[Scpg] Speakers Pam Warhurst: Cofounder, Incredible Edible TED TALK

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

http://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2012-08-10&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Speakers Pam Warhurst: Cofounder, Incredible Edible
Pam Warhurst cofounded Incredible Edible, an initiative in Todmorden, 
England dedicated to growing food locally by planting on unused land 
throughout the community.
Why you should listen to her:
Pam Warhurst is the Chair of the Board of the Forestry Commission, which 
advises on and implements forestry policy in Great Britain. She also 
cofounded Incredible Edible Todmorden, a local food partnership that 
encourages community engagement through local growing. Incredible Edible 
started small, with the planting of a few community herb gardens in 
Todmorden, and today has spin-offs in the U.S. and Japan. The community 
has started projects like Every Egg Matters, which educates people on 
keeping chickens and encourages them to sell eggs to neighbors, and uses 
a 'Chicken Map' to connect consumers and farmers. Incredible Edible 
Todmorden empowers ordinary people to take control of their communities 
through active civic engagement.

"I wondered if it was possible to take a town like Todmorden and focus 
on local food to re-engage people with the planet we live on, create the 
sort of shifts in behaviour we need to live within the resources we 
have, stop us thinking like disempowered victims and to start taking 
responsibility for our own futures."
Pam Warhurst
Quotes by Pam Warhurst
“There's so many people that don't really recognize a vegetable unless 
it's in a bit of plastic with an instruction packet on the top.”
Watch this talk »
“Can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and 
culture? … Yes, and the language would appear to be food.”
Watch this talk »
More TEDQuotes…

Transcript

The will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual 
places. This is where I come from, Todmorden. It's a market town in the 
north of England, 15,000 people, between Leeds and Manchester, fairly 
normal market town. It used to look like this, and now it's more like 
this, with fruit and veg and herbs sprouting up all over the place. We 
call it propaganda gardening. (Laughter)

Corner row railway, station car park, front of a health center, people's 
front gardens, and even in front of the police station. (Laughter) We've 
got edible canal towpaths, and we've got sprouting cemeteries. The soil 
is extremely good. (Laughter)

We've even invented a new form of tourism. It's called vegetable 
tourism, and believe it or not, people come from all over the world to 
poke around in our raised beds, even when there's not much growing. 
(Laughter) But it starts a conversation. (Laughter)

And, you know, we're not doing it because we're bored. (Laughter) We're 
doing it because we want to start a revolution.

We tried to answer this simple question: Can you find a unifying 
language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help 
people themselves find a new way of living, see spaces around them 
differently, think about the resources they use differently, interact 
differently? Can we find that language? And then, can we replicate those 
actions? And the answer would appear to be yes, and the language would 
appear to be food.

So, three and a half years ago, a few of us sat around a kitchen table 
and we just invented the whole thing. (Laughter) (Applause) We came up 
with a really simple game plan that we put to a public meeting. We did 
not consult. We did not write a report. Enough of all that. (Laughter) 
And we said to that public meeting in Todmorden, look, let's imagine 
that our town is focused around three plates: a community plate, the way 
we live our everyday lives; a learning plate, what we teach our kids in 
school and what new skills we share amongst ourselves; and business, 
what we do with the pound in our pocket and which businesses we choose 
to support.

Now, let's imagine those plates agitated with community actions around 
food. If we start one of those community plates spinning, that's really 
great, that really starts to empower people, but if we can then spin 
that community plate with the learning plate, and then spin it with the 
business plate, we've got a real show there, we've got some action 
theater. We're starting to build resilience ourselves. We're starting to 
reinvent community ourselves, and we've done it all without a flipping 
strategy document. (Applause)

And here's the thing as well. We've not asked anybody's permission to do 
this, we're just doing it. (Laughter) And we are certainly not waiting 
for that check to drop through the letterbox before we start, and most 
importantly of all, we are not daunted by the sophisticated arguments 
that say, "These small actions are meaningless in the face of tomorrow's 
problems," because I have seen the power of small actions, and it is 
awesome.

So, back to the public meeting. (Laughter) We put that proposition to 
the meeting, two seconds, and then the room exploded. I have never, ever 
experienced anything like that in my life. And it's been the same in 
every single room, in every town that we've ever told our story. People 
are ready and respond to the story of food. They want positive actions 
they can engage in, and in their bones, they know it's time to take 
personal responsibility and invest in more kindness to each other and to 
the environment.

And since we had that meeting three and a half years ago, it's been a 
heck of a roller coaster. We started with a seed swap, really simple 
stuff, and then we took an area of land, a strip on the side of our main 
road, which was a dog toilet, basically, and we turned it into a really 
lovely herb garden. We took the corner of the car park in the station 
that you saw, and we made vegetable beds for everybody to share and pick 
from themselves. We went to the doctors. We've just had a 
6-million-pound health center built in Todmorden, and for some reason 
that I cannot comprehend, it has been surrounded by prickly plants. 
(Laughter) So we went to the doctors, said, "Would you mind us taking 
them up?" They said, "Absolutely fine, provided you get planning 
permission and you do it in Latin and you do it in triplicate," so we 
did — (Laughter) — and now there are fruit trees and bushes and herbs 
and vegetables around that doctor's surgery. And there's been lots of 
other examples, like the corn that was in front of the police station, 
and the old people's home that we've planted it with food that they can 
pick and grow.

But it isn't just about growing, because we all are part of this jigsaw. 
It's about taking those artistic people in your community and doing some 
fabulous designs in those raised beds to explain to people what's 
growing there, because there's so many people that don't really 
recognize a vegetable unless it's in a bit of plastic with a bit of an 
instruction packet on the top. (Laughter) So we have some people who 
designed these things, "If it looks like this, please don't pick it, but 
if it looks like this, help yourself." This is about sharing and 
investing in kindness.

And for those people that don't want to do either of those things, maybe 
they can cook, so we pick them seasonally and then we go on the street, 
or in the pub, or in the church, or wherever people are living their 
lives. This is about us going to the people and saying, "We are all part 
of the local food jigsaw, we are all part of a solution."

And then, because we know we've got vegetable tourists and we love them 
to bits and they're absolutely fantastic, we thought, what could we do 
to give them an even better experience? So we invented, without asking, 
of course, the Incredible Edible Green Route. And this is a route of 
exhibition gardens, and edible towpaths, and bee-friendly sites, and the 
story of pollinators, and it's a route that we designed that takes 
people through the whole of our town, past our cafes and our small 
shops, through our market, not just to and fro from the supermarket, and 
we're hoping that, in changing people's footfall around our town, we're 
also changing their behavior.

And then there's the second plate, the learning plate. Well, we're in 
partnership with a high school. We've created a company. We are 
designing and building an aquaponics unit in some land that was spare at 
the back of the high school, like you do, and now we're going to be 
growing fish and vegetables in an orchard with bees, and the kids are 
helping us build that, and the kids are on the board, and because the 
community was really keen on working with the high school, the high 
school is now teaching agriculture, and because it's teaching 
agriculture, we started to think, how could we then get those kids that 
never had a qualification before in their lives but are really excited 
about growing, how can we give them some more experience?

So we got some land that was donated by a local garden center. It was 
really quite muddy, but in a truly incredible way, totally 
voluntary-led, we have turned that into a market garden training center, 
and that is polytunnels and raised beds and all the things you need to 
get the soil under your fingers and think maybe there's a job in this 
for me in the future. And because we were doing that, some local 
academics said, "You know, we could help design a commercial 
horticulture course for you. There's not one that we know of." So 
they're doing that, and we're going to launch it later this year, and 
it's all an experiment, and it's all voluntary.

And then there's the third plate, because if you walk through an edible 
landscape, and if you're learning new skills, and if you start to get 
interested in what's growing seasonally, you might just want to spend 
more of your own money in support of local producers, not just veg, but 
meat and cheese and beer and whatever else it might be.

But then, we're just a community group, you know. We're just all 
volunteers. What could we actually do? So we did some really simple 
things. We fundraised, we got some blackboards, we put "Incredible 
Edible" on the top, we gave it every market trader that was selling 
locally, and they scribbled on what they were selling in any one week. 
Really popular. People congregated around it. Sales were up.

And then, we had a chat with the farmers, and we said, "We're really 
serious about this," but they didn't actually believe us, so we thought, 
okay, what should we do? I know. If we can create a campaign around one 
product and show them there is local loyalty to that product, maybe 
they'll change their mind and see we're serious.

So we launched a campaign -- because it just amuses me -- called Every 
Egg Matters. (Laughter) And what we did was we put people on our egg 
map. It's a stylized map of Togmorden. Anybody that's selling their 
excess eggs at the garden gate, perfectly legally, to their neighbors, 
we've stuck on there. We started with four, and we've now got 64 on, and 
the result of that was that people were then going into shops asking for 
a local Todmorden egg, and the result of that was, some farmers upped 
the amount of flocks they got of free range birds, and then they went on 
to meat birds, and although these are really, really small steps, that 
increasing local economic confidence is starting to play out in a number 
of ways, and we now have farmers doing cheese and they've upped their 
flocks and rare breed pigs, they're doing pasties and pies and things 
that they would have never done before. We've got increasing market 
stalls selling local food, and in a survey that local students did for 
us, 49 percent of all food traders in that town said that their bottom 
line had increased because of what we were actually doing. And we're 
just volunteers and it's only an experiment. (Laughter)

Now, none of this is rocket science. It certainly is not clever, and 
it's not original. But it is joined up, and it is inclusive. This is not 
a movement for those people that are going to sort themselves out 
anyway. This is a movement for everyone. We have a motto: If you eat, 
you're in. (Laughter) (Applause) Across age, across income, across culture.

It's been really quite a roller coaster experience, but going back to 
that first question that we asked, is it replicable? Yeah. It most 
certainly is replicable.

More than 30 towns in England now are spinning the Incredible Edible 
plate. Whichever way they want to do it, of their own volition, they're 
trying to make their own lives differently, and worldwide, we've got 
communities across America and Japan -- it's incredible, isn't it? I 
mean, America and Japan and New Zealand. People after the earthquake in 
New Zealand visited us in order to incorporate some of this public 
spiritedness around local growing into the heart of Christchurch.

And none of this takes more money and none of this demands a 
bureaucracy, but it does demand that you think things differently and 
you are prepared to bend budgets and work programs in order to create 
that supportive framework that communities can bounce off.

And there's some great ideas already in our patch. Our local authority 
has decided to make everywhere Incredible Edible, and in support of that 
have decided to do two things.

First, they're going to create an asset register of spare land that 
they've got, put it in a food bank so that communities can use that 
wherever they live, and they're going to underpin that with a license.

And then they've said to every single one of their workforce, if you 
can, help those communities grow, and help them to maintain their spaces.

Suddenly, we're seeing actions on the ground from local government. 
We're seeing this mainstreamed. We are responding creatively at last to 
what Rio demanded of us, and there's lots more you could do. I mean, 
just to list a few. One, please stop putting prickly plants around 
public buildings. It's a waste of space. (Laughter) Secondly, please 
create -- please, please create edible landscapes so that our children 
start to walk past their food day in, day out, on our high streets, in 
our parks, wherever that might be. Inspire local planners to put the 
food sites at the heart of the town and the city plan, not relegate them 
to the edges of the settlements that nobody can see. Encourage all our 
schools to take this seriously. This isn't a second class exercise. If 
we want to inspire the farmers of tomorrow, then please let us say to 
every school, create a sense of purpose around the importance to the 
environment, local food and soils. Put that at the heart of your school 
culture, and you will create a different generation.

There are so many things you can do, but ultimately this is about 
something really simple. Through an organic process, through an 
increasing recognition of the power of small actions, we are starting, 
at last, to believe in ourselves again, and to believe in our capacity, 
each and every one of us, to build a different and a kinder future, and 
in my book, that's incredible. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank 
you very much. (Applause)