permaculture

[Lee Flier <lflier@mindspring.com>]

Eric wrote:

>So, as long as you stay within reasonable limits, I don't see why a
>"vegan philosophy" would cause a problem.  The only obstacle I can see, so
>far, would be the difficulty of encouraging enough wildlife to hang around
>some sites long enough to do as much good as domestic animals could in a
>good design.  I would be interested to hear other's opinions.  Any thoughts?

Well that's just it - once you start encouraging wildlife around where
you're growing your food (or the wildlife show up anyway because you do
such a good job of restoring their habitat), the trouble is they are going
to EAT your food.  If you've done your job well and planted a lot of nuts
and fruiting shrubs and so on, you won't mind that the wildlife get some of
course.  But all that food will eventually cause their populations to rise
to the point where it's a problem.  So unless there are other predators in
the area it seems to ultimately become unavoidable that you have to kill
some animals, if you live in an abundant area.

I have already run up against this problem here in the southeastern US...
there are way more deer than the area can handle.  Personally I'm
vegetarian and don't want to kill any - but I'm glad there are other people
around who eat meat and like to hunt!  So I guess what I'm saying is that a
community can support some number of vegans or vegetarians, but trying to
form a whole community around veganism would, IMO, be ultimately a problem.
 Just the amount of land that would have to be used up to grow enough
grains and legumes to support a lot of vegetarians, could be a problem.
Whereas eating ruminants who graze on native grasses or tree browse doesn't
pose the same problem.  So again there is something of an impasse when you
try to incorporate veganism into PC... 

= Lee =




***************************************************************************
Lee A Flier
lflier@mindspring.com
Atlanta and Ellijay, Georgia, U.S.A.
http://lflier.home.mindspring.com