J-CAN rocks the Casbah at Mr Organic’s. Fuelled by spicy parsnip soup

 Last Saturday, 5 J-CAN members planted about 30 willow cuttings each to form a new hedge at Brian Adair's organic farm at Sion.

Brian got the 200-odd cuttings from Alcindo Pinto, who's "The Man" to supply you if you want to grow your own Wicker Man to sacrifice some climate change denialists in. We were half expecting that Edward Woodward would turn up, but… Edward Woodward wouldn't. (read that last sentence out loud).

As I’ve pointed out before we are only supposed to have the equivalent of 61 trees each  for our lifetime, worked out by the total number of trees in the world divided by global population. Although willow hedging probably doesn’t “count” as a full tree, it was nice to know that we had each planted enough to approximately add an extra 50 % to our personal global tree tally.

After we finished this community action, we retired to Brian’s office/shed for some warming and highly spiced organic parsnip soup and French bread and some of Maria Barnicoat’s chocolate dipped soul food to finish. Probably it was because we were glowing with that warmth that you get when you work hard outside in cold weather, but it all tasted incredibly good.

Brian, who’s a leading light in the Jersey Soil Association, and the Jersey organic movement generally, started Jersey’s first accredited organic farm.  He supplies the organic shop in Stopford road - he also grows around a million organic seedlings a year. Some of his plants are raised by other growers locally, who go on to supply Riverford Farm Organics with courgettes and cauliflowers. Riverford have probably the biggest and best known organic box scheme in the UK – and Jersey supplies it!

61 trees

This link is to a story that claims to show that we only have 61 trees each per person.
They did this by using NASA satellite figures to estimate the number of trees in the world (400 billion'ish) and dividing by the number of people (6.5 billion'ish).

If we take it as 61 trees per person per lifetime (say an average of 80 years) then that's less than one tree per year each. Trees are not necessarily finite though because with natural germination and forestry culture they can be replaceable but so are people, so to speak. The problem is the global human population is still increasing fast. I think we're gaining on the trees and not in a good way...

Apart from the obvious uses such as timber, wood stove fuel, paper and cardboard there are a myriad of other uses for wood products such as (excuse the American bias): baseball bats, barrels, books, blocks, benches, crutches, coffee filters, guitars, grocery bags, pencils, pine oil, beds, billboards, buttons, candy wrappers, buttons, chewing gum, cork, crayons, egg cartons, fruit pie filling, kites, linoleum, luggage, paper, pingpong balls, chopsticks (especially the disposable kind), rubber, tambourines, telephone books, tires, toilet paper, turpentine, xylophones and yo-yos (the wooden kind). Yes, I already know there are errors in this list such as that chopsticks can made from bamboo, which is a grass etc.

Although trees such as conifers can be mature within a human lifetime, hardwoods are nowhere near fully grown. Considering each human only has a piece of land 150 metres square as their share of Earth's land surface (do the math - it's not too hard), the above figures are yet more logical and mathematical proof that we are living in a dangerously unsustainable way.

Those local politicians who based their re-election on claims to be a safe pair of hands in troubled times, while pursuing business-as-usual policies without thought of the consequences, are caught in the spotlight of these hard figures as being dangerously irrational and irresponsible, not to mention ignorant of reality to an almost criminal degree.