Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

My response to permaculture is this:  In the near term the urgent need is for 
millions to learn to produce all they can in as little space as possible. 
Why? The perfect storm - too many people, not enough good land, abrupt 
climate changes, rising fossil fuel-derived fertilizer & pesticide costs and 
falling income, and an economy running on fumes.  And Peak Oil, but also 
rising prices in *anticipation* of Peak Oil. That's right. Nations hoarding 
and speculators driving up prices will be in the news. Full oil tankers are 
waiting to sell, lying off the coasts right now in anticipation of higher 
prices later. Even in recession now, global demand is predicted to outstrip 
supply by at least 10% this decade (except the IEA feels sure the Saudis can 
take up the slack. They can't). In theory a mere 15% shortfall can drive oil 
to $500 a barrel. The powers that be know this. They plan for it; the people 
don't. They know we are in the post-Peak "plateau" currently and long wars 
are being fought to control oil & gas producing countries. For obvious 
reasons they don't want to panic the markets.

The effects? Big cities where population is dense will soon need all the 
space they can get for growing cheaply, with as little high priced food 
transported from outside as possible. Towns and rural areas will need the 
same since big farms hog most agricultural land and their fossil fuel input 
costs and prices keep rising. In town and country many people need to learn 
efficient growing in adverse soil & climate conditions, simply because there 
are too many people to feed and so much land has been ruined by industrial 
agribusiness. Topsoil depletion and water scarcity are widespread problems in 
agricultural areas. Most of us simply can't pick and choose where we'd love 
to have our "permaculture" design.

I'm not foolish enough to draw up a timeline on this, but the direction is 
unavoidable. As in what we need to salvage some community food security. One 
of the sources for my comments was Heinberg's essay "Fifty Million Farmers". 
As for the "shift" you mentioned, my view is people will do what they need to 
do when forced to by economic conditions. One sign of this now is increased 
savings and less spending.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net


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

On 1/17/2010 at 2:56 PM Tommy Tolson wrote:

>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
>