Michael Mobbs is a former environmental lawyer who spent nineteen years working on aluminium smelters, coal mines, water and infrastructure programs. During this time his interest in sustainability grew. Today his area of expertise lays in being a sustainability coach and speaker, sustainable urban farm designer, residential sustainability consultant and a consultant for major sustainability projects. He is an associate lecturer in the School of Engineering at the University of Technology in Sydney.
After renovating his inner-city Sydney terrace and making it almost entirely self-sufficient in energy, water and waste disposal, Michael Mobbs realised his house was sustainable, but he wasn't. While his house saves 100,000 litres of dam water a year, the same amount of water is used to produce ten days' worth of food for the average Australian.
In this companion book to the bestselling Sustainable House, Mobbs turns his attention to reducing the carbon emissions associated with growing, processing, transporting, selling and disposing food. With his own experiences anchoring the book, Sustainable Food contains practical advice on establishing community and backyard vegetable gardens, keeping chooks and bees, and reducing water usage, along with insights into dealing with councils, sidelining supermarkets and what we eat and why.
This book should be compulsory reading for every Local Govt. functionary and elected representative. They have much to learn and Michael Mobbs has worked hard trying to get them to see reason for a very long time now. The chances are that none will and probably because they imagine Michael Mobbs as something like an "ageing hippy". If that's how they imagine him they will have missed point the of the evidence and experience he has to present.
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Posted By The Coordinator to Tasmanian Sustainable Communities Network at 11/18/2012 08:38:00 PM
3 comments:
GOOD ON YOU MICHAEL MOBBS!
Launceston has been very bad about allowing food trees to be planted on verges. Apparently the people in the parks division think that kids will throw apples etc through people's windows. If they don't have apples they'll find stones.
Costa Georgiadis of Gardening Australia is showing the way but Tasmanians seem to be too lazy to follow his example. The again they may be afraid of the bolshy Council types who are very good at saying NO to just about everything.
More guerilla gardening I say. We ned to start sowing the seeds of discontent and NOW.
Let's face it, there are far too many busybodies on/in the Council who think they should make decisions for the rest of us...to judge us and our express needs instead of delivering them.
Worst part is, they cannot even manage to stay within budget and lose money on everything.
Hello Moira, you are kind of right but I'd call most of them lazybodies. Mostly they keep on saying no because its easy and it doesn't call on them to get off their bums and do something.
Council jobs are about the same as an overpaid dole recipients where doing something, anything even, is up to them. Most choose to do nothing. The ones who do ket kicked for showing the others up.
If they were to be paid on achievements they would be very poor and trying to live on less than the dole and sleeping under bridges. That is top to bottom.
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