A Systems Thinking Approach to Community-Based Urban Agriculture | Kalen Pilkington | TEDxMacEwanU

We are all part of interrelated

systems

and this connection has fascinated me from a very early age. I remember growing up helping my grandmother take care of the garden and when it came time to harvest, strawberries were always my favorite and it was probably because of this rule for each strawberry we picked one too, now I know what you're

thinking

. This made our harvest considerably slower, but also gave me the opportunity to observe the many aspects that made our garden healthy, much to my grandmother's dismay. Soon I became equally interested in birds, insects, bees and worms, as I was the food we were now growing, I carried this fascination with me and, 15 years later, I was a wide-eyed college freshman.

I was looking to leave my mark on the world. I learned a lot in those 15 years, but my eyes were about to open, you know when you have one of those aha moments? I had two of them during that first year of college, the first occurred during an Environmental Studies course on

systems

,

thinking

that everything just seemed to click. In essence, systems thinking is looking at the whole instead of individual parts and pieces, really. we are looking at the cause and effect of relationships. Here let me use an example to demonstrate that on the left side you will see a series of independent objects if I add something or remove it it probably wouldn't make much difference, however on the right side you will see these same objects assembled into a system, together they are capable of achieve something greater than what they can do independently this time, if I add something or remove something, it would fundamentally change how that system works, but this is not our first experience with systems.

The hydrological system is one of the first we learn about in school, but every day we also navigate social, cultural and economic systems and the decisions we make impact and influence how those systems change and evolve, so after learning about all these systems, I was pretty sure I was suffering an existential crisis, you know, I was learning about these. complex issues and I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to take action, but I had no idea where to start. I was completely overwhelmed, and as I talked to my other classmates, I realized I wasn't the only one feeling this way as we went along.

As the course progresses, the more I learned about feedback loops, links and connections and I realized that we have created big problems and that is because there is a gap between how systems work in reality and how we believe that work. Our food system is a good An example of this is a system that has a high degree of human interference and that can be a good or bad thing, but in our case, because of the decisions we have made, we have created an unhealthy and unbalanced system. , one that we are so far disconnected from where our food is grown and produced, it's amazing, so this was my passion, this is where I wanted to make a difference, so I thought okay, through decision making, Maybe I can move this system a little, so I became a vegetarian now, this was a good first step.

I was definitely reducing my ecological footprint, but I didn't feel any more connected to my food systems than I had before, so I got together with a group of friends and we decided we were going to grow food. ourselves, then we started running into challenges, challenge number one, we lived in a high-rise dorm with no balconies, no green spaces and windows that were barely big enough to grow spider plants let alone food, okay, problem number two, it turned out to be the middle of winter. in Canada, so we put our dream on temporary hold a few months later.

I was at the local farmers market eating an apple strudel minding my business when I overheard two women talking about how they had baskets full of produce and they were talking about how they used to grow a lot of this in their garden, but as they grew They could no longer take care of them. I quickly jumped into the conversation and within 30 minutes found out that these women lived just three blocks from the University, so without taking into account the fact that I had just met them, I asked them if they would be open to me coming to work at their backyard garden and in return they would get fresh produce.

They quickly said yes and within a few months, by spring, we had eight gardens and five gardeners. The first year was a great success, it took a lot of work, but we were able to grow enough food to share between the gardeners and those who tended the gardens, so I thought we were finally making a difference, but what really interested me. That was the user experience, so one day I sat down with those two women at the farmers market for a cup of tea and that's when I had my second "aha" moment, they said, Kalyn, I love fruit. fresh.

I love that you are using our land, but more than that, I love visiting the gardeners and the sense of

community

this has created. That's when I realized that to have true Dunh sustainability, we not only have to tend to the garden, but we have to take care of it as well. one from the other, my scope was too limited and my vision of sustainability changed from one that was predominantly environmental to one that included social, cultural and economic components, all part of the same complex system that next year we will grow more food than ever before to add.

More gardens we added more gardeners and did things a little different. We began to learn about the culture of the residents who planted crops they remember growing up with and in turn gave us knowledge we could never learn on the internet. We also started. knocking on doors inviting residents to come back to visit us instead of worrying about disturbing them and since we had extra produce, we started partnering with a local farmer, who gave us a small corner of his market table where we could sell the extra food and earn some money reinvested back into the project we were all part of a system the natural environment gave us countless things, including solar rainfall and pollinators the gardeners gave us social stimulation and manual labor the landowners provided us with land and knowledge the farmer provided us with a medium to sell Our products and the

community

benefited by having access to affordable local organic products and their money was directly reinvested into food security within their own community.

This was an extremely local impact, but it was connected to the broader global goal of food security through local action. We were slightly pushing the system towards the more Ward system recently, the UN introduced the UN Sustainable Development Goals, these provide us with a global framework where we can align local action with global goals trying to address some of these complex problems. I want you to think about them. What is my piece of the pie? You don't have to take care of the whole cake. There are other people with passions and strengths in different areas who are there to support you and help you find what you are passionate about and take action.

Thinking is complex and these issues are interconnected and interrelated and must be analyzed comprehensively. We have these tools with which we can take solutions apart and put them back together synergistically to address shared goals and some of these wicked problems that we've had. created, we need to bring together people with different backgrounds, all contributing to shared solutions so that we can reach a more sustainable state by integrating innovation and biomimetic design. Imagine the opportunity for system-wide change we need to shift our thinking from parts to whole. from objects to relationships and from quantity to quality John Muir, the naturalist, really summed it up well.

He said that when we try to select something on its own, we find it united with everything else in the universe. For systems to truly change, we have to think holistically and support each other. and empower everyone to take action and find their piece of the pie together, we can solve some of these wicked challenges and remember that next time you pick strawberries it took a whole system to create that delicious berry, thank you