This article in the Guardian, by Pam Warhurst, is so good I want to copy it all, but won’t, but do read it! This is transformative stuff, in a world where it seems hard to see where we can achieve change at the grassroots, Pam shows how!
“‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world … Incredible Edible’s guerrilla gardening movement encourages people to take food-growing – and more – into their own hands”
“What is the solution? Incredible Edible is calling for a “right to grow”, which would make permission to plant on public land automatic, and create obligations for local authorities to facilitate it. In that is the kernel of a much bigger idea – one that goes beyond food.
“This is saying: look, in a time of crisis, [at] what we, the people, can do, and how we can use land differently to get better outcomes,” Warhurst says. “You could theoretically apply it to energy, you could theoretically apply it to housing, you could theoretically apply it to a lot of things, but I’m only doing food.”
What this is about, she says, is nothing less than “a new relationship between the citizen and the state”. Incredible Edible has already demonstrated it can make a material difference to people’s lives.
“We’re repurposing people power and we’re repurposing land, and that’s the bottom line,” she says. “We’ve got oodles of both of them … just respect people and create frameworks that allow them to just crack on and do these things instead of having to fight the system all the time.”
And with that, Warhurst says, there is hope for the future.
“God knows I wish that we weren’t in the state we are in as a planet, and I wish we weren’t in the state we’re in as a nation. But we are where we are and there’s no point having a moan about it – you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and do something.”
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