[permaculture] Useful knowledge- was Re: Useful Phytochemicals
KNat
knat at sprintmail.com
Wed Apr 11 09:04:47 EDT 2007
H. Marshall wrote:
> Hi folks, I am sure many of you have seen this database but in case not I
> wanted to bring it to your attention...
>
> http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/
>
Thanks. This would be a good candidate to be put into multiple places
for the time free access isn't (with proper permissions of course.)
Information is being boxed fast. Libraries clear books based on usage
and soon the reference is not there to look up. I use old books and
reprints of found books with simple plans for the things we need within
our homestead. Takes lots of word of mouth to find them (and sometimes
simply dropping on me at a used book source.) We've spoken here, within
the week, of reading notes from lectures Steiner gave in 1820s to find
clues to our bee troubles. Many of my favorite books are discards
(favorite defined here as most useful in answering a question so I can
go on with my intention.) Electronic libraries are doing the same.
Simplifying by eliminating "unused" references.
I enjoyed travel w some ethnobotonists, including Duke, and attest the
passage by word of mouth is the source of much of this. I was startled
awake at that time that the next generation wasn't going to know any of
what we were learning. There were no apprentices in those villages. As
cultural value is lost, meaning is also. We must store more than what we
currently find meaningful. (my favorite example was, in Peru, one young
mother with a very ill child who had a kitchen herb garden outside her
home, planted by neighbors/family with the plants traditional to give a
young bride. A traditional gift of housewarming she herself had planted
for others to honor their weddings. She did not know that everything she
needed to cure her baby was growing by her back steps until we told her.
No one had valued that knowledge in her life exposure and the plants had
become either superstition or custom. Kept there and available by custom
not meaning. Her child might not even have planted/tended those plants.)
I look at Duke's database and think of preserving rainforest knowledge.
Attempts to have money go to the jungle not the pharmaceutical company
pirate (or not just the pirate, I actually kinda like pirates.)
Unaddressed funding to learn to value, before extinction, of plants with
many answers. And the need to record the knowledge and preserve it!
Using models that worked for people for the longest time- a tribe or
village needs to find and support a next generation to shadow and learn
knowledge that requires touch, taste, osmose, as well as reading and
writing. Time devoted to preservation not just development. One of my
inspirations is the number of you finding supports and offering your
mind receptacles for techniques of developing more sustainably. But I
feel the need for more storehouses and maybe not just electronic versions.
Search engines maintain links based on commercial gain.
My search engines already fail. And our history and old research is
within storage media most of you would not recognize even if you had a
machine to read it.
Peace,
Kathyann
ps lol I suddenly recall my grandfather concerning the library would one
day only contain Reader's Digest Condensed Books.
(history buffs- book publishers and educators (textbook publishers) made
sure that didn't happen, quite deliberately.)
More information about the permaculture
mailing list