Homestead mailing list

[EarthNSky <erthnsky AT bellsouth.net>]

Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:
> > > LOL, yeah, I tried not to take it personally that folks are ignoring me
>
> Bev, sometimes the best way to get ignored on this list is to post something 
> actually about homesteading.

I was actually just joking around, but thanks everyone for caring!

> After reading the link it started a whole round of discussion here, and it 
> has a great deal to do with homesteading and the prospects of homesteading.

I think so, too.  Even if you don't garden/farm like that, it is 
inspirational that sustainable systems can be made to feed large 
populations without modern day fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides, 
GE, etc.  It is a fact, because chinampas existed thousands of years ago.


> The chinampas are like a great number of other horticultural phenomena such 
> as the highland farming in New Guinea, the terraced gardens of the Incas, the 
> mesa gardens of SW, etc.  They were very skillful adaptations of greatly 
> increasing the fertility and productivity of the land but at the same time adapting 
> food plants and animals for a specific niche.  
>
>
> People look for that ideal homestead, and there was even one fellow I heard 
> rumors of that wrote a book about it.  It is well to look for the place best 
> suited for yourself, but not to take half a lifetime doing it.  Make your best 
> shot and then make a stand there.

I think the first thing anyone should do is to read about how indigenous 
populations lived in the area you choose.



> A study of the agricultural goings on in meso-Ameraica gives us a couple of 
> other insights into today's circumstances as they relate to homesteading.  
> First I'd point this out:  The Aztecs had plenty of gold, as did the Mayans and 
> Incans.  But among them it was never money, it was adornment.  Sahagun recorded 
> a great deal about Hahuatl society and preserved a few of the Aztec codices.  
> The basis of the economy was reckoned in corn, specfically in tortillas.  When 
> lists of things such as stipends for warriors and retainers, cost of weapons, 
> etc. needed an accounting or exchange rate, they were noted with symbol that 
> represented a number of tortillas.  This echos many other such ancient 
> economies such as the Minoan, Shang dynasty of China, and ancient Egypt.  Egypt had 
> plenty of gold too, but expenses were not reckoned in gold but rather in 
> measures of barley.  In feudal Japan the cost of things were reckoned in so many 
> 'koku' of rice, the amount needed to feed one peasant family for  a year.  Many 
> societies have had gold but did not ever use it as money.  This belies the 
> infomercial that gold has been a unrivaled storehouse of wealth for 5000 years.  
> It most certainly has not, and such societes as the meso-American, Incan, and 
> ancient Egyptian show, it is not universally recognized as having intrinsic 
> worth that could be translated into anything practical as we imgaine it could 
> today.
>
> That leads me to, and explains, the second thing the Chinampas teach us.  As 
> is pointed out in Bev's article, the Aztecs didn't invent the system, in fact 
> it might not have been Nahuatl speaking people at all.  The archeological 
> evidence shows that the areas where chinampas were the basis of agriculture had 
> several waves of "civilization" that came and went.  YET the knowledge of how to 
> farm the chinampas persevered.  What was happening there is better 
> illustrated and preserved in oral tradition just a little south of there in the Mayan 
> speaking areas.  It was not until this previous century that the "ruins" of 
> great Mayan civic centers were discovered in the jungles.  Archological evidence 
> reinforced by oral tradition tells how the peasant population was forced to 
> support the wealthy but when the land around the cities became exhausted and 
> drought aggravated the situation, the peasant families and clans simply moved 
> deeper into the jungle to farm new land and abandoned the cities.  The wealthy 
> (ass-sitters) starved.  Same thing seems to have happened in Mexico, when times 
> got dicey enough, the chinaperos simply withdrew to more remote locations and 
> the wealthy ass-sitters died.  Mexico city itself was founded by a group of 
> just such expats.   

I'm glad someone else picked up on that conclusion, too.  Today, there 
is generally one oddball person in every family that has moved away from 
 an urban/suburban lifestyle and knows how to garden, at least in my 
neck of the woods.  I just don't see the wealthy starving anymore, 
because they have the means to move and import.  They are resource 
hogs...gleaners...never providing for themselves...  In the old days, 
they died when the support was removed, but today, they would just move 
on to the next third world country to build/develop/exploit that..no 
collapse of the wealth, no cannibalism due to hunger...

B


--
"The world is my country, all mankind are my
 brethren, and to do good is my religion."
 Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)