pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Scott Pittman wrote:

> While on a rant I would like to respond to L.L.'s idea of expanding the 
> db. 
>
> The original idea, if I remember right, was that while permaculture is a 
> strong advocate of guild planting and food forests with stacked function 
> and diversity that we had precious little information on guild formation 
> or food forests.  I don't think that I have seen over twenty different 
> contructed guilds in my twenty years of teaching and practicing 
> permaculture.  Since the ideas of guilds comes from observing that 
> plants in nature seem to accumulate the associate plants ,
> mammals, invertegrates, and microorganisms that they need to maximize 
> their productivity and health - so the obvious thing would seem to look 
> at apple trees in Kazakistan forests and identify the associate life 
> forms and their functions  and then replicate that system by using the 
> same biota or analogs that perform the same function.  Further I know 
> botanists, farmers, biologists, etc that have spent their lives 
> observing and they could contribute to this collection of information - 
> saving us all the trip to where ever to observe ourselves.  This in my 
> mind was the original impetus for our current effort.  It certainly 
> wasn't a small task - and I am frankly amazed at how far down the road 
> we have progressed, and the cumulative crowd of participants is awesome 
> in the breadth of their knowledge and experience and their willingness 
> to work so hard to make this project a first class product out of the 
> goodness of their hearts is truly inspiring to me.

This is certainly the heart of the PIW database and what we should be 
about.  AND why we desperately need to somehow reach folks around the 
world to bring them a resource they can interact with and use.

special areas of interest for me are traditional asian agriculture
(especially Southeast Asia, Japan and South Korea)
- also high country regions in the middle east (Hunza and other areas
considered the old breadbasket of the world [Iraq, Iran])
- and of course Palestinians could use PIW to help stabilize their 
traditional farming.

> Now to the chase, I don't think that this db should take on any 
> additional fields of interest such as horticultural practices, 

Horticultural practices in one sense but implied in the data delivered 
regarding a lifeform's cultural requirements and/or need to 
coexist/coevolve within a guild - see my comment on a lifeform's 
"mirror" - this is inescapable as cultural data about a lifeform forms 
the basic knowledgebase that connects it to other lifeforms when 
relationships matching - I'm just suggesting emphasizing and refining 
cultural data for each lifeform. Nothing wrong with including some info 
on horticultural practices for each lifeform. I did not suggest doing a 
general horticultural practices or composting techniques database and 
certainly not one on community building. I think there will have to be
adequate (or at least a minimum of) hands-on agricultural practices info 
on each object to make the DB useful - i.e. take the data PIW returns to 
user, print it out, go to the field, make plant, etc. selections and 
begin planting and doing other related work installing the desired 
permaculture system.

> composting techniques, or community building ,  not that I don't think 
> that all of these are critical to our survival on the plantet but 
> because I think that they should be addressed in another forum and 
> another db, that could be, perhaps, linked to the current effort at a 
> later time.

Great idea. I hope this will happen.

Here's an example from the PC list describing a group of people on the 
Yukon needing a dataset on doing permaculture in their bioregion:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [permaculture] Arctic permaculture
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 12:46:07 -0700 (PDT)
From: ed sarten <esarten@yahoo.com>
To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Hello I live on the Yukon River in Alaska and iI would like any info on 
permaculture in arctic environments,If not maybe myself and other arctic 
people around the globe would be interested in starting study in this 
bioregion.Thankyou ,Ed Sarten Ag. & natural resource director, Ruby 
Athapascan Tribe.907-468-4499

> For now I find that most of the information that Lawrence 
> would like to include already exists in some form on the web.  I 
> certainly use information from SARE all the time.  I understand that the 
> information is scattered around and needs organizing a bit but it 
> exists.  There is no source for the kinds of information we are 

Here's where Rich's use of XML and our integration in The Semantic Web 
comes in - if SARE and other USDA-spponsored web resources make their 
information available in XML we could offer users access to these 
resources _in context_, i.e. whle doing a search on a specific topic -
if they wanted composting techniques info we could offer them links to
sources (XML mode, in a manner of speaking, or with PIWFabULator).

> soliciting and collecting for the db we are currently developing and it 
> is critical information if we are to survive the end of the petroleum 
> economy and culture

> I, personally, think it would be a big mistake to change our focus at 
> this time.

I am thinking of a simple infrastructure tweak, is all.