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Rhona

Farm/city overlap and Suzuki’s Top 10 seafood

Yesterday’s episode of CBC’s The Current included a segment called Farmland Disputes, a discussion of what happens to farms that are swallowed by cities. It’s uncomfortable territory.

There is no doubt we need to protect growing land for food, but those lands, particularly when they are overtaken by the city limits, are too expensive for farmers to buy, particularly when farmers are paid so badly – and in careers that lack pension plans. When retirement comes, many of our aging farmers hope to sell their land, or rezone it for development, in order to make up a retirement fund. But that takes more land out of the food production picture. The program reported that

  • Only 6% of Canada’s land is suitable for farming
  • Class 1 farmland, on which you can grow almost any crop, makes up about .5% of the total
  • Between 1971 and 2001, Canada permanently lost 14,000 square kilometres of its best farmland to urban growth
  • Almost half of Canada’s urban land is sitting on dependable farmland
  • The population of all our cities is growing beyond the limits of existing housing

Where land is being protected – and developers do tend to be winning the battles – much of the land sits idle, because there are not enough new farmers. And aspiring farmers often cite the cost of land as one of their chief obstacles. Until we have governments that back farming and promote a national food policy, we’ll go on losing land. Meanwhile, we must sit watching it slip away until the crisis point is passed.

Turning one’s worried face to the sea, here’s another handy fridge guide for sustainable seafood, courtesy David Suzuki:

Victoria Seedy Saturday 2011

Ah, Spring. Victoria’s Seedy Saturday was heaving again this year. I didn’t make it to any of the talks, and was too preoccupied to make thorough visits to all the stands, but once again the interest in seeds – both flower and vegetable – was there in (ahem) spades.

The seed swap was as popular as ever. Bring something to trade, or put a loonie down and take your pick of local seeds:

Gabe and I were there representing the Gorge-Tillicum Urban Farmers (GTUF) on the CR-FAIR table, and were pleased to find so much interest in neighbourhood food security.. and meet a couple of new members too.

Linda Geggie’s “Test Your Seed Smarts” was hugely popular. A few sniffed they didn’t need to see the back of the card to know what the seeds were, but most who stopped found the self-test highly entertaining,

particularly the younger gardeners.

Haliburton Farm was there; and LifeCycles.

Dan Jason with some Salt Spring Seeds.

And many more besides.


Can’t believe it’s over.

Actually, it’s not: many more Seedy Saturdays (and Sundays) still to come across the country.

Stories

We were in the company of about 150 others last night, at the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecture given by Ojibwa story-teller Richard Wagamese.

Invoking the likes of CS Lewis and Norval Morrisseau, Wagamese spoke on the roles of stories in self-actualization; affirming childhood’s freedom with narrative; community building; and even the building of garden sheds. Demonstrating with a few stories of his own, and framing the talk with an Ojibwa story about the bringing of light into the world by a spider (which is also the story behind dream-catchers) he spoke to an attentive audience, mostly white, partially students. Wagamese is one who embraces contemporary tools – Facebook, Twitter, blog – unapologetically (“I welcome all those who are friends I don’t know..”). I confess my favourite lessons were those of Lewis (You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.) and Morriseau (who urged Wagamese to tell the story for the story’s sake). Perhaps that only affirms the role of the story teller as sharer of wider wisdoms.

Textbooks

I have been a student in my day. Several times over in fact. And I know the pain of textbook costs, which is a large pain. As a poet, I also know the pleasure of being included in textbooks, and it is a large pleasure. Though relative to the pleasure of a living wage, it is a veritable widow’s mite.

I know we live in Google’s world, which promises to deliver free information to everyone, and I know that Google doesn’t really care how that information is created or obtained, so long as it’s provided free to the user in ways that help Google boost its revenues through other channels.

And in keeping with this spirit of largesse, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a revealing article (which, it has to be said, I read for free) about the struggles of Washington State to meet the cap of $30 per online textbook that will unlock a large grant from Bill & Melissa Gates, with the aim of reducing textbook costs for the state’s students.

What I find most interesting about this article is that it makes not the slightest attempt to address the reasons why textbooks are expensive, which include – but are not limited to – that irritating cog in the wheel of free information: the textbook’s author, who must be paid. Or more typically, the several authors and/or editors who put the material together. All the article does is bemoan the fact that it’s very hard to find good quality educational materials for free or cheap.

Like many of us, I sit on both sides of this particular fence. I benefit greatly from all the free information that’s available online. On the other hand, for many of the past few years if I were living on my earnings from writing alone I couldn’t have afforded to pay for what I accessed, had the authors been fairly compensated for their work. Because the opportunities for me to earn a living wage from my writing – once a respectable and reasonably lucrative profession – dwindle with the days.

In discussing course materials for the online course I teach, for a college with a less than ample budget, it became clear that new online program areas in bricks ‘n mortar institutions take a while to catch up with details like copyright fees and electronic rights. So for the time being I point students to a lot of free newspaper articles and other freely available materials to augment the (reasonably priced) textbook.

Are these freebies the best available materials? Possibly not, but who knows? It’s as hard for academic publishers to keep up with changing trends and topics as it is for today’s academics to monitor the listservs and discussion boards, the conferences and webinars and workshops, the tweets and the blogs. And of course the published materials, whether online or in paper.