permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflondon@mindspring.com>]

On Sat, 18 Nov 2000 22:22:36 -0800, "John Schinnerer"
<johns@eco-living.net> wrote:

>As detailed in some of the material Larry London posted links to, it's not
>all that cut-and-dried either way (any pun's a good pun, I say... ;-) - and
>I would prefer to err on the side of caution.

It would be good for anyone to learn enough about compost-making to be
able to use a compost pile and the heat it generates to render
polluted biomass environmentally safe as Kevin has described. This
would be useful on-farm or in-yard in situations involving accidental
spills of toxic material, whether it be oil dripping on the ground
from a vehicle, dish/clothes washing products, any products used in a
shop, building materials, solvents and other cleaning aids.


>Given that "invasive exotics" didn't smother life as we know it during the
>very large number of years before humans created chemical herbicides,

I get tired of hearing complaints about kudzu, Johnson grass, pigweed,
morning glory (bindweed?) and other wonderful plants.
So much of the public has been brainwashed into believing that these 
are generally bad, useless and a nuisance, when the opposite is true.
Many have neither the interest or imagination to envision a world
where these plants are respected and used in a multitude of ways. I
have an old ag textbook, in fact several of them, that describe the
culture and management of kudzu for animal feed, 
i.e. a standard, often used forage crop. If it were taken seriously
for its value as an economic plant then management of it would also be
taken seriously, i.e. not letting it become invasive. That is an
interesting challenge for farmers. Of course the state of present day
agriculture precludes this mostly because of the dominance of larger 
conventional farms and the pricing structure of farm products. 
Lawrence F. London, Jr. 
lflondon@mindspring.com    
london@metalab.unc.edu
http://www.ibiblio.org/london
http://www.ibiblio.org/permaculture