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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Growing Your Own Food: Permaculture, Integrative Organic Farming and Gardening

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Growing Your Own Food: Permaculture, Integrative Organic Farming and Gardening
  • Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:46:17 -0500

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







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