Essay: Wild Communities

It is nearly seven on a February morning, and I am in the garden picking tomatoes and greens to take back to the kitchen. We, my family that is to say, have been supplementing our grocery supply with our own produce for some years now, and the longer we build this habit of self-sufficiency, the more I know we must see how far we can go with it. 
All of the sentiment, you’ve no doubt heard before, about the satisfaction of growing one’s own vegetables, applies, though these days I am beginning to fear I am no longer doing it for the satisfaction, but that the garden is becoming a buttress, against which I prepare for where I think things are going. I regularly worry myself, as I type words with dirt under my fingernails, but that is the trouble with gardening - it brings about introspection. 
The preparation taking place in our garden, the literal spade work, has no doubt been agitated by recent global events, which have highlighted the precarious nature of our day to day lifestyle. From our viewpoint in western society, we have all felt the ramifications of the fragility of the systems that underpin our way of life - even if only as slight hindrances for now. Still, the impulse towards self-sufficiency was there before it all. I have felt this way for much of my adult life. 

Knowing we can supply ourselves with most of the plant-based side of our diet is comforting, but challenges me at the same time. Like many of us do, I can’t help it as I carry in a basket of fresh produce, but to critique the shelves in the fridge and pantry, questioning the cost of each item to our health, and that of the planet. How on earth is it possible that the can of baked beans I push out of the way to reach a pickling jar, find themselves harvested, tinned, artificially sauced (though not so sourced, at this stage), steamed, bound in plastic with their kin, shipped, shelved and shunted home by me, for less than a dollar? Now I am aware of economy of scale, but something is being lost here, and I don’t know if we are ever going to find it again. 
That aside, let alone a label that says organic, I am increasingly more concerned with the vulnerability this tin of beans represents in my life. When I take stock of our consumables around the house, if I cannot produce it - then I want to find out whether I could indeed do so, or perhaps live without it. Could I source this from my immediate community, or indeed my own garden? I know this sounds somewhat like the words of a romantic, but do not think for a minute that our family does not use the supermarket, nor shop online. For me, those aspects of our consumerist society are regrettable, though at this time largely necessary for the conveniences upon which we have built our lives. Of course, I can see how in terms of eyeballs and income, the online space has empowered artists and producers alike, including myself, and also been an agent for a lot of good in small communities. It has, though, put our global society and all it’s shiny things at our fingertips, allowing us to demand the supply of our desires be shipped around the world. Our demand has, indeed, been supplied, to the point of collapse. Can we challenge this pattern of behaviour? I think we should try, and if not for trying, why dream in the first place?

I was too far along in my journey of growing food, when the realisation that self-sufficiency, for the great majority, is a myth, settled in my mind. I since have come to the position that not only is it a myth, but a counterproductive one, encouraging like-minded people who could indeed support one another, to go it alone in their quest for a responsible, intentional life. What we need is community sufficiency. 
Instead of looking at the vulnerabilities of my pantry, I have learnt that I should look to the potential of my community. Who could I feasibly go to and buy, swap or sell with, tomorrow, to meet my needs and theirs? Of course, this is somewhat predicated on the size of your community, but it really comes down to with whom can you build connection, and reciprocal support. Many of our present communities are very much what are referred to as ‘food deserts’, with not an ounce of food produced within walking distance. Our personal concepts of food supply are disjointed and abstracted, to the point of tapping a button and avoiding any relationship with anyone remotely connected to the production of what we are eating.
Following pandemic lockdown restrictions, we are presented with the opportunity to reflect on our response.  For us, here in New South Wales, and for many in similar situations, we are reflecting on living with distance restrictions on our consumer habits down to the kilometre. We weren’t prepared for it, and neither were our supply chains, and on the whole, society largely shifted to online shopping to meet our needs (and of course for those things that are not necessary, but felt that way nonetheless as a means to quell anxiety and bring comfort). The distance based restrictions did change our immediate movements though, didn’t they? If we could explore these restrictions again, though this time self-urged, not imposed, and done with the intention of community sufficiency, I wonder if we could not only be prepared for the inevitable challenges of the future, but build more resilience into our lives and communities too. Alongside an uptick in online consumerism, there was a flurry of activity at the local grocer, bakery, and butcher, in those places, like our village, where that retained old way of doing things meant that these options still even existed in the first place. 

As I fill two oven trays with yellow cherry tomatoes, I notice the pears and zebras, among other varieties we have grown, and think about how different the shape, colour, and taste, for that matter, of these are from any tomato I have had from a supermarket. There is a soul-satisfying quality to knowing an heirloom. A hand-me-down. A connection to the past and simpler times. A wilder time. It brings me more calm than ‘retail therapy’ could. Growing food is, at its roots, a simple act and a simple pleasure too. The trouble is, home-grown has become a platitude. Much the way the words seasonal, local, and artisanal have been co-opted as marketing terms, diverted from the meaning they are grounded in, and used to fuel the system that paved over the original human-scale, authentic village market of artisans that they have been derived from. They need not be a marketing strategy, or way to signal a moral viewpoint. Seasonal and local should just be.
Is it time to rediscover parochialism? I’ve recently been reading a great deal of Paul Kingsnorth. He explains that though the word may be used to mean narrow-minded, at its etymology is the idea ‘of the parish’. Imagine at its heart, a community that is small and connected. It is insular, not in an unwelcoming manner, but in the manner of sufficiency, and likes being that way. Its inhabitants find calm knowing that the needs of those that live there, can be met there, for the most part. This sort of parochialism could be developed parallel to, or even within, our exisiting supply chains rather than a radical alternative. It would better prepare us for the inevitable challenges that will arrive on our collective doorstep over the coming decades. It would also make some amends to the unfolding damage to the planet, by reducing food miles, unsustainable growing practices, processing and packaging. It would also show us something else.
If we could reach a shared understanding and appreciation of our food being grown in our community, then it would become achingly clear that the survival of our soil, our waterways, our forests and biodiversity, is linked to our own survival. It would be the wild and the garden that sustained us. Arguments over fault and responsibility being that of corporations, governments or individuals, are like arguing over who should put the plug back in, whilst all of our taps are simultaneously running. That is not to condone institutionalised and systemic destructive behaviours, but to counter that changing a world-view to a here-view, with self-organising communities that truly take the care of their region into their own hands at a generational level, would go some way into escaping the trap of thinking that led to the formation of those pernicious structures in the first place. A wild community, untamed to fit the mould of globalisation and the institutionalisation of our most basic needs.

Whilst-ever our current supply chains exist, without challenge, we can continue to pass the problem down the line, so long as somewhere in the world still possesses the conditions to sustain us. The problem will compound with every kick of the can, but one of history’s lessons is that we keep kicking it along, no matter the warning signs.
Instead of growing our own food being a pleasantry or platitude, it would become, or return to being, part of the lesson for care of all life. It may have once been a sensical scripture, a way of living. It certainly seems a straightforward lesson, one that we have continued to overlay with our own complexities, that other life is, after all, what sustains us. Unfortunately, we have overrun any notion of sustainability, which in any sense has been strewn across the green landscape with the likes of local and organic. Sustainability was always a misnomer for care of the earth anyway, an anthropocentric lens m0re about comfort and living standards than our place in a great ecology. To be sustainable would only be a continuation within the paradigm of the same problems. To become wild would be to embrace regeneration. 
I imagine small bioregional communities existing like the wild places of the unexplored mists of time before. The story has been reversed, in that we must now explore the wild edges of an increasingly colonised, urbanised, and industrialised world, looking for the pockets of resilient real communities amongst the proliferation of precarious and soulless development. Wild places are places of ecology. Communities of life. Wild communities would be the parochial regions sanguine about their prospects, self-assured and self-reliant through virtue of thriving ecologies, though cognisant of what lies in the ominous glow of the machine beyond.

I’m up to the last of the jars from the cupboard, and still have tomatoes to spare. Their burnt hues of sunshine will brighten our kitchen long after we fold their leaves and stems into the compost, but for me they also represent going back into the mists. Away from the fluorescent glare of the supermarket and all the perplexities obscured by its halo. Retreating from the urban lights that, by now, seem like they cannot be turned off, and so never are. I will barter or give these tomatoes to neighbours, with no external systems required, just relationships in my immediate place. I feel that the more our actions can become wild of the machine and its inherent problems, the more resilient we will be.

Paterson, New South Wales
February, 2022