One suburb’s plan to take over the streets.

THE transformation of Chippendale, in inner city Sydney, began three years ago. “We held a ‘Food for the Future Fair’, invited local farmers and closed off three city blocks,” explains resident and sustainability expert Michael Mobbs.

The council donated 200 fruit trees to be given away, and people were shown how to plant them in front of their homes.

“From then on there was a change in momentum in the suburb. Now it’s understood that this is a place where we grow food and do things differently,” he says.

Mr Mobbs is the author of Sustainable House, a detailed guide to the way his family retrofitted their home, together with the lessons and results garnered over more than a decade.

Now he’s drawn a blueprint for overhauling the entire suburb. The ‘Sustainable Streets and Community Plan’ covers matters as diverse as transport, stormwater harvesting, heat-reflective roads, food growing, and greening buildings and businesses. It’s available to download from the Sustainable Chippendale website.

One of the most innovative proposals is to link rate rebates with householders’ sustainability behaviour. For example, residents who compost (and attend a council-run workshop) would receive a discount on their rates; likewise for businesses that grow vertical gardens, or householders who trap stormwater on their blocks.

“I’m trying to link financial and other rewards to public and private actions in our streets,” he says. Many of these changes would reduce councils’ spending on infrastructure, maintenance and waste collection.

Similarly, Mr Mobbs sees a role for a streamlined or pre-approval process for projects that meet defined eco-criteria. “So many councils say they want to be sustainable, but they don’t give priority to sustainable projects. You just go in the queue with the business-as-usual,” he says.

Last year, the residents submitted their plan to the City of Sydney. They’re still waiting for a decision. Although Mr Mobbs fears it has disappeared into the council’s “black box”, he and his neighbours are forging ahead with several activities, including installing bike parking, converting stormwater drains and running a box scheme for local fruit and vegies.

There are about 50 residents who are actively, but informally, involved: they tend to devise their schemes while they’re at work in the garden. “We’ve found that it’s better to do things, rather than hold meetings. It’s projects that bring change faster than discussions, I think,” he says.

Because the suburb comprises about 4000 workers, as well as 4000 residents, they’re also beginning to work with businesses – starting by training an employee from a local café about how to better recycle waste and grow food.

Mr Mobbs says the plan isn’t just about Chippendale; it’s the kind of transformation required – and replicable – in every city. Already, delegations from two Chinese provinces have visited for a briefing.

“It’s really important that we make our suburbs and our cities sustainable this side of 2020,” he says. “Government is too slow. Communities have to show the way – that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

But so far, the biggest change in Chippendale isn’t in the hard infrastructure. It’s become a place where neighbours introduce themselves in the streets.

“The ultimate goal of sustainability is not a conversation about water efficient taps. It’s really a conversation about how we see the world and relate to it.”

Global worries sow the seeds for a local harvest.

IN Melton, 40 kilometres west of Melbourne, Carey Priest has taken a lease on a small farm. He’s starting slowly, beginning with a modest market garden and 100 free-range chooks that peck their way around the old olive and almond groves on the property.

Each week, Mr Priest supplies about 35 dozen eggs to several food co-operatives in the city’s inner west. “Many of my customers have visited and seen the chickens and the conditions where their eggs come from,” he says. “We run regular open days – it’s as transparent as it can possibly get.”

His farm is one of the initiatives listed on a new food website, Local Harvest, created by the Ethical Consumer Group.

“The website is a place to find food choices outside the mainstream supermarket system, or the industrial food system, and to find those easily,” explains the site’s coordinator, Nick Ray.

When you type in your postcode, Local Harvest lists the food co-ops, farmers’ markets, vegie box programs, organic cafes and small retailers nearby, as well as groups such as community gardens and food swaps. There are already nearly 2000 entries around the country, with more to be generated by the site’s users.

As part of the launch, Mr Ray is promoting the weeklong Local Harvest Challenge. From April 1, participants will try to reduce the degree of separation between them and their food.

“It’s an opportunity to become more deliberate about your food choices. You can make it as easy or as hard as you like – for some people it might be shopping at a farmers’ market for the week, or for others, it might be eating from within a certain radius of where you live,” he says.

But why take the challenge at all? Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine, says initiatives such as Local Harvest are springing up in many countries – and for good reason.

He argues that humanity is facing scarcity in nearly everything we need to produce large amounts of food, including water, nutrients, land and topsoil, fish, cheap oil and stable climates. (You can find a summary of his findings and solutions on the Sustainable Table website.)

“We have to reinvent our food system, and that includes reinventing how we grow food in our cities,” Mr Cribb says. “At present our cities are wasting vast amounts of water and precious nutrients. We need to channel those back into urban and agricultural food production.”

He sees a future food system that involves both high- and low-tech farming methods, but both, crucially, will need to produce on a smaller energy footprint. “Oil prices will go through the roof over the next two or three decades,” he says. “There’s no point in developing an agriculture that requires oil and synthetic fertilisers if they’re going to become too expensive.”

Individuals must help bring about that change, he says. To do so, we also have a personal incentive to switch away from the “killer diet” that contributes to lifestyle illnesses such as obesity, cancer, heart disease and stroke, and towards more fresh fruit and vegetables.

“Agriculture is one of those things that individuals can do. You don’t have to wait for some dreary government to catch up. If we wait, too little will happen and far too late. We need creative people to show the way.”

Read this article at The Age online

A town shrunk its footprint when the residents showed their colours.

IF you pass through Heyfield, a small timber town in Gippsland, at the foot of the Snowy Mountains, you’ll notice something strange a-flapping: flags. Hundreds of them – white ones, blue ones and green ones – flying from businesses and homes throughout the streets.

It all began a year and a half ago, in front of the local supermarket. “We did a survey to see what the community thought,” explains Julie Bryer from the Heyfield Community Resource Centre. Volunteers from the centre had already installed thousands of efficient light globes and hundreds of shower roses around town, but residents weren’t sure what to do next.

“What came up was that people wanted more information on environmental sustainability practices. They were concerned about costs and they also didn’t know where to start,” she says.

The resource centre hatched a plan in three stages: white, blue and green. To meet each level, householders must tick-off several items from a list of about two-dozen things you can do to save water, electricity and waste, and to live longer in your home.

Participants must stay on each stage for three months before they’re eligible to step up. Items listed under the white flag are free or very cheap; big-ticket expenses, such as solar panels or hot water, come later on.

“We insisted that everyone do the three step process, because if I put solar panels on my house while I have the bad light globes and leaky taps and haven’t mulched my garden, then really I’m not helping myself and the environment as much as I can,” Ms Bryer explains.

“When we assessed houses for the blue flag, a lot of people asked to re-do the white stage first, because they’d gone back and completed most of the requirements they hadn’t met before. That was really encouraging.”

Ms Bryer started the program by asking all the businesses in town to participate, and only one refused. Since then, nearly half of Heyfield’s 2000 residents have taken part. The resource centre also coordinated a bulk purchase scheme for solar panels. “We’ve found that people are becoming more interested in growing vegetables as well,” she says. “They’re coming into the community garden here asking for information.”

The flags, by virtue of public participation, have been crucial to the scheme’s success. “People thought, ‘Joe Blow across the road has got a flag, so I better get one too’,” Ms Bryer says. Interestingly, while the women in town were the early adopters, many men have led their family’s push to achieve blue flag status.

“It worked right through the community: young ones did it and oldies did it too. We held information sessions at the primary schools, and often mums and dads came in with their littlies, saying their children were interested,” she says.

The resource centre funded the program itself, in part from the proceeds of its weekly local paper, the Heyfield News. Late last year, the scheme’s extraordinary success was recognised when it won a world environment day award from the United Nations Association of Australia.

“We had lots of fabulous volunteers and the participants in Heyfield were really enthusiastic – they just ran with it,” Ms Bryer says. “You can imagine when we won the United Nations award! Oh my goodness, everyone was beside themselves.”

Read this article at The Age online

Growing vegies gets cheaper and easier when you save the source.

CHRIS Brock’s vegie patch is laid out in terraces, stepping up the slope above his house in Healesville. It’s well fenced to keep out wombats and netted to ward off birds. Right at the top of the hill, he’s working on a different line of defence.

In the top bed, he’s growing General Mackay climbing beans, but his family won’t be eating any this year – they’re saving them for seed instead.

“It’s a rare variety, and I only had a small amount of seed,” Mr Brock says, “so I’ve grown them out to hundreds of seeds. Next year I can grow a decent crop myself, and share them with others.”

Mr Brock is an environmental scientist, and the convenor of Yarra Valley Seedsavers. As well as the climbing beans, this year he’ll be keeping seeds from broccoli, swedes, wombok and kale, to list a few.

“I’m concerned about conservation of seed varieties and about maintaining diversity in what we eat,” he explains. “Saving seeds and growing your own vegies is a practical way to be less reliant on the industrialised food system, which is degrading biodiversity.”

His group meets before the change of seasons. Together, they sort seeds, share tips and deposit and withdraw from their collective seed-bank, according to their needs.

“There’s a lot of cultural information you don’t get on a packet of seeds. When you meet the person who grew them, there’s so much you learn about how to grow that vegetable, when it’s ripe and how to prepare it,” he says.

Brock and his fellow gardeners are part of the national Seed Savers Network, founded by Jude and Michel Fanton. The couple have worked on similar projects in over forty countries. They’ve also published a guide, The Seed Savers’ Handbook, which contains instructions for over a hundred vegetables, herbs and flowers, including tips on avoiding cross-pollination among certain varieties, as well as storage and cultivation.

Ms Fanton says there’s no reason to be intimidated. “For plants that go to head, you can rely on self-seeding. It’s the simplest way, and it’s what we’re doing in our garden more and more,” she says. “Let things like carrots, parsnips, parsley or dill go to seed, then whack the seed-head around into other beds.”

When it comes to tomatoes, she also suggests starting with the most straightforward method. “You can just squeeze the seeds over a paper towel, write the name on it, let them dry on the table or the windowsill, then roll them up and put them in a jar.”

No matter the plant, the most important thing is to make sure the seeds are completely dry before you store them – otherwise they’ll decompose.

Once you get in the habit, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. “It gets easier and easier to grow things, because the plants are adapted to your soil, your growing style and your climate,” Ms Fanton says.

“Home-saved seeds are changing all the time and that aspect of evolution is really important for the way we cope with climate change.”

There’s another, less tangible benefit, too. “Sharing and saving seed is a way to remember people too,” she says. “For example, we’ve got a sweet French fennel from Michel’s aunty and we’ve had it for 31 years. It really adds a poignant aspect to the word heirloom.”

Word-of-mouth advice works in every language.

LINA Hassan is very enthusiastic about household sustainability. “Everywhere I go, this is my message,” she says, leaning forward on her couch, in her Thomastown home.

She arrived in Australia from Lebanon in 1985, escaping the civil war. The day after she fled her apartment in Tripoli, the building was destroyed.

Ms Hassan, now 47, is an aged-care and refugee support worker with Victorian Arabic Social Services. She’s also a bilingual sustainability assessor with Environment Victoria.

When she began training for the organisation’s Green Town project, she discovered – happily – that some wartime deprivations had prepared her for the long drought and rising electricity bills in Melbourne.

“I like all the tips, really, because back home during the war, we were already adopting some of the strategies,” she says. “We never had electricity. We only had four hours of water each day.”

If her smile weren’t so open, I’d think she was making a tongue-in-cheek comparison. But Ms Hassan is speaking in earnest. The connection is safety – an urge to provide security for her children; later in our conversation, she describes climate change as a waiting bomb. “We have to act, all of us. We all worry.”

With future generations in mind, she is most worried about water. Together with her husband, Raafat El Kashef, who is also a Green Town assessor, she’s installed tanks and become an avid water recycler. “I’m Muslim and I pray five times daily. I was wasting one bucket every time I washed,” she says. Now, she uses it on her herb and flower garden.

She is critical of the state government’s decision to ease water restrictions. “It’s too soon,” she says. “People were adopting ways to save water. We don’t know if we’ll have shortages again in the future.”

Under the Green Town program, Ms Hassan visited over 40 households and businesses in the Lebanese community in Melbourne’s north, explaining sustainability issues in Arabic.

One in five Victorians speaks a language other than English at home. For many people, mainstream eco-advice – like this column – is inaccessible. 

As a remedy, Environment Victoria has posted info sheets in 20 different languages on its website. Then there’s Green Town, which operates like a pyramid scheme. The organisation has trained six community leaders, who oversee 59 assessors, who’ve visited hundreds of homes and businesses from different language and cultural backgrounds. All up, over 10,000 people have heard the message.

Nina Bailey, who coordinates Green Town, says it’s the most effective behaviour change campaign her organisation has run. Based on the participants’ estimates, they’ve cut energy and water use by about a third, and waste to landfill by one quarter, on average. Converted into power and water bills, that amounts to savings of more than $500 per year.

Despite this success, the state government has withdrawn its funding for the scheme. Ms Bailey is hopeful she’ll find a way to keep it going. She says the results say something powerful, no matter what language you speak: awkward as it may feel, talking about climate change and sustainability with friends and family can be transformative.

“If you have knowledge, it’s worth sharing, because people want to hear it,” she says. “Your neighbours may be interested. People who seem different are often concerned about the same issues you are.”

Read this article at The Age online