Own Grown Gardening

  Earlier this month, here in the UK, I stumbled upon an episode of Tim Harford's More or Less on BBC Radio 4. Tim interviewed Jason Hawes, a researcher from the University of Michigan. Jason and his colleagues recently published this article, Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture , in the academic journal Nature Cities . This publication is not to be sniffed at. Nature Cities is a new offshoot of the esteemed academic journal Nature no less.  Now, I'm not going to mince my words. For allotmenteers out there, Jason's research findings make sober reading. Their results suggest that low-tech urban farming, the sort of vegetable production we do in our home gardens and allotment plots, emits six times more carbon into the atmosphere per serving of food than conventional industrial agriculture. Wait, what? Gah!  Initially, that depressing finding sounds just baffling. How can it be true? This is the exact question Tim put to Jason in his inte...

I find myself increasingly wondering what a Net-Zero future might look like. Is such a future even possible?  Here in the UK, the government has signed a commitment for this country " to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 ". From where I'm standing at this moment on the cusp of 2023, to achieve this target feels almost farcical while simultaneously imperative. Some look to Cuba as a model for how to adapt. " The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil " takes this view. On the one hand, I find this documentary quite inspiring. One of its key messages seems to be that overcoming adversity has the power to bring us together for positive long lasting change. A pleasant thought when contemplating how to minimise and even survive climate change. On the other hand, is this documentary's message too simplistically idyllic to the point of misleading? Hmmm... I fear it might be... Let's examine Cuba as a case study. What caused the cr...