Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Bill Mollison said that we can throw straw on concrete and grow food in it, so some folks in Austin, TX are growing in straw bales this season - and it's working, so far, since El Nino has brought us some rain (and cloud cover) after a tough 2-year drought of less than half an inch of  total rainfall in that time period. 

Humanure's a no-brainer, to me.  The "modern" centralized sewage system consumes one-third of all the electricity produced in the US.  This is not sustainable. 

Perhaps the agriculture/horticulture distinction comes down, in the final analysis, to intention, going in - do we intend to dominate the land, or to join it as plain members of the land community, as Aldo Leopold suggested?  If we are farming from cultural custom, what is the intention?  Do we tend the land and accept its bounty with gratitude, or do we wrest a living from the land?  I suggest that my culture, western culture, is the single most destructive force to ever exist on this planet, and my focus concerns this culture.  Most cultures are more ecologically sensible than western culture in that they contain an intention to provide for the future for their children and grandchildren and teach, perhaps through story-telling, what the culture has learned, so far.

I would say that those prepared to throw out ecology as a helpful knowledge base have not yet encountered systems ecology, which, more than anything else, explains how nature operates, giving humans who have devolved to primarily intellectual development an entry point into harmonious, rather than adversarial, relations with nature.  Humans have at least six developable potentialities (mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, social, and volitional), and to develop only one is, in my mind, an extreme version of the Cartesian nonsense (just "bracket" everything "science" can't explain) that serves as the foundation for modern western culture.

Read Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, by Brian Walker and David Salt, to see several versions of how people are set up to resist ecological succession.  Agriculture, especially tilling the soil, is devoted to the principle of arresting ecological succession, of maintaining a portion of nature in an state of immaturity to serve humans, which seems like a version of slavery, to me.  A central tenet of Permaculture is honoring its profoundly simple ethics (Earth care, People care, Surplus share) to break this destructive cultural injunction and to live within the patterns of our landscapes so that nature does the heavy lifting and provides livings for populations that are able to evolve into flowing with the trends of ecological succession - which will, in the end, prevail. 

Life on Earth dominated by humans has entered a time of depleted resources because western culture did not learn nature's operating system (systems ecology) before indulging in shortsightedly (and only temporarily) enriching ourselves at nature's expense, so that, generally speaking, pond scum is much more ecologically useful than most humans in western culture.  So now we must evolve into living by nature's OS or perish into extinction.  Veganism is an excellent training regimen for learning the sort of mindfulness required for intentional human evolution, a regimen which most in western culture are capable of engaging, once they accomplish the place of willingness (surrender to nature?) in the developmental process.  In AA, years ago, they taught that change occurs when the pain of the solution becomes less than the pain of the problem.  Since, having brought PTSD home with me from Vietnam, my first career was as an alcoholic/damn drunk seeking emotional and spiritual numbness 24/7, learning to become happily sober (24 years in November) was/is a hell of a thing, but it blessed/damned me with a perspective on how addictions impact human development that others may not have.  The process of living supports me by challenging me to keep growing. 

Urban Permaculture and Transition (Rob Hopkins' Permaculture design for a sustainable human future) are my focus today, urban concerns, of evolving Austin into working with the landscape so it supports life instead of just a few humans, of farming the human terrain so we can remain here through the Earth changes humans have caused and learn to avoid such grave errors.  It's not a task I foresaw, so I am in a process of learning and constant change to achieve an Austin that plays fair with nature as it learns to live on the land it has swallowed up in an ecologically unwise manner. 

So I put stuff out there and learn from the responses that thoughtful and generous people provide.  I'm grateful.  Thanks.

Smiles.
Tommy         

On 6/6/10 6:12 AM, pbunch@cox.net wrote:

In a world rapidly approaching a population of 9 billion, scale is critical. I doubt if small agriculture will capable of providing the required resources for a world mostly made up of urban dwellers. The world recently (2008 if I recall correctly) passed the point where more than 50% of the total population lives in cities. I don't think they are going to be going back to the farm in large numbers and both the logistics and politics of getting them there would be difficult if not impossible. 

 I am not willing to write off a high percentage of the population without making an effort to develop systems that can effectively feed and cloth them. There are significant challenges but  I don't really see an alternative.


---- John D'hondt <dhondt@eircom.net> wrote: 
  

And good to meet you again too Dieter. I could not agree more. At the moment 
the Amazon is burning more to grow tofu than cattle.
And yes it is all about scale and intensity. Industrial farming will destroy 
soil and fertility on the best soil in on average twenty years whatever the 
end product they are producing.
Old fashioned and varied, mixed agriculture in old China went on for more 
than four thousand years on the same land and ended up with better fertility 
than it started with.
john

    

Hi John,

Good to hear from you again!  What you say about Ireland applies to the 
South of Portugal and most arid or semi-arid regions of the World too. 
Much of the land is too poor to sustain farming, it can however be used as 
grazing land for goats and sheep.  The goat and sheep manure is 
traditionally used to feed the land that can be used for farming.  Without 
that manure the soil has to be fed by synthetic fertilizers.

I think Tommy doesn't understand the difference between traditional 
farming and conventional or industrial farming.  Traditional farming has 
increased and maintained soil fertility in many parts of the World for 
numerous centuries; while industrial farming has destroyed this same soil 
fertility within a few short decades only, among other things to produce 
grains for vegetarians.

The problem is not the feedstock in farming; the problem is the way 
industrial farming works.  Industrial farming is destructive no matter 
whether it is used for producing meat, vegetables or grains.  Vegans like 
to point to the methane gas produced by cows, conveniently forgetting all 
about the methane gas produced by paddy culture of rice, for example.

Dieter Brand
Portugal


--- On Fri, 6/4/10, John D'hondt <dhondt@eircom.net> wrote:
Sorry to say that where I live in Ireland it is impossible to be a vegan 
or even a vegetarian and self sufficient both. What grows best here is 
grass. There are traditional ways to keep farm animals without being cruel 
or dirty and I can see no other way as long as we are desperately failing 
to grow climate adapted nut and fruit trees. (we have been working on it 
for close to 25 years and we probably need another 100 years to succeed)
john




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