permaculture

[Scott Pittman <pci@permaculture-inst.org>]

Forgive me if I am a little skeptical about continuous mono cropping
being sustainable.  Just as the midwest farmer got away with it for
over a hundred years and now is finding that his productivity is going
south, so too, I firmly believe, will the Main forester/farmer find that
his soil fertility will plummet over time and his northern white pine
succeeded by some plant that can survive on less fertile 
ground.

I also don't think that the beaver or elephant takes the place of man but
vice versa and that man's place should be considerable smaller than
currently believed.  We contribute less than the beaver in terms of
increasing fertility and decreasing erosion.  In fact a large amount
of our current riparian farm land is there thanks to the beaver. 
Since we contribute less in overall improvement than the beaver, perhaps
the beaver should have a bigger share.  Since we are the most
destructive force let loose on this planet perhaps we should learn from
the elephant and beaver how to do better and then emulate them.

Since we have already ended up with "more like what we want"
and that has given us desertification, filthy water, unbreathable air,
and dead soil perhaps we should be living in national preserves and the
other critters living in the greater landscape, if we could just control
the pesky human breeding problem.

Scott P.

At 12:00 PM 11/13/02 -0500, you wrote:

They said they had been managing their land for well past 150 years and had learned to care for it as thoughtfully as any farmer did his own ancestral land. They were farmers and their crop was northern white pine. They said it might be different in other places but up here you cleared the land and let it rest for 30 or 40 years-- then you culled out all the underbrush and selected for your prime timber. The rest was pulped, or returned to the soil.

And it worked great. Coincidentally for the same period of time the lobstermen had evolved a set of traditional rules to manage the lobster that appeared to be better than anything that might have come up from Washington. That is, there were still more lobster out there than you could bring to market, and the only size that was pretty well depleted was the old jumbo whoppers, 100 years old (lobster are like beaver and racoons-- they never stop growing). But it was a good system, one that might not work anywhere else, just as anyone else's rules might not work there.

So if you develop a pristine landscape, are you going to let a transforming species like beaver (or in Africa, elephants) take the place of man and turn it into something else? Not always. I think sometimes you're going to want to step in, as an agent of modern landscaping management practise, and clear the varmints out so you can end up with more like what you want.

And if you want beaver, be sure to put your request in with all the municipalities. They don't have enough foster homes for urban beaver, so I suspect a lot of the varmints caught tree poaching in the city park end up as landfill.

Mike Elvin
Fuquay-Varina, NC