Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

I guess it makes sense in some context of humanist thinking, but it's 
more of a book review than an opinion piece.

When we consider that the Earth is a farm, though, it is much simpler to 
see that what we have done is 'keep all of the calves' and now we have 
more animals (people) than the barn can hold or the land can feed with 
the (willing)labor available.

If we stop thinking of humans as separate from nature and look at 
permaculture's version of humans putting work into their own survival 
(rather than buying it with money based on unsustainable resources), 
then shifting to a smaller, diverse and distributed way of growing food 
makes a lot of sense. We are bombarded with stories about jobs and job 
losses and money spent to 'create' jobs for people, but nobody needs a 
job. They need food, water and shelter. These things can be created by 
hand, but we've grown accustomed to them being created with petroleum 
and machines and purchased with money from a job. The paradigm is one of 
belief in a System of systems to do the 'drudgery' stuff, rather than 
doing it as cooperative members of nature and societies which were 
developed to survive amid the nature surrounding them.
I think that the globalized and centralized food, manufacturing and 
political systems are really a side effect of the 'progress' which we 
call cheap foods.
To an animal living in the wild, cheap food means overpopulation and 
then dieoff, while 'expensive' food means barely surviving. Somewhere in 
between is a balance between what nature has to offer a species, what 
the species has to offer nature, and the maximum available thermodynamic 
properties of the environment when humans use their brains to nurture, 
rather than conquer those relationships.

A nice idealism, but the reality is that humans are dumber than yeast 
and more destructive because they believe in their own good intentions, 
while their behaviors are ACTUALLY ruled by random acts of emotion.
Until egoism gets beaten out of our species by nature, we will see more 
cycles of boom and bust. We are not as grand as we think we are, but we 
sure believe it when it sells us something.

Dan C.
Belgium, WI


> From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
>
> Growing Your Own Food: Permaculture, Integrative Organic Farming and Gardening
> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25928
>
> does all of that piece make sense?
>
> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>
>
>