permaculture

[Larry London <london@metalab.unc.edu>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 01:44:43 +0100
From: Alan Sloan <alansloan@maccas.globalnet.co.uk>
To: sanet-mg@ces.ncsu.edu
Subject: Fertility modelling


Some time ago I recall someone being interested in modelling fertility. I'm
forwarding a note from another interested party which turned up on another
ng from Lois Agnew at mesroqilar@ameritech.net

(Snip discussion of philosophy of sustainability)...

 ...These are good points, ones that I have been working on also. The
underlying question is how does an ecosystem work? The problem with
civilization is that we extract mineral potential from the soil  faster
than it can be replaced. In actuality, according to Connor and
Shacklette in a 1970 USGS paper on agricultural minerology, 80% of our
soil's nutrients are lost simply to erosion. This I purport is due to
monoculture, another symptom of idealism-oversimplification, the main
subject of the alphabet. In a Ukrainian study, done sometime in the
1970s (Sorry, I lost the reference) a group of students did a census of
all the plant species on a 20 year old meadow. They then did a total
mineral analysis of a representative sampling of each species. They
found that none of the species' mineral compositions matched that of the
soil, but combined, they matched it almost exactly. Since a soil's
mineral composition reflects that of the underlying bedrock, it appears
that species diversity plays a role in accumulating a soil's entire
potential. This has got to be a clue as to how nature mitigates erosion.
I suggest we investigate a wider array of plant species for food sources
as well as simply for agricultural tools (...plants are nuclear powered
tools). I have been collecting mineral analyses of whole plants
(including roots) and recently insects, for several years and have
learned quite a bit about species relations and soil erosion by plugging
this information into a multidimensional linear regression, calling the
error erosion. The program was recently translated from Commodore Basic
into JAVA (by me) and lost a lot of its flexibility. Eventually some of
the more experimental processes will be available at 06HORTICULTURE.

For more superficial arguments finding the alphabet as the source of
western values, see my website
"Beyond Radical Deep Ecology"
Lou Agnew