The French Connection?
If we ever start to take our food-miles and travel-carbon seriously, we will find that Jersey is much closer to France than it is to England.
Many years ago I started writing a series of fictional letters from what was then the distant future. All kinds of environmental crises had come and gone, and Jersey was happily settling into a truly sustainable way of life. I called them ‘2020 Vision,’ which shows how long ago it was, as 2020 seems just around the corner now.
I don’t remember much detail, but there was one character called Sophie who kept all kinds of animals including heavy carthorses who could be borrowed or hired for big jobs like vraicing, where the electric tractor would be unlikely to cope. I also recall that the seawall along St Aubin’s Bay had been extended up so high that you could see nothing of the sea from the roads as you trekked into town.
The reason I stopped writing them was because I quickly realised how little we could be certain of about the future. Whatever I said life would be like in Jersey by 2020 would almost certainly be completely wrong by the time we got there. To set yourself up as a futurologist in uncertain times is to doom yourself to inevitable failure.
I did include a greatly increased relationship between Jersey and France. In times where our main form of off-island transport was by wooden sailing ferries, the distance our trade-links had to span was much more crucial. I found it interesting therefore, when the subject of dealing with France came up a couple of times recently.
The first was when discussing recycling at this month’s Jersey in Transition meeting. France is well ahead of England, we heard, in its recycling facilities. A bit of web research and a few phone calls by a good French speaker had uncovered several ways that all kinds of materials including various grades of plastic could be recycled, and also that perhaps the island would even be paid for the privilege.
France came up again at the recent public meeting to discuss a new zero-waste organic cooperative shop at Vermont Farm in St Brelade. The French, we heard — like other Europeans — have made enormous strides in organic farming practices, and a large range of good organic foods are now produced there. In a zero-waste shop you fill your own containers without any single-use plastic. Equipment for this, we heard, is also much more readily available from our European neighbours than from anywhere else.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 28 June 2018
