Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

excerpts from Facing the New Dark Age: A Grassroots Approach
http://www.survivingpeakoil.com/article.php?id=facing_dark_age
John Michael Greer

Despite four decades of detailed warnings, industrial civilization has
failed to turn aside from self-destructive policies of exponential growth
and dependence on nonrenewable resources. At this point, stark limits of
time and resources as well as a failure of political will make attempts to
prevent the fall of industrial society an exercise in futility.
Individuals, small groups, and communities can still prepare for the
approaching crises by mastering low-tech survival skills now to lay
foundations for a sustainable society in the future.
..................

 If industrial civilization faces inevitable collapse, the crucial step
that must be taken now is the rediscovery and deployment of non-industrial
means of survival. A few critical skills have already been preserved or
rediscovered and passed on in this way; consider the case of the organic
agriculture movement, which has evolved efficient, sustainable methods of
growing food without petrochemicals using human muscle as the only energy
source, producing yields exceeding those of modern industrial farming.
Using such methods, a spare but nutritionally complete diet for one person
for one year can be raised on less than 1000 square feet of soil.(8)
Unfortunately only a small minority of farmers and a somewhat larger
fraction of home gardeners practice these essential skills.
................

Most proposals for dealing with the approaching crisis of industrial
civilization take a top-down approach, offering grandiose plans for huge
programs to retool the entire industrial world at once. As shown above, it
is too late for that approach, even if the political will to accomplish it
existed — which it clearly does not. But an alternative grassroots
approach remains possible.
....................

What would a grassroots approach to the coming crisis look like? It would
begin with individuals learning the skills needed to build a sustainable
society within the shell of the collapsing industrial system. These people
would revive the basic skills of postindustrial survival, learning how to
light a fire, grow a garden, treat an illness, and fight off an assault
without any help from the industrial system, using simple hand tools and
the capacities of their own bodies and minds. These skills would be
practiced and mastered, not merely learned intellectually, so they could be
used and taught to others at a moment's notice. ........