Kauai food strategy needs sustainability thinking
Needing to reinvent our food system as part of the sustainability transition, we might expect a 2-day Ag Forum tasked with ‘strategic planning’ to address systemic issues within a sustainability framework. Yet, mebbe Kauai isn’t there yet.
Despite apparent consensus that we must grow more food locally, the focus this past weekend was more on vulnerability than sustainability.
From a synopsis of the state-of-practice, we ‘get’ that the desired outcome is “eco-efficiently producing food and non-food crops within local supply-chain clusters and socially-inclusive communities, resulting in enhanced cost, risk, nutrition, and entropy.†And, we need more practice thinking this way.
Sure, it’s a bit more complex to simultaneously consider all three spheres in our human support system across all six challenges in our ecological footprint.
Yet, we’re not thinking “strategically†(let alone sustainability) unless we do this, and keynoter Michael Pilarski only just got us started down this path.
Bear in mind that system failure is what prompts our discussion of sustainable farming and food, in the first place. This is no longer just about ‘nice-nice’ principles, but about survival.
We need to know (as Tim McGee notes) how to use “a ‘constructal approach’ to define an optimal ‘complexity’ for a polyculture†that points out which different species need to be grown when, and where, and is sufficiently well thought-out that it will confuse insects, keep nutrients within the soil, reduce water use, and even increase the yields of production.â€
Oh, and, if we close the loops, as in Mae Wan-Ho’s “Dream Farm“, we could actually generate more energy than we use in the food system.
Plus, our food system is about much more than growing food (as seen in the chart above showing shares of food system output).
To their credit, Ray Maki and the Malama Kauai organizers know this, and we’re continuing our work together to push beyond panaceas.
So, maybe we can take the pieces of insight from the Ag Forum and weave them together in a community resilience strategy that has a decent chance of succeeding.
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