Another Life: The tallest plant in the vegetable garden just now is a spire of asparagus kale, stretching up head-high in a cloud of yellow flowers, writes Michael Viney
It is not any sort of asparagus, of course, nor the kind of curly kale your country uncle used to grow, but a rape kale, descended from the wild Brassica campestris, ancestor of turnips and swedes.
New shoots of asparagus kale put greens on our plates through the "hungry gap" of early spring - a meltingly tender, dark-green bite, packed with vitamins. Now the best plant has been left to run to seed; its summer pods will yield enough to sow the whole garden, though one square metre will do.
You won't find asparagus kale in the glossier kind of seed catalogue. It is special to the network of seriously self-sufficient organic gardeners as a plant that has all the right associations: hardiness, tradition and a peasant thrift defying global seed corporations.
But "self-sufficiency" has a curiously dated sound these days: whatever happened? Thinking on alternative lifestyles deals instead in terms like "ecological footprint", "sustainable living", "permaculture", "ecological building". Even the programme for Ecotopia, the two-week environmental festival to be held in Co Kerry in August, doesn't mention the words - though organic growing is well up the workshop agenda, and vegetables for the festival were planted weeks ago.
"Self-sufficiency", which sought to express an attitude rather than an absolute, died a little of embarrassment. It claimed too much for a lifestyle that has rarely gone beyond a voluntary frugality in the countryside and a lot of hard work in growing, rearing and processing food (I leave out "simplicity" - there is nothing simple about it).
Homesteaders - another word from the past - also shied away from the images evoked by a dozen paperback jackets of the 1970s. A kind reader recently sent me a jumble-sale find of Hovel in the Hills, by Elizabeth West. "A warm, funny, moving account of the simple life in rural Wales", ran the cover: a line that summed up a whole decade of cheerful and gritty initiatives.
The book's foreword was by John Seymour (long since settled in Wexford), whose book, Self-Sufficiency (1973) was a bible of the movement, and still sits on my own top shelf in a torn and earth-stained cover. He talked about taking the chance on making a living in the countryside and the way serendipity has of rewarding initiative and resourcefulness.
His theme prompted me to check on the progress of the Rural Resettlement Ireland scheme, launched a decade ago when city unemployment was high. It has helped some 430 urban families to make the move west, underpinned by grants and loans, and to date only 20 per cent have renounced their new experience, though many are still without jobs. Thousands more have been waiting in the queue, but changed times will, no doubt, have brought many second thoughts.
For those really committed to alternative living, one has to look to the uncounted numbers of Irish and foreign "settlers" (scores? hundreds? thousands?) contentedly hoeing their bean-rows in the backlands of the periphery, having made their own way into a total change of lifestyle.
A good many of these, it is hoped, will head for the Organic Centre at Rossinver in Co Leitrim on Sunday, June 2nd, for an afternoon forum (1 p.m. to 5 p.m.) on "Self-sufficiency in the 21st century". A series of workshops will tease out the essentials of the original idea, and what has happened to change and develop it.
The passing decades have brought one affirmation after another of a need for alternative, more self-directed lifestyles, and some link to soil and nature seems inherent in the drive to break free of the capitalist market.
The very word "sustainability" has roots in the new awareness of ecology and the human interaction with the Earth.
There has never been a stronger sense of the planet, both as the living organism of Gaia and the global capitalist empire, as the radical Internet community and the corporate playground. But along with this awareness has come withdrawal to units of intuitively human scale. In the so-called "civil society" of groups and organisations concerned with sustainable living, the visions are of largely self-sufficient communities, local food production, local currencies for exchanging local products and services.
Such independence of world finance and its recurring crises is always more readily imagined in a rural setting, whether of commune, eco-village or small country town. But the city, too, needs its local strategies and "green" networks, its defence of community and place.
Another new word in the lexicon of change is "downshifting" (as distinct from downsizing) - a deliberate move from the stressful corporate ladder to a saner, more frugal family lifestyle with more time and room for creativity and togetherness. When no job is forever, the only real failure is the sacrifice of choice: even slow food from one's own back garden can be a start to more drastic experiment.
The Organic Centre in Rossinver (www.theorganiccentre.ie and e-mail organniccentre@tinet.ie) is a national focus of training and the exchange of ideas. In Dublin, the recent Convergence Festival has dispersed to its websites: Sustainable Ireland, at www.sustainable.ie, is the portal to the whole "alternative" scene, from economics (www.feasta.org) to eco-villages (www.thevillage.ie). The Ecotopia details are at www.ecotopia2002.org.
Michael Viney welcomes observations sent to him at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Observations sent by e-mail should be accompanied by a postal address.