Don’t Panic! We CAN save the planet by James Campbell

James Campbell has written a guest blog for us around saving the planet and how he began growing food in a bathtub! With inspiring stories and ideas, this is a blog that calls you to action!

 

I have become more and more worried about the planet ever since I started hearing about climate change. I’m not a full-on eco-warrior though. I’ve never been on a protest march. I don’t wear t-shirts with slogans on them. In fact, for the first half of my adult life, I was the opposite of an eco-warrior. I flew all over the place in aeroplanes doing my Comedy 4 Kids show – in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Everywhere. And for most of my twenties, I lived on fast food and takeaways.

When I was in my early thirties however, I decided to start growing vegetables. At the time, I was living in a small London flat with only a tiny paved garden. But one day I found an old bathtub, just lying on the pavement.

So I dragged it along to my flat and stuck it in the garden. The next day, I bought as many bags of compost as I could carry (one) and poured it into the bathtub. Once I had eventually filled the bath with compost, I grew potatoes in it. They were great potatoes.

The next summer, I grew carrots in an old chest of drawers, and chilli peppers in a tiny greenhouse I made from a fish tank. If I’d stayed in London, I might have ended up growing rhubarb in a goldfish bowl and sweetcorn in the toilet.

A few years later, I escaped to the countryside, where I got myself bigger and bigger gardens to grow more and more food. At the same time, however, I was also living in bigger and bigger houses. Eventually I realised that I needed to find a way to live completely differently.

I bought an old caravan and converted it to be off-grid. This means I am not connected to the network of electricity lines and power stations and pylons. After a year in the caravan, I upgraded to a tiny house which is slightly bigger than a caravan but a lot better built. It is incredibly well insulated and the roof is covered with solar panels which power pretty much everything.

It took a lot of time to make it into something you can actually live in, but now the tiny house sits in a field of unused farmland and it’s my home. My children come here at weekends and holidays.

We are planting trees and food forests and trying to create something sustainable and beautiful that will inspire others to help save the planet. There is even a little nursery garden where I am growing babies from the plants we have.

I like to try experimenting with as many planet-saving ways as I can find, like solar ovens, compost toilets and water harvesting.

What I have done is pretty extreme. Sometimes it’s been quite hard. Mainly though, it’s just been the right thing to do.

This year’s theme for National Share-a-Story Month 2024 is “A Feast of Stories” and I am here to talk to you about how food can help us save the planet.

Food is very important. It gives us all our energy for doing things and thinking things, and all our protein for growing stronger. Most people eat food three times a day. With snacks in between! I don’t know about you but if I miss a meal, my tummy starts rumbling and I can’t think straight.

If all the billions of people on our planet are going to be healthy and happy, we need enough food for everyone to eat.

But food doesn’t just grow on trees – although some of it does. Food has to be grown by people, made in factories or in kitchens and all that sort of thing.

And unfortunately, producing this much food has a bad effect on the environment.

Let’s look at my daughter’s typical packed lunch. Mainly, she eats plain bagels and weird pieces of chicken that come in a packet.

According to the packet, the bagels contain flour, eggs, sugar and various chemicals that sound terrifying. The flour comes from wheat, which is grown in fields. The eggs come from chickens. The sugar comes from sugar beet, also grown in fields. I don’t know where the chemicals come from.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Think again.

Firstly, the wheat and sugar beet are grown using lots of water, and probably nasty fertilisers to protect the crop. They also are most likely grown really far away. Think of all the carbon that is produced transporting it over here. The eggs, of course, come from chickens – but because the packet doesn’t say ‘free range’, that means the eggs are from battery hens. These are chickens kept in cages in such cramped conditions that they lose the ability to walk and their feathers fall out.

All that nastiness, just from one little bagel.

Farming in all its different ways has a huge impact on the environment.

· 37 per cent of all the greenhouse gases we create are made by producing food.

· 60 per cent of all the mammals in the world are farm animals.

· 50 per cent of all the world’s usable land is used for farming.

It wasn’t so long ago that most people ate food that they had grown or farmed themselves. Even those who lived in cities knew that the food they were eating had come from the local countryside, not from thousands of miles away.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT NOW?

The most important thing you can do is to BE LESS FUSSY but you could also try to grow a little bit of your own food. It is surprisingly easy to grow fruit and vegetables – and you don’t need loads of space. If you live in the countryside, you might be lucky enough to have a garden to use. You might even have room to create a food forest garden.

If you live in a town or a city though, you might not have a garden. But you can still grow stuff in pots, either on a balcony or a windowsill. Or if that doesn’t work, you can always try growing stuff in the bathtub like I did.

Hopefully you can make a sheet mulch and grow potatoes. You can harvest elderflowers from hedgerows to make cordial and shout at green tomatoes till they go red.

We are creating a food forest in our field. It’s a bit like a woodland, except we have replaced a lot of trees and bushes with ones that produce food. We plant raspberries and strawberries, nut trees, pear trees and cherry trees. We make sure we have leaves that we can eat and herbs to make our food tasty. We grow mushrooms and chestnuts which we can roast.

Food forests give us the best of both worlds. We get plenty of food, but without using any fossil fuels or fertiliser. And once we have got the whole system going, we won’t have to do any work at all really. We just turn up every now and again with a basket and get fed. For free.

Our food forest is called Thistle Doo Farm. Soon, we hope it will be place that families and schools can visit.

We are also helping schools plant food forests on their grounds – if you think this is something your school might be interested in, ask your teachers to look me up to find out more about what we do!

The only thing with food forests though is that you may have to try new foods that you haven’t tasted before. You also need to be careful to check everything you eat and make sure it’s safe.

In the future, some of us might be eating insects or weird space food. They say that insects are better for the environment than beef is. And there are now laboratories than can grow a strange kind of protein that looks a bit like meat. Or we might all be living on the Moon and have huge dome-shaped greenhouses full of food that we are growing.

Whatever happens, we are going to have to grow a lot more of our own food and be less fussy about what we eat.