Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pete Vukovich <pvukovic1@yahoo.com>]

Took a seminar with Holzer a couple years ago.  I found his enthusiasm contagious, and his rejection of common 'knowledge' inspiring.  Some of his conclusions and methodologies I'm not so sure about. But he certainly makes it sound fun and creative. I've read his books, they're good, but in some ways I still feel like they are starting points and not end games. You could never tell because he seemed to keep saying 'Das ist ganz wichtig' (its very/wholly  important) a little too often when he spoke. He's pretty adamant in saying its Holzer's permaculture he's concerned with (and that he didn't really have a name for it when he did it), not permaculture per se. Anyway a fun guy and a fairly decent drinker and story teller.

Yeah we probably think too much of our capabilities. Self included. At least some days. Other days, its just better to be in the backcountry looking for wild onions.

--pete

---

From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 9:46 AM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Growing Your Own Food: Permaculture, Integrative Organic Farming and Gardening

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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