permaculture

["Ava Devenport" <essenheal@iname.com>]

On 05/30/00, "Toby  Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>" wrote:
> Marsha wrote: 
> 
> > It is the tendency of all natural systems to grow.

> Toby wrote:

> ... not really true of ecosystems. Those ideas were
> common in ecology until about 1980. They've been superseded by an
> understanding that the "perfect world" those ideas require doesn't exist,
> thus they can lead to erroneous assumptions or requirements about what
> actually occurs, or what is sustainable. In nature, disturbance and
> perturbation are the rule. A living system is _capable_ of long-term growth
> or deepening complexity, but there is always a fire, disease, storm,
> revolution, or some other setback that destroys biomass and resets the
> system's trajectory along a new path. Always....



Sometimes I feel as if I live in my own little 40-acre eco-system.  Always 
growing, always dying, storms, winds, blistering heat at times...broken 
limbs, retention ponds that fill up and need maintenance...have my own 
'rock dust'...open-range cattle grazing, my own manure factory...elk, deer, 
wild turkey, mountain lions, bears, bob-cats...more life and death...birds, 
critters, insects...a small creek that's part of the watershed in the 
Arkansas River Basin...always polluted, spring through fall, nothing feeds 
into the creek from higher altitudes but the cattle...hope the kids don't 
drink the water...have to get the community involved and clean it up!  By 
the way, how do you potty-train the cows from defecating in the creek 
during the grazing season?....



> 
> In study after study, the forest or animal or estuary under examination was
> pole-axed by perturbations, and never got to follow the ideal trajectory.
> For example, nearly all forests increase in mass (though diversity
> fluctuates, it doesn't always increase) for some small fraction of the
> theoretical lifespan, until they create conditions that are perfect for some
> catastrophic fire or blight or bug, and then are destroyed well before
> "climax." This is why old growth occurs mostly in small patches. Dawn points
> out that scale is important, and at small scales--patches of trees or
> whatever--things are _really_ chaotic with no trends evident. So most
> ecologists have abandoned the idea that real ecosystems are headed toward a
> more complex, diverse, or massive state. They are capable of it; they just
> rarely make it very far on that path. This idea is reorganizing restoration
> and forest ecology, and I think has use for permaculture. It means we need
> not feel guilty about the "recombinant" ecologies we're creating by mixing
> natives with exotics; disturbed, patchy ecosystems are the rule. Nor is
> disturbance from harvest or logging a bad thing, if it is on a scale
> appropriate to the local system.
> 
> Maybe it is only with human intervention that systems can be kept on the the
> "ideal" constantly complexifying path, as in permaculture, where we cut back
> brush, add new plants, move mulch from one site to another, etc, to keep
> things growing nicely.....


This is me, cutting, adding, dredging, mulching....and LOVING EVERY MINUTE 
of it, except, would someone rub my back?  Can anyone tell it's raining 
here today?  I need to get back to work....Blessings


> 
> Toby