Re: Talking about Food and CG--Mile Square Living

S* G*

Another fun thing might be to get neighborhoods to take a Mile Square 
Living inventory.

Vicki Robin did this in her neighborhood as a personal exercise.

What you do is locate your house at the center of your block, and then go 
out a mile in each
direction(N,S, E, W).  Then connect these 4 points into the sides of a square.
So you get a block that is 2 miles on each side.  The space inside the block
includes the points that you could walk to easily in 20 minutes or so or 
less from your house.
Total area equals 4 square miles.  (I realize the corners of the block are 
more than
a mile from the house.)

Then the object is to take a census of what is available in the block.  Can you
(or how can you) meet all(most all) of your needs within the Mile-Square Block?

Besides making a person very aware of what is available within a sustainably
reachable distance, it also seems like it would be a really good test for 
someone
choosing a new place to live.

A couple blocks worth of neighbors could do this as a group exercise while
looking at what is needed in the neighborhood or what might be in excess.
And then use this info to either start new businesses/projects, or work to 
attract those sorts of
businesses/projects that the neighbors would like to have closer access to.

For your purposes, you could do a complete inventory, or you could just look
directly at food and garden related businesses/projects.  Although...... 
one could make
a case for everything being related to the garden :-).  For starters it 
might be best
to focus on the very obvious food-garden things that you mentioned unless
  your main goal is to turn the area into  a large regional Permaculture 
garden.
There is a neighborhood in the US that had a permaculture team come in
to teach permaculture and help work up an area plan, so there are beginnings
of looking at the wider picture if that is what you are looking for.

Sharon
gordonse@one.net

______________________________________________________
The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org

To post an e-mail to the list:  community_garden@mallorn.com

To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription:  https://secure.mallorn.com/mailman/listinfo/community_garden