The food we eat every day has a high cost on our environment, as the soil gets depleted by highly controlled non-stop agriculture trying to supply food for billions of people and livestock. The main crops include barley, corn, rice and wheat which by itself is responsible for using over 230 million hectares of land. Therefore, the need to takeover non-agricultural land seems like the logical thing to do in order to keep feeding the world.
Keeping up with the demand for a continual supply of food while growing crops on top of tired and depleted land is an ongoing challenge and brings with it an increased need for chemicals and pesticides to maintain high outputs. This modern and increasing agriculture demand can only stop or at least significantly reduce if we as consumers decide to be earth conscious and start growing our own food.
This means that we have to come together in our communities, our neighbourhoods, otherwise it’s going to be exhausting and almost impossible to grow a large variety of vegetables and fruits to supply our yearly needs. And this will be even more important for the people living in the cities where green space might be very little to zero, then the importance to create urban edible gardens has to become a priority for this topic, checking if there are available allotments around you or if there’s a need to get a license for a new one.
The call for action is here, with the uncertainty of how things will be at the other side of the Covid19 crisis, I encourage you to start growing your own food. It doesn’t really matter if things go back to normal by the end of this big pause in the economy, whether we are standing on fragile ice to see economies collapse or not; we have learnt enough and seen enough to understand we cannot pretend that the global ecocide has nothing to do with us and keep living as usual.
There is no easy solution for what we are currently facing, and the only thing we know for sure is that there’s an urgent need for a change in our ways if we want to keep alive our ecosystems. I think we are fortunate to be part of an era where there’s more awareness and consciousness about our world, there’s for sure a higher understanding of how we are all interconnected and that our lives depend on such tiny events like sandstorms that will enrich the seas, or even tinier but dramatically important like the existence of the bees to keep propagating our food.