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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Permaculture - Farms for the Future
  • Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 14:56:35 -0600

I lived in a Permaculture design in Santa Rosa, CA when I was married to my first wife. From the second year, its food forest produced food. We planted annuals on berms of adobe clay that we amended with shell flour, kept mulched with straw, and watered with drip irrigation. Everything we planted grew like crazy. The marriage didn't.

I've seen the change that happens when people realize that part of Transition is inner transformation. When I got to Austin, local Permaculture was all about gardening, and I objected to that. It's part of Permaculture but not nearly all of it. Permaculture is about building functioning ecosystems which happen to produce food for all the creatures who make their living from that land. It's still a lot more esoteric than it should be by now. Stewart Brand, I think, said long ago, "We're as gods, so we may as well get good at it."

I, too, think we've run out of time. The national government wages wars for the oil to keep up our unsustainable consumer society. We sacrificed four thousand dead and no telling how many injured so ExxonMobil and Chevron could bid on producing Iraq's oil. When US fossil fuel interests got the inside track at Copenhagen, it was all over. We can't afford mitigation, but we can far less afford climate change.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, wondered this week when the recovery would start. Real recoveries are not jobless. The economic paradigm can't see ecological constraints.

My hope is that people proactively engage the process now to create the future they want to live after the economic paradigm falls and the ecological paradigm replaces it. Growing one's own food is, I think, a necessary element of getting through the crisis part of that paradigm shift. But it's only an element. The shift itself is the system, and I hope it can be consciously negotiated. We need to re- learn how to build community, and learn how to create cultures that support us in "being all we can be."

But the big deal is the crash that the failure at Copenhagen and corporate control of Congress almost surely guarantee. I believe community will determine who lives and who doesn't, when the time comes.

Smiles.
Tommy



On Jan 16, 2010, at 10:32 PM, Tradingpost wrote:


Well, Tom, I had to look you up at http://transitionus.ning.com/profile/TommyTolson . I've been around the block myself and seen all kinds of wannabes joining every new trend that comes along - but never actually DOING anything beyond changing their gurus or light bulbs. I strongly suspect you see a lot of that in Transition Texas. It's the only thing I see in permaculture, nothing to teach you how to actually grow your own food and use it.

I'm not against theTransition thing anymore than the Permaculture thing. I just think we don't have the luxury of waiting for people to take it seriously. I don't pretend to be a prophet because I'd hate to be wrong. In fact we're seeing the perfect storm converging on us now, not someday. $145 bbl oil triggered this Great Recession and all hell broke loose, and recovery is bogus. At Copenhagen most of the world condemned our stonewalling on climate, and we can't afford mitigation costs. We know these things, and we know there's a damm good reason the media won't allow the words "peak oil" or the folly of unlimited growth on the air. There's more chatter about crop losses in too many countries due to climate anomalies. It's all out there to see, but it's not on Leno.

What I'm doing to adapt to growing in little space under adverse conditions, without fossil fuel inputs matters very little, but there are millions of others working, and learning growing and community food security. I keep saying people like to eat. Food, water, shelter, transportation, community - when the necessities are threatened and store shelves are stripped bare, then people get mad and realize they're clueless and don't even know their neighbors. Thanks to globalization and just in time inventory, stores and gas stations have three days supply at best, and we see what happens in minor emergencies.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net


*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 1/16/2010 at 1:29 PM Tommy Tolson wrote:

Permaculture is a design system intended to consciously and ethically
place humans back into the natural order, based on processes of
observation and interaction, in a way that fosters ecological
resilience. Permaculture puts us in position to learn from nature to
design ecosystems that support all the life that makes its living from
the land with which humans in a Permaculture design learn to live.
Pattern literacy is a huge part of the design system. We seek to
design into the patterns of nature, so nature supports us - instead of
rejecting us, as climate change threatens to do. We learn to use any
given landscape as our text, so we read landscapes to inform the basis
of our designs.

Mollison and Holmgren created Permaculture based on their grounding in
Howard Odum's articulation of systems ecology. Odum's "Systems
Ecology" remains the single best Permaculture book in existence, but
it's expensive and written to an advanced academic audience: ecology
graduate students. Mollison and Holmgren are both forest ecologists.
"Environment, Power, and Society," Odum's attempt to reach beyond an
academic audience, is useful, in that it teaches human ecology and
systems ecology in a straightforward way.

Permaculture designers create systems, rather than limiting designs to
elements of systems, as reductionist education teaches. A system may
use legacy practices, or may inspire the creation of new practices, or
mix both, or something entirely different. The idea is to design so
that nature does the work, creating low-energy systems which enable
humans to sow once and reap many times, among many other advantages.
A Permaculture Design Course should focus on grounding students in
systems thinking rather than any practice, per se, save design
practices, as each landscape requires its own practice.

"Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability" by David
Holmgren is the single best Permaculture reference I know of
presently. Here's the blurb from www.alibris.com, where you can get
the book new for less than $22.00:
About this title: David Holmgren brings into sharper focus the
powerful and still evolving Permaculture concept he pioneered with
Bill Mollison in the 1970s. It draws together and integrates 25 years
of thinking and teaching to reveal a whole new way of understanding
and action behind a simple set of design principles. The 12 design
principles are each represented by a positive action statement, an
icon and a traditional proverb or two that captures the essence of
each principle.Holmgren draws a correlation between every aspect of
how we organize our lives, communities and landscapes and our ability
to creatively adapt to the ecological realities that shape human
destiny. For students and teachers of Permaculture this book provides
something more fundamental and distilled than Mollison's encyclopedic
Designers Manual. For the general reader it provides refreshing
perspectives on a range of environmental issues and shows how
permaculture is much more than just a system of gardening. For anyone
seriously interested in understanding the foundations of sustainable
design and culture, this book is essential reading. Although a book of
ideas, the big picture is repeatedly grounded by reference to
Holmgren's own place, Melliodora, and other practical examples.

Biodynamics is fairly commonly used as one element (annual production)
of a Permaculture design.

Smiles.
Tommy

On Jan 16, 2010, at 4:42 AM, A Deville wrote:




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