Blog Action Day: Local Veggie Boxes

As you may or may not know, today is Blog Action Day. (thanks earthchick!) The 15 of October is a day for bloggers to all write about a very important topic: our environment.

A fair chunk of posts on Exeterra are already about the environment, but it's time for another :)

This Saturday I went with some fellow members of the Green Society to Shillingford Organics, a local organic farm on 200-something acres. We had a great time getting a tour of their low-impact methods and trying our hands at farm work. We pulled dock, harvested more winter squash than I will eat in a hundred lifetimes, and planted garlic further than the eye can see. Here are some pictures:

Martyn shows us which yummy veggies to harvest.

We planted rows of garlic (one clove every six inches) on this strip of land, which was a few hundred metres long.

At the end, Martyn gave us as many free vegetables as we could carry. I have never seen people so ecstatic over carrots.

At the end of the day, I signed up for a weekly vegetable box. Shillingford delivers to a few hundred local households and restaurants, providing them with weekly vegetables that have been harvested no more than a day or two before arriving. You really have to taste this stuff to believe it -- there are lush flavours and sweet smells that I didn't know existed. The one bad thing I will say about their veg is that once you try it, you will never be able to eat supermarket vegetables again.

Although it is not as high-profile as automobiles, electricity use, or recycling, how our food is produced is just as environmentally important. With a local veggie box program -- or some other system of community supported agriculture -- you reach a win-win-win situation.

You win because you get the best vegetables ever delivered to you. Because there is no middle-man, the prices are comparable to supermarket prices. You actually know who grows your food, and have a connection with that person.

Your community wins because you are employing local small-scale farmers. You can also meet other like-minded people if you pick up your box from a neighbourhood delivery point. In some systems, the members spend a small portion of time working at the farm -- and believe it or not, this can be quite a lot of fun.

The environment wins because organic community supported agriculture can be very low-impact. Shillingford is within walking distance from my house, so not many food miles there. The vegetables are fertilized naturally through crop rotation (no petrochemicals in this food chain), pests are controlled biologically, and the harvest is gathered by hand. The farm supports us, but not at the expense of wildlife -- ponds, hedges, and woodland are integrated into the farm design to allow for co-existence rather than compartmentalization.

Most places in the US and UK have several organic vegetables box systems available -- try Googling it; you may be surprised at what you find. Most allow a trial veggie box so you can see if you like it -- so go ahead, give it a try! If you live in Exeter, I've already put a list together.

I Won a Bike

This week, I won a new bike. It was the first prize in a contest held by Easy Green Exeter, an organization that tries to make green living a little bit easier for people in and around Exeter. The goal of the competition was to implement an idea to make your work or home more environmentally friendly. My idea was to put up signs with visual instructions on how to double print on the printers in my building. Basically, every printer is a different model, and has a different maze of menus to double print. So I took screen shots of as many as I had access to, printed them out with written directions, and attached the signs to the printers themselves. Our building goes through hundreds, maybe thousands of reams of paper every year, so this could be quite a lot of paper saved. Signs are up on the three main busiest printers so far, (the ones I have access to) and signs will be going up on the few remaining ancillary ones, as people with access to them send me screen shots of the menus.

It's often found in the conservation psychology research that no amount of persuasion or cajoling to conserve does as much good as simply removing simple physical barriers. Local governments that collect mixed recyclables will do better than those that spend on big persuasion campaigns yet require citizens to sort their recyclables. Even whether people are provided a free recycling box or asked to find one of their own has a huge effect on recycling rates. Likewise, simplifying a complicated printing menu can potentially save many more trees than expending greater efforts in persuasion and awareness raising but without demystifying how to actually navigate the menus.

I received the bike at a mini-awards-thingie on Thursday, presented by the head of recycling for Exeter Council. It will be very useful, as currently I am walking 5 miles a day to and from work (yeah, bus prices went up 57% in a year - the exercise is good though.) There should be a story about it in the next edition of the Exeter Citizen.

Here is a picture of me on my new bike:


Well, ok, but everything besides the picture is true.

Environmental Strategy

I've just finished reading the consulation draft for Exeter's Environmental Strategy. You can too, if you want; just click on the picture. Given it is a government document, I'm pretty impressed with it. It's readable, comprehensive, and ambitious in its plans. The areas where it seems to really be on target are taking centralized, concrete actions. For example, the Council is installing 6 wind turbines on it's offices, along with photovoltaic solar cells, and fitting in green biomass generators at many of the public schools; all city documents will be printed on 100% recycled paper, printed with non-toxic inks; informal city gardens will be landscaped with native plants, grown locally and organically; fertilizer and pesticide use by the city will be heavily reduced; the old shipping canal's locks will be retrofitted with micro hydropower generators; all timber used by the City will be either reclaimed or from sustainably farmed European forests; all bricks will be reclaimed from old sites. There are 60 pages of recommendations like this, all with completion dates and where the funding will come from (most are self-funding; the green power will pay for itself).

Here is where it falls short: communication and public behavioural change. Helping the environment requires action on many fronts: technological adaptations, governmental support, and public awareness, to name a few. But all of these mean little without a change in public behaviour. Everything the Council is doing is terrific, but it is small pertaters without public change as well. This is where social psychology comes into play. Awareness is not the same as behavioural change. There is actually very little relation between the two, as countless psychology studies have found. Knowing ≠ doing. For example, the UK government gives money away to people to insulate their homes and take various green actions. It's very easy to get this money, and most people know this resource is available. Yet, they do not act on it. Paradigms and public behaviours must change, and actually affecting these changes is by far the weakest point for all organizations concerned with protecting the environment.

The research I'm doing is aimed at figuring out how these changes in behaviour come about, and understanding which paradigms work and which do not. I'll be doing some studies over the summer with the City Council, and have three that I am now doing in the University. Of course, I'll just be scratching the surface, but it really is surprising that most public awareness/behaviour campaigns are designed intuitively, rather than actually being based on empirical evidence or psychological theory. Without evidence and theory, it's all just shots in the dark. Even if something works, we will not know what, or how. To their credit, the City realizes this is a problem, and is eager to work on it. I'm pretty eager too. Research can be surprisingly exciting, and these projects will be a lot of fun. I'll continue to post updates as they progress.