Submitted 31 May 2013
The Caldera Environment Centre (CEC) would like to make the following submission to the Tweed Shire Council Rural Land Strategy.
Introduction
As discussed below, The CEC promotes a sustainable ecological ethic of housing development. We disagree with the concept of small rural subdivisions, and would promote an alternative paradigm of rural settlement based on the ideas of Multiple Occupancies (MOs). This would enable the ‘best of both worlds’ where land parcels are kept intact from renegade industrialists, local communities are fostered and population growth can be maintained. There are lessons to be learned from past experiences with MOs, particularly in terms of land management and self-sufficiency. However, that should not be a reason to limit them in favour of cloning city-suburbs (like what is being proposed for Mooball or at Mebbin Springs) in the middle of nowhere. It is important with this ruralising development that wildlife corridors are an integral part of the planning proposals. Effort needs to be made so that there is no further fragmentation or degradation of ecosystems and that the riparian zone is protected. If well managed, these corridors may be expanded with agroforestry and could provide the timber required to eventually replace the housing in the clusters by selective logging.
The idea of land as the “farmers’ superannuation” is an idea that needs to be reconsidered. Folklore has it that farmers will subdivide their land so they can cash in on their ‘super’ upon retirement; they become farmers of people, not cows. Such a concept is anathema to sustainable living, and will without enlightened oversight, inevitably lead to the conurbation and suburbanisation of the Tweed Shire, resulting in yet another, sprawling urban wasteland like every other area in Australia. Proper planning now can shift the Tweed toward a more sustainable future, moving away from current unsustainable patterns towards something unique and resilient merely by promoting Multiple Occupancies in favour of subdivision.
The Alternative to Traditional Agriculture
There is every likelihood that the sustainability of agriculture will not occur through the endeavours of broad acre farming, but in larger rural populations functioning more at a gardening level. It is suggested that it is only at this level that it is possible for a farming/gardening agriculture to not only become organic, but move to greater on-farm “polyculture” (or diversity), to reducing industrial dependence and to local marketing – all of which are the basis of sustainable agriculture. Industrial agriculture currently feeds and clothes the nation but is inherently unsustainable, relying on fossil fuels, fertilisers and other manufactured inputs; while the movement away from industrialisation, potentially feeds the nation sustainably in the future.
At a gardening level, gardening/farming blocks need be relatively small compared to industrialised farms. There are many relatively small blocks of land in Tweed shire that are too small to be profitable for industrialised agriculture, whose land is often agriculturally marginal, but that are nevertheless suitable for agriculture functioning more at a gardening level. Many marginal lands begin their improvement from being marginal when their soil organic carbon (SOC) increases. Increasing of SOC is more likely to occur with gardening farms than with broad scale agriculture that has mostly economically constrained itself to the use of artificial fertilisers. Agricultural development with Multiple Occupancy gardening farms potentially puts labour in proximity to weeds in both time and space, and enables increasing biomass to be used to increase gardening SOC.
The current planning of the development of Mooball with small (urban consolidation) blocks of land with sewerage and water reticulation added has been reductionist or non-holistic planning that mostly evades the fact that there is an environmental crisis, rather than beginning the process of planning for sustainability. Urban consolidation is a limited representation of what humans can do, and misses a planning opportunity about how humans can occupy rural lands sustainably. Furthermore, there is evidence that human social contact and community cannot function properly under dense living conditions.
Tweed Rural Land Strategy Forum: differences in style
At the TSC community discussion forum on the 15th May, in Murwillumbah, at a table sat at by two Caldera Environment Centre (CEC) representatives and including Council’s sustainable agriculture officer, Sebastian Garcia-cunca, it was perceived by the CEC members that most people at the table felt that when population is planned for further expansion from urban areas, it is done with an attempt at ruralising the development as it moves into rural areas. It was understood that this involved more things like chooks, vegetable gardens and perhaps orchards.
During the small group discussions at the RLS meeting, one comment repeated by traditional graziers was that things, from a farming development point of view, have to be done markedly different to what we propose here. It is suggested the major difference is that rather than the area of land being the major feature of these gardening rural MOs, it is how the people use it that is of major consideration. How that is actually achieved requires major discussion. Because this is a difficulty in planning, is not good enough reason, why gardening rural agricultures should not be planned.
Planning for Gardening Villages
In the ruralising of Multiple Occupancies, emphasis needs to be given to alternative technologies. Dry composting toilets, on-site grey water recycling/disposal and adequate water tanks to catch the gift in this area of a relatively heavy rainfall, are an integral part of the development. Alongside this land area necessary for chooks, vegetable garden and orchard need to be catered for. Self-sufficiency in water collection is a necessity of future developments in order to eliminate the “downstream”, or what Fritjof Capra labelled as early as the 1980’s, the “inflationary”, effects of not fixing problems at their source. In Tweed shire, this lack of planning for water tanks has in more recent times led to a dam debacle, in ironically and ashamedly, one of the most climatically, water-rich areas of Australia.
It is important that this form of gardening development does not intrude on prime agricultural land. At the beginning of developing a post-industrial society (since the population is almost wholly fed and clothed by an existing industrial agriculture system), agriculture and prime land needs to be preserved until such time as the gardening cultures prove they are self-sustaining in terms of successfully being able to feed and clothe the people who are engaged in them. To that end, at this time of the society’s agricultural history, all prime farming land needs to be preserved intact in order that industrial agriculture can maintain its viability as long as it is required.
Despite land area for this type of gardening development being relatively large, compared to the usual urban model, the costs of service delivery are reduced. There is no need for curbing and guttering or footpaths which are the creation of impervious surfaces, the concentration of water flow and its attendant erosion problems, and the prevention of storm water percolation to sub-surface water aquifers. Guttering acts to prevent tyre and oil residues being degraded by soil micro-flora before the residues are carried to watercourses. There is also no need for such extensive street lighting in rural areas; light pollution from Hundred Hills now stains the sky and further reduces star gazing options. As previously mentioned there is also no need for dependence upon centralised sewerage or water piping when alternative technologies are employed.
Blocks need only have one entrance road to a cluster of rural houses whose total population is approximately 150 (See appended article, Sociability and Progress.) This sized cluster of houses has each house’s agricultural acreage mostly facing outward from the cluster. The houses are clustered close enough for people to easily walk to visit each other, yet far enough away that a husband and wife arguing cannot be heard. In order to make these MOs cheaper, Council could insist that the road into the housing cluster, and its table drains, are maintained by the owners of the cluster rather than Council.
It is understood that such a MO could be a planner’s nightmare: there is no guarantee that householders will actually work the land rather than say, interminably and unsustainably cut the grass with ride-on mowers or find greater convenience in buying the economically cheaper produce from industrialised agriculture, rather than grow dearer food on their own land. Even the planting of these blocks out with primarily native vegetation, would not necessarily be the movement to sustainability compared to householders moving toward independence from the industrialised food supply. It is this greater agricultural sustainability and more intensive use of land that in the long run ensures more land is able to return to habitat.
Lessons from the First Multiple Occupancies
It is suggested that there are several reasons why current Multiple Occupancies are not currently successful at small scale food production:
a) They, like most Western people are rusted onto the cheaper food of the industrialised system, particularly if they are working “out” to maintain their economic journey and are near shops selling industrialised food. There is often too, an attachment to traditional foods that are grain based whereas diet-science appears to be pointing in the direction of fruit, vegetables, nut, seeds and tubers as human food. It still does not appear to be widely understood that it is the growing of fruit and nut trees that are the foundation of human food supply and they are comparatively easy to grow in terms of low mechanisation, compared to grains.
b) There appears to often be inadequate land set aside for the provisioning of fruit trees as the foundation of food supply for the occupants. People generally have no understanding of the area of land with mixed fruit trees that is necessary to feed a person. Currumbin Eco village for example, arguably, has not enough land to feed the occupants, and Lilyfield community in the Kyogle Shire, may have enough if it carries out major land clearing of native vegetation. M.O.’s ideally should begin on already cleared land.
c) Small scale food production (SSFP) is not considered practical or recognised as a legitimate lifestyle choice by contemporary society. Of course there is good reason for it to be considered illegitimate:
- SSFP is generally not economic in terms of the industrialised system. It is instead the production of the environmental and social capital, but in a society such as ours which is unbalanced in its emphasis upon the economic; the production of the environmental and social capital isonly currently paid lip service. SSFP is said to be illegitimate because it is not in the “real” world.
d) The legitimacy of SSFP has also been held up by planning generally failing to recognize the enormous environmental and social benefits accruing from decentralisation and potential self-sufficiency in development models, rather than the constant insistence on centralisation. It took a lot of effort to get composting toilets legitimised in the Tweed shire and the widespread use of rainwater tanks is experiencing the same dragging of the heals by planners. There cannot be expected to be an outpouring of gardening produce when the society generally assumes this gardening model is carried out by lesser mortals. The society’s regulatory bodies appear to not approve of self-sufficiency because recycling one’s own bodily excretions and the harvest rainwater, have to be fought for rather than seen as genuine indicators of progress in the midst of an environment crisis.
Conclusion
There is much to be learned from history, and repeating the same mistakes as other areas when proposing development of rural lands will forever tarnish what makes the Tweed unique in the present. There is no inevitability to the process of subdivision and urban consolidation, there is no ‘invisible hand’ of the market guiding the development of our future, and such ideas of continual and inexorable upward progress are a fallacy (what Karl Popper calls the Poverty of Historicism). The CEC offers an alternative perspective to the current development in Australian society that favours large houses on small blocks dependent on centralised infrastructure.
Sincerely,
(Signed)
Samuel K. Dawson
Coordinator, Caldera Environment Centre
With the invaluable assistance of Geoff Dawes, CEC committee member.
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