permaculture

["souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>]

The paucity of western technological culture is exposed in its preoccupation
with resource extraction; mountains are consumed for copper, rivers are
dammed for power, forests are felled for timber.  Our relationship to the
world has become one of challenge to the earth to yield its wealth.  Then,
we have known this for years: familiarity breeds contempt and conservative
reaction (a la Lomborg).
Extraction equals exhaustion (extinction)...etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Yes, but...

...but what can georg possibly mean when he writes; "I do not have a
herbspiral in my garden but spirals made from rocks - they serve no purpose
whatsoever but pleasing me and maybe the lizards"

When Greg Williams says, "It is completely unacceptable when their (PC)
claims are made to the general public, who stand to waste huge amounts of
time and money on a (much) less-than-optimal approach to boosting garden
output", he is maintaining the above cited cultural predisposition to
perceive nature as a resource, a resource that must always be maximised.
Greg Williams exists within the mechanised food industry, georg parlow does
not.  There are no aesthetic appreciations when food is a resource to be
extracted from the earth like coal or ore and certainly no lizards!


Souscayrous




-----Original Message-----
From: georg parlow [mailto:georg@websuxxess.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2002 10:56 PM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: Pc slammed in Whole Earth Review

ever did measure, he says, the yields of conventional gardens
should dwarf
> those of forest gardens.

if this is talking about financially quantifiable yield per
square unit, the fella is propably right as far as my own
observance is going. but this is not what my life is about. i am
highly satisfied with a 50% material yield for 10% of the labor
input, plus some hard-to-quantify yields like personal
relationship with natural cycles, fun, satisfaction and other
similar subversive things.

from my point of view the multilevel power of pc sits in it's
wholistic subsistence orientation - it is imho not fit to compete
with _any_ agriculture (conventional, organic, bio-dyn, you name
it), if the reference frame is a culture where 3% or less of the
population supply the renewable primary ressources for the rest,
and all values have to be expressable in $. so toby, if you are
taking this match on, i am afraid you will end up with a bloody
nose.

interesting though that where the reference frame is the actual
survival of the people (cuba, vietnam), pc is favoured.

georg







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