Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Richard is well on the way to feeding his family from the Permaculture 
design in what was his yard in Santa Rosa.  As the design matures and he 
and Janet tweak it as its feedback loops advise, it provides for them.  
Richard walks his talk.

Einstein, way back when, advised vegetarianism to "save the world." I 
didn't make it up.  Nor did Richard.  The UN body that produced the 
paper about going vegan to save this climate regime (since our national 
governments are all corrupted by corporatist - the authoritarian 
combination of governmental power with corporate power -money) came from 
all over the world.  No one is coming to save us from our ignorance of 
natural process.  We must save ourselves.  Veganism is a means by which 
we consciously engage the process of life and reclaim our colonized 
volitional potentials from the corporatist mind control industry.  I'm 
not talking about the few who have learned to live with the land without 
damaging it.  I'm talking about the multitudes who remain clueless about 
the ecological crisis we are deeply into now on Earth.

Livestock is the only thing that approaches plowing in sheer ecological 
destruction wrought by the farmers of western culture, who made deserts 
and moved on until there was nowhere to go.  It seems to me that 
situation came about from raising livestock for money rather than 
subsistence.  Agriculture colonized the land, enslaved it in order to 
produce a surplus to support the priests and soldiers required by the 
owners (banksters) of the surplus in order to maintain Master status.  
Thus the evil economic paradigm was born expressly to attempt dominion 
over nature.  How is that working out for us?  Making a yield isn't the 
dumb part.  Attempting dominion over nature - which produced our species 
- is.

More and more Permaculture oases are sprouting in the deserts of the SW 
US on down into Mexico as Scott Pittman and his crew get folks trained 
in design skills for drylands Permaculture.  Putting massive amounts of 
organic matter into pure sand within a few years forms a lens of mostly 
rainwater that supports trees.  These designed ecosystems are there now, 
supporting folks who live with them, tweaking them into increasing 
fullness.  I don't know how many, if any, support livestock beyond 
chickens and rabbits.

I think there are ways to integrate livestock into human food production 
systems that sustain themselves.  Chickens and rabbits are Permaculture 
animals, easiest to integrate and maintain in ecosystemic balance.  
Hoofed animals are harder to integrate, though not necessarily 
impossible, as Holistic Management shows.  Chicken and rabbit "wastes" 
are easiest to add to the natural closed cycles of a successful design.

The bottom line is, I think, that, unless we are fortunate enough to 
know enough pattern literacy to symbiotically join existent functional 
ecosystems, we design and build complete ecosystems with ourselves and 
our families designed, as symbionts, into the system from the beginning, 
if we, from family to city scale, are to survive industrialism's pending 
collapse.  As Stewart Brand said, we are as gods so we might as well get 
good at it.

Smiles.
Tommy

On 6/4/10 10:30 AM, Doug Willhite wrote:
> I don't give a rip what the U.N. or Richard Heinberg might have to
> say about it... really, I don't. I've known Richard since the 1970's.
> He's a brilliant and talented man. But there's a vast difference
> between being "book smart" and being "street smart."
>
> Veganism and vegetarianism are NOT realistic or doable options for
> folks who are serious about taking responsibility for their own food
> supply.  Not around here. Not where I live. Your kind of talk --
> "vegan lifestyles are a survival device" -- is just plain la-la land!
>
> The myth of vegetarianism needs to be dispelled pronto.  Vegetarian
> ideology is currently one of the biggest obstacles to reaching local,
> community food self-sufficiency.
>
> doug
>