Meaningful Work; Part One

"You don't plan to fail, you fail to plan"--a good saying and one that I believe. There is nothing wrong with being spontaneous such as deciding to take a different route to work as you step out the front door, or changing restaurants on your way to lunch. In fact, I encourage people to do something unplanned.

When you have a day to yourself, which may be difficult to find given our overcrowded lifestyle, do something different, or just go out for a walk, no specific destination in mind, just let your instinct guide you. When it comes to your future and your Life, a plan will assist you to achieve your goals.

For a plan to work, we must understand what we are trying to achieve. In other words, our intentions must be clear. To ensure clear intentions we need a vision, a picture or image of where we want to go. This way we can create the map that will guide us there.

For example, if we are to develop a plan for a city, we need to first create a vision of what that city should look like. All too often, as we develop this image, we pay Nature and ecological principles scant attention. We compound this oversight by not paying sufficient, if any, attention to food security issues.

We do build an extensive and expensive network of roads and railways to transport food and other items into the City. We don't create a food infrastructure that will enable the city. Our visions does not include the planting apple or other fruit trees in public green spaces, such as parks.

Planning is carried out as though it is acceptable for people to go hungry or that it is perfectly acceptable for food to travel thousands of miles to reach our tables. If the planners were intent upon creating Healthy, Living Cities then they give some thought to incorporating community gardens, common spaces and livestock into the planning process. The living city is a sustainable one.

All too often the decision makers' eyes are focused so intently on the mega-projects that are often dangled before them that they can't see the alternatives surrounding them. The urban farmer can turn a city, that is dependant for its food supply on far away producers, into a self-reliant, thriving entity.

Urban farming is one part of an urban food circle. The Food Circle is a dynamic, community-based and regionally-integrated food systems concept/model/vision. In effect, it is a systems ecology. In contrast to the current linear production-consumption system, the Food Circle is a production-consumption-recycle model.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic