I’m a huge fan of Wilding and the Estate’s pioneering conservation initiatives, so I was curious to see the project close-up.
I joined a tour of the brand new re-wilded walled garden, and heard the transformation story first hand from the Head Gardener and some of the team.
I heard a tale of a classic, large lawn (read: green desert) inside the old brick walls of the Estate, re-imagined into a new biodiverse and climate change-ready ecosystem.
Then I took a turn around the newly re-wilded walled garden and saw a mediterranean planting scheme – many from the mint family – scattered naturally throughout a newly undulating gravel terrain.
The heavy clay soil of East Sussex I learned, bakes rock hard in the summer sun then turns to sodden, heavy mud in the winter making the terrain incredibly challenging to both farm and tend as a gardener.
Designing with not against these challenges is the key here.
With the magic addition of gravel built on and mixed with recycled concrete and aggregate recovered from old buildings on the Estate, you get good drainage and the right conditions for the right plants to thrive.
As the path meanders through terracotta hues, I saw small mounds and ponds carved to create a range of different and unique habitats.
Everything was designed with this mindset: create the space and a diversity of insects, plants and animals will arrive and thrive. And when they do, everything mingles and builds a balanced, resilient garden ecosystem.
I’m eager to see what this newly re-wilded walled garden looks like in 5 years when it’s truly established. And I’m eager to hear about the experiments, failures and lessons that will inform and evolve the team’s thinking and approach each year.
I get the sense that Knepp’s owners do not take their immense privilege lightly. If you were given the job of caretaking such a huge Estate in the context of the climate emergency and global biodiversity loss, would you do the same?
The garden team’s passion, friendliness and knowledge was next level. My head’s been buzzing with ideas ever since. Inspirational.
I’d like to share some thoughts about applying Permaculture in a digital or technology context, because I find it super relevant and useful as a framework for helping your team, product or organisation become more sustainable.
I recently did a talk at Agile Cambridge in June 2022 and I covered this topic while drawing parallels to Agile ways of working. Below are some of the main points I made in that session and some themes I’ve been learning about recently.
Participants in my workshop at Agile Cambridge and me, top left.
Take a sustainability and Permaculture-first approach
When I’m not learning about sustainability and Permaculture, I typically work as an Agile Consultant with various digital and tech teams across the UK.
These days I like to see it that way around – as in, sustainability first. We are after all in a Climate Emergency.
I’d wager that moving to Net Zero is going to be the biggest transformation organisations face over the next 20-30 years. So if you specialise in digital and organisational transformation like me, IMHO you need to get on board and start that work, stat.
Here’s a sobering stat I learned thanks to Chris Adams at The Green Web Foundation:
The tech sector’s emissions is about the same as the entire shipping industry, or the Carbon footprint of Germany or Canada, and about the same as all combined emissions of commercial and heavy industry in Europe. It’s big.
We in tech like to think that Digital Transformation initiatives and Digital-first strategies are doing good for the world, but there is actually a decent dose of harm we’re doing to the biosphere with every new product released or byte of data stored.
The internet is the biggest machine in the world and it mostly runs on fossil fuels.
– Chris Adams
Technologists and, well, everyone in this sector desperately needs to learn more about what it takes to create a fossil free internet and start taking action.
A fossil-free internet – that’s the goal and the work to be done. We also need to consider the multifaceted topic of Climate Justice in a digital and tech context… but that’s a post for another day.
Learning about the Principles & Ethics, wearing the Permaculture goggles
Since learning about the Permaculture ethics and principles and doing a PDC and Diploma, I’ve truly put on the Permaculture goggles. I see Permaculture everywhere. Just ask my friends about my WhatsApp spam, poor souls.
And it’s so incredibly relevant in a work or digital and tech context too, so I’m really keen to share it with my work communities at every opportunity.
The Ethics
A slide from my recent conference session. The Permaculture Ethics are Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share.
Balancing care for the earth (our entire biosphere), care for people and the fair share of our planet’s resources is a great challenge and a useful concept. Is our product or organisation doing harm to planet or people? Are we taking more than our fair share? These are just some of the questions that come to mind when considering the Permaculture Ethics.
The Principles
A full list and description of the Permaculture Principles can be found here, but in my recent conference session I chose a select few to introduce to my workshop participants.
The Permaculture Principles I selected for my conference session.
There are many ways to be inspired by these principles in a digital or tech context. They’re great thinking tools to challenge us to act or to generate ideas.
An example action for Cycling of Energy, Nutrients and Resources + Produce no Waste: using the heat generated by server farms to warm a greenhouse.
I’m collecting and learning about more and more ways to put these Permaculture Principles into practice in a digital and technology context, and in a work context in general.
I plan to share some more of these examples and actions and deep dives into the principles soon.
In the mean time, if you’re interested in exploring the possibility of running a workshop like the one I described in this post for your team or organisation, do get in touch. (I’m offering these workshops for free at the moment).
Eliminating or reducing your waste (rubbish/garbage) is cheaper, helps conserve resources and helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not a new concept*. Even if you’re eliminating waste just a little bit, if enough of us do it, we’re actually starting to make a huge difference.
Examples of living with zero waste
While venturing down a random, internet browsing rabbit hole a few years ago, I’ve found and been inspired by people like Oberon and Lauren Carter from Spiral Garden in Hobart, Australia.
The Spiral Garden family practically produce no waste at all, they make it look so easy and are living examples of how to tread lightly on this earth. I highly recommend watching this short piece by Happen Films on their family and inspirational way of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5ijPk5_8pM
While the Spiral Garden folks are amazing examples of how living almost completely ZERO waste is possible, it seems like such a difficult and radical change for most people.
Produce less waste in the mean time
Producing less waste – especially plastic waste – is something I’ve been actively working on for a few years now with small steps and changes to the things I buy and where I shop.
But with each emergency cucumber I buy for my daughter from the local shop that comes covered in plastic, I start to despair** that I’ll never quite make it to a utopian zero waste state.
But don’t give up! Your small efforts are still mega helpful and impactful!
Producing less waste also makes a huge difference
If like me, the occasional single-use plastic guilt plagues you, you’ll be relieved to know the following: it’s still incredibly impactful and important to be even a little bit zero waste. Don’t give up.
Imagine an average person creates 1000 pounds of waste per year. If 5000 dedicated zero wasters produce a maximum of 90% waste, in total they’d avoid sending 4.5 million pounds of waste per year to landfill.
But if 1 million people make small changes so they eliminate 10% of their waste, in total they’d be diverting 100 million pounds of waste per year from landfill. So that’s 95 million pounds more than being perfect zero waste super-humans.
The bigger impact will happen when millions of us make small, consistent changes. Let’s forget about trying to be perfect and look at waste reduction ideas.”
If you’ve ever come across a management consultant, you’ll know they’re often looking to identify and eliminate different types of ‘waste’ in an organisation, manufacturing plant or whatever it is they’ve been brought in to analyse. That’s because finding and reducing different types of waste will typically increase productivity and ultimately make companies more profit.
The old adage ‘waste not want not’ also comes to mind.
Don’t fall into the ‘it’s all my fault’ despair trap.
Let’s not forget there are some big, systemic and policy-level changes that could be made to fix this.
Let’s stop proliferating the lie that creating waste is all the consumer’s fault. We could be banning single-use plastic nationally, or mandating to cover all food products in compostable packaging by X timeframe.
Exciting times in our house this month: we have adopted some new wiggly worm friends. Yes, this is what gets me excited these days and I’m going to (ever so slightly embarrassingly) admit it.
Here’s a short tiktok video of my daughter and I unboxing our new home wormery called a WormBox, last week:
A leaflet that came with my wormery kit claims food waste makes up 20-30% of our household waste, and that feels about right at my place.
I’ve heard food waste can produce methane at processing centres and in landfill sites and these harmful greenhouse gases are linked to global warming. I’d like to learn more about this – especially where and how my local Council food waste is processed. I will share what I learn in a future post.
If I can reduce my share of that methane, plus turn that food waste into something useful to use at home, I’ll be taking another small step towards a sustainable life.
I’ve been meaning to set-up an effective composting system to feed my garden for a while and one of the fastest and nutrient-packed ways to compost (most of) my home food waste is to set-up a home wormery.
Composting with the help of wiggly friends is known as Vermicomposting, whereas the breeding of worms for this purpose is called Vermiculture.
Vermicomposting is faster than traditional composting
If you’ve ever tried composting your food waste in a standard garden compost bin, you might like me be surprised to find the process painfully slow.
Not so long ago, I opened the bottom hatch of a compost bin I’d been dutifully feeding in my backyard. After a full year, I was expecting to harvest amazing compost for my spring seedlings, only to sift through egg shells, cabbage leaves and grass clippings still looking close to original condition.
I later learned that I need to layer brown (cardboard, dry grass) and green (food waste, green cuttings) materials, build enough thermal mass (make it big and hot enough) and give this traditional compost method some time to work. Quite a lot of time.
Vermicomposting is much faster. The speed will depend on how warm you keep the red wigglers (ideally between 15-25 C), the amount of aeration and the size/volume of food you feed them. Cutting food waste into small bits will really help.
Most sources I’ve researched agree that it will take between 2 to 3 months for your food waste to totally break down in a vermicomposting system, and the resulting soil will be much richer in nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium than your standard de-composition garden compost bin.
I’m still learning about how to keep my worms happy (there were a few escapees over the first few days, which is apparently common as they settle in) and how to keep the vermicomposting conditions optimal.
I’ll keep you posted on my progress and what I learn from friends with wormeries. I hope to share some of their stories in the coming weeks.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the climate emergency, so I’ve started this blog to lift my spirits and share ways people are taking action and making change happen.
Sometimes I find myself thinking about all the things I’m personally failing at. Like the amount of items that somehow, unconsciously find their way into my home covered in single use plastic.
Last year I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts, How to Save a Planet and their episode ‘Is your Carbon Footprint BS’. They quoted a stat that reframed the issue for me: an average American’s carbon footprint is 15 tons, and overall the global carbon emissions is 50 billion tons. This means the average American’s contribution to the total global problem is 0.0000000003.
Even if you are the perfect, zero-waste, low-carbon footprint human being, that doesn’t change the world unless you do something bigger than yourself. Because if you disappear tomorrow, we would still be facing exactly the same magnitude of climate crisis because you’re just a rounding error to global carbon emissions.
Given my new understanding of my own minuscule impact, I more often find myself despairing at all the work our society needs to do urgently to address global heating.
Like shifting to renewable, clean energy sources to power our homes and transportation. Like drastically reducing industry’s reliance on fossil fuels. Like governments outright banning single use plastic. Like transforming agriculture and improving soil health. Like setting more ambitious targets for a carbon zero future…
The list feels endless. The politics are often nasty and complicated. The subject is divisive. My thoughts can wander down that rabbit hole and suddenly the problem feels huge and hard. It’s a bit of a downer.
But then I try to remind myself there are tonnes of inspirational ways people are already making change happen. From little things, big things grow. There are easy, small, impactful things I can do now that can (maybe, possibly) turn into bigger, impactful things later. We’ve got to start somewhere.
There are amazing people around the world who are transforming their homes, communities, cities and countries. These initiatives can start as very small changes – maybe just in one’s own backyard or community group – then have great ripples of influence. If enough of us make a change and take action, the effect is felt in the offices of policy makers and in the strategy rooms of big fossil fuel consumer companies. Systems are changing, one ripple at a time.
To avoid that feeling of climate emergency despair, I want and need to feel like I’m working on making a difference every single day.
So I’m setting myself a mission in 2022 to find inspirational people who are making change happen and share their stories. I want to learn how I can transform my own world and share that journey, but most importantly I want to learn how I can make changes that ripple out and have an impact greater than just myself.
I want to share these stories with anyone else who’d find it helpful to follow along too. So here we go…
