result is a depleted rhizosphere that deprives plants of micronutrients and weakens their resistance to disease.

our task at this pivotal moment in our evolution is not just to reconcile ourselves with nature or to save the world by carving it up like some colossal pie, but to recognise ourselves as creatures of the wild. In an age of rampant urbanisation and technical mastery, this may seem a strange way to describe ourselves, yet that is the whole point. What our reawakened sense of deep connection with nature shows us, above all, is just how deadly the deal we have struck with it really is. If we are to have any chance of thriving in the future, we need to recalibrate that deal, and fast.

Obliterating rainforest for palm oil or bottom-trawling the seabed for fish (the underwater equivalent of dragging a 30-tonne, 150-metre iron bar across the countryside) are simply not the behaviours of civilised beings. Instead, we must learn to eat with a lighter touch, in ways that preserve wilderness, rather than destroying it.

We already know that wild foods are vastly more nutritious than cultivated ones. The wild berries the Hadza eat, for instance, have between ten and a hundred times the nutritional content of blueberries bought in Aldi or Asda. Instead of breeding such wildness out of plants in order to achieve higher yields, therefore, we might start farming in such a way as to preserve their wildness. That is, of course, pretty much what organic farming already does. But we could go much further, by mimicking and encouraging wild growth to produce edible ecosystems almost as rich and diverse as those in the wild. Such an approach would clearly require us to eat very different foods (less bread and pasta and more nuts and berries, as well as more seasonal produce), yet they would also be deeply efficient in the sense that they would focus on quality rather than quantity. If we ate berries a hundred times more nutritious than supermarket ones, we’d only need to grow one hundredth the amount.

Eating like creatures of the wild would also require us to expand our diet to include far more species, including insects.

If you cater for your microbial companions whenever you plan a meal, you’ll eat much better – and you’ll never dine alone.

Today, Knepp is a rich, diverse, yet still productive landscape in which longhorn cattle, red deer, wild ponies and Tamworth pigs roam freely in a habitat that is rapidly recovering its former biodiversity, with a wide range of plants re-establishing themselves and a profusion of insects, bats and birds, including nationally threatened turtle doves and nightingales. Although Knepp no longer feeds as many people as it once did, it demonstrates that productiveness and wildness are not mutually exclusive.

Is it possible to transform our cities in the same way? Most cities already have parks, gardens, ponds and rivers that could easily be subjected to the Knepp treatment, as well as a host of wild and semi-wild beings – plants, birds, insects, hedgehogs, foxes, rats and mice – that we already live alongside. Beyond making such spaces wilder and more productive, what else might we change?

Thinking on its own isn’t enough, but it is a vital first step. Merging back into the wild, towards conscious coexistence with our fellow non-humans, farming in ways that mimic and complement nature, rewilding cities and farmland – these are among the acts that will help us find our way home. We need biodiversity, not just because it’s necessary to our survival, but because we’re part of it. We carry wildness within us, we can’t escape or transcend it, it is the daemon that we have lost and yet yearn to bond with again.123 Rethinking the way we live is a long-overdue exercise; yet more urgent still is that of rethinking ourselves.

This is Dartington Forest Garden in Devon, designed and planted in 1994 by British agro-forestry expert Martin Crawford and cared for by him ever since. This two-acre plot may well be the farm of the future. Although not specifically designed to maximise productivity, its low-maintenance, low-input, year-round fecundity is, Crawford believes, the key to how we might one day feed ourselves. Most of the plants here are edible, but by no means all: some have medicinal properties and others provide specific ecosystem services, for example providing ground cover to discourage weeds or aromatics to deter pests. The key to forest gardening, Crawford explains, is to create ecosystems that, like those in the wild, sustain a natural balance between inputs and outputs. The alders, for example, were pioneer trees, planted early for their ability to fix nitrogen, for which they remain the garden’s main source. Valerian, meanwhile, is grown as a mineral accumulator, its deep roots absorbing nutrients that other plants can’t reach. Once it has flowered, it is cut back to release those nutrients into the soil for other plants to use.

Could forest gardens really be the farms of the future? In our world of shrinking resources and increasingly extreme weather, they’ve certainly got a lot going for them: minimal input, maximum nutrient and water retention and natural resilience due to their great diversity, which allows for constant adaptation as climatic conditions shift. Like no-till farming and wild farms such as Knepp, forest gardens maintain what Albert Howard called the Law of Return: the natural balance between growth and decay essential to all fertility. With the addition of poultry and pigs, which naturally forage in forests, the garden’s productivity could be further increased to provide a naturally rounded, semi-wild diet. With forest gardens and wild farms on our doorsteps – perhaps in rewilded parks and gardens as well as in the countryside – we could all live closer to nature. With minimal upkeep and something new to be harvested each day, such farms and gardens could become our new commons. We could visit them as often as we chose, to forest bathe, do some planting or pruning, gather something for dinner or just hang out. We would be physically fitter, soothed, entertained and engaged in a productive, meaningful common activity.

Forest gardens aren’t the whole answer, of course, any more than vertical farms, vegan diets or garden cities, yet they could certainly be a useful piece of the puzzle.

Robots are already farming our land; before long we may create cereals that can fix nitrogen. We can’t stop the march of progress, but we can decide who owns such technologies and how and when we use them to help us balance our lives with nature. Non-invasive, commonly owned, technically enhanced natural farming is probably our best hope of doing just that.

the concept of sustainable development, first defined in the 1987 United Nations Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.48

Slow Movement is all about: like Stoicism, it recognises that life is best lived, not in the past or future but in the present.

Yet admitting our complicity, Timothy Morton argues in Dark Ecology, is the first step towards a cure.