Twenty years ago we were living on Texada, an island in British Columbia, and oddly enough it is very similar to where we are now, in Shetland. Same climate. More or less an equivalent number of people. An archipelago, and where everything to keep the people alive has to be imported.
Texada, and Shetland, haven’t always relied on getting what they need to live from elsewhere. There was a time when they were both self-sufficient, helped by having a much lower population and an unexploited landscape they could survive on, as long as they treated it with respect. They were sustainable. But all that changed when the settlers arrived. Who not only claimed ownership of everything, but encouraged more and more people to come and work for them, tearing up the natural resources until eventually they started to run out.
When we arrived in Texada it had got so bad there was a movement growing that was concerned with what would happen next (to those not rich enough to own most of the land). Whether they would end up starving and have to leave, should the supply of imported goods become any more expensive or stop becoming available. They even had an expression for it, FOOD SECURITY: the ability of a community to sustain itself, ie become self-sufficient.
Twenty years later this need has become even more urgent, and not just in rural Canada. Global powers are deliberately manipulating the supply of necessities for life, and the human population has increased exponentially, along with its demand for those resources. While the amount of land available for agriculture has dropped to accommodate them. Less countryside means less habitat for other species, especially those who are crucial to pollination and pest control. The rapid rise in population has also had an effect on our climate, making more and more of those areas most suited to large-scale agriculture no longer viable.
Yet, despite all these clear warnings, not once has the importance of FOOD SECURITY in Shetland ever been raised by our MP/MSPs, Shetland Islands Council (SIC), Holyrood or Westminster.
Very strange, don’t you think? Especially when their primary role/ responsibility is surely to serve the basic needs of those who pay their salaries. How is it I have been aware of the importance of FOOD SECURITY for the last twenty years, and they haven’t? Do they not see with their own eyes the now almost always empty shelves in the local supermarkets, or wonder why the quality of their so-called fresh food has become so abysmal, all since the start of the Viking Wind Farm project? Or that it is harder and harder to get a cabin on the lifeline ferries, because they are being used more and more by the energy industry, rather than for those who they were intended? That the imported workforce for these energy company projects are also eating our food, drinking and washing with our water, and getting preference at our rapidly collapsing medical facilities. At the same time a very small number of people in Shetland have been getting richer encouraging more tourists, all of whom also require feeding, water, energy and access to our medical services. If all that isn’t bad enough Shetland Islands Council is constantly banging on about how we need more people to relocate to Shetland, more homes and schools to house them, without a single thought about the impact that all this will have on an already crumbling ecology.
It’s all very frightening, and yet doesn’t take that much intelligence to work out what is happening here, that the real priorities of those in power (who effectively rule over us) are not about serving our needs, but making themselves and their oligarch cronies enough money quickly enough to escape before society collapses.
So how will this end? Well in the short term (the next ten years say), a few people will certainly be a lot richer from doing business in Shetland than they are now. The rest however, will probably end up forced to leave. Without a regular and affordable supply of food and other essentials, including enough potable water, energy and a working Health Service, they don’t stand a chance. But this doesn’t have to happen. Shetland is actually very unique. It has an ideal climate and enough land (if we don’t allow any more desecration of the precious ecology and keep the population at current levels) to feed and provide for everyone for a very long time, even with Climate Change. The question is, will people be interested enough to make this happen?
How to live off-grid 