permaculture

["Nick Routledge" <fellowservant@yahoo.com>]

Very impressed with the quality of list discussion around the PC Afghan
story. Yesterday I bumped into Alan Kapuler (he of Seeds of Change, among
other many fine achievements, and an icon to many within the visionary ag
community Stateside) and, as usual, he was speaking fervently of peace and
"non-violent food systems." He has committed to help with seed for
Afghanistan. A huge boost from a good friend on the ground who has long
been a passionate and deeply respected voice around the relationship
between peaceful earth cultures and human cultures. I've been broaching
the Afghan PC angle with other permies on the ground around Eugene and
support for this strange and beautiful notion seems very strong indeed.
Unusually so. Perhaps you've tested the idea wherever you are? I'd be
interested to know how it goes. I've learned of a permie just south of me
who was doing relief work in Afghanistan as little as two years ago, as a
medic I understand. A meeting with him soonish, hopefully. The issue of PC
in Kabul not if, but when, perhaps.

As an aside, I bumped into a book this weekend, "Biomimicry: Innovation
Inspired by Nature" by Janine Benyus, 1997. The core of the book, as she
intimates, is a fifteen or so page synthesis of the work of Wes Jackson
and his Land Institute. I've yet to encounter such a sweeping yet concise
and approachable precis of Jackson's work. Jackson, for those of you not
yet familiar with the fellah, is the U.S. prairie polyculture guy.
Rightfully considered a giant this side of the pond. Three snippets, then:

"...What _can_ be imported from the Land Institute, Jackson says, is its
methodology - its approach to learning a native system, intuiting its
'rules'...

"...After two years, any species in the replacement plots that have
dropped out or failed to germinate will be replaced, "We want to give our
target species every opportunity to join our community," says Piper. "It
may be that mammoth wildrye can't establish itself in the first year, or
the second year, but it can in the third."

and, a remark he made at the Politics of Sustainable Agriculture
Conference here in Eugene, a few years back:

"After seventeen years of scientific research in pursuit of answers to
four basic biological questions, The Land Institute is ready to formally
state that our country _can_ build an agriculture based on a fundamentally
different paradigm than the one humans have featured for the last eight to
ten thousand years...And not only that, but we think it might just solve
all manner of marital problems and end sin and death as we know it."

:-)

Later,

n.
www.foodnotlawns.com

"Give the cops and criminals a shovel and a thousand seedlings." - Cedric
Wright