I am excited. It has taken four years, three months and two days but I have submitted my PhD thesis on What academic sustainability theorists can learn from the lived experience of sustainable food practitioners in Southeast Queensland. Challenging academia in an academic thesis is, well, challenging. To do that, I needed to spend a lot of time developing, fine tuning, and justifying my methodology. Here is a recording of my rehearsal for a presentation at the International Sustainability Transitions conference in Oslo in June 2024.
There is quite a lot of interest in the methodology, so that has become my short term focus.
In the long term, I am more interested in my findings that we need a diversity of solutions, that we need to stop discussing what is the best, optimal, or right solution and accept a diversity of solutions, even though there is something wrong with all of them. Diversity leads to resilience, precisely because it includes redundance. Diversity is not efficient, but efficient systems are inherently fragile. In food systems that means we need to stop focusing on the role of technology in decoupling economic growth and environmental harm and nurture the local, grass-roots, nature-based solutions that offer resilience when the dominant, efficient systems fail.