permaculture

["Charles Knoles" <charles@growfood.org>]

>Just as a footnote to the discussion of large farm Pc, what are the best
>books anyone would recommend on the subject?
>(Yes, the question is not as innocent as I have made it sound. If I'm not
>way off the mark then there will be very few which are explicitly Pc
>books -
>however, I would be interested in hearing recommendations that are
>implicilty Pc too)

>Jamie
>Souscayrous

Here's a quote from a recent interview with Mollison on the subject from the
seeds of change website
(http://store.yahoo.com/seedsofchange/25enewsletter.html)

"Vlaun: So do you think your ideas of permaculture can apply to all
different scales, from the industrial agriculturist to the home gardener?

Mollison: Any scale......... on the big scale, we have farms much bigger
than Texas in Australia, so we go very big, and we do thousands of them a
year. Somebody said to me, "Would you design Greece?" or "Would you design
Connecticut?" and I would say, "Sure, that's an easy job. That's smaller
than designing one of these farms." So, it goes from the tiny one room flat
in Stockholm to the unthinkably large, a 4 million acre cattle station in
Northern Territory. "

  In terms of books, the designers manual describes many strategies that are
only appropriate for large scale farming such as the keyline dams, rangeland
management and much of the earthworks chapter.  In addition to that many
small scale strategies described in it can be scaled up easily such as guild
plantings of food producing perrenials, planning around natural patterns and
using sectors in your favour.  On the other hand some strategies such as
sheet mulching scale up very poorly.  The mistake is to assume that large
scale permaculture looks the same as small scale permaculture.  There are
different strategies for both.

  Permaculture only exists in our minds. If you use the techniques of
permaculture to the benefit of the earth then you are practicing
permaculture no matter what scale you do it on.

Love

Charlie