Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Fwd: [permaculture] RE: Major histocompatibility complex (MHC)

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Fwd: [permaculture] RE: Major histocompatibility complex (MHC)
  • Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 10:11:46 EST

Toby--

Many thanks for your post, footnoted below. I hope we can return to the main thread of a subject I find fascinating-- "weed" behavior.

True, it is really the human race as a whole that is noted for its rapid spread and colonizing behavior that can instantly take over every ecological niche. This trait has gathered momentum in recent generations with advances in our technology and with the rapid and unsustainable increase in our population.

When I was young the world was a fairly comfortable place of "only" 3-4 billion. Less than five years ago we passed the six billion mark and we are already at six and a quarter billion. Clearly this uncontrolled proliferation is weedlike behavior in the extreme, and has grave consequences for the planet. I assume that everyone in this listserv came to permaculture with the feeling that the permaculture approach was the one best suited to enable us to coexist with the planet that nurtures us. Without it, what happened a few thousand years ago in places like the Middle East can happen to the whole planet. Eaten bare and not replenished, it will turn into bare hard-packed dirt. Soil nutrients, considered "waste" matter, will go out to sea with the bathwater, so to speak. Artificial chemicals will be called upon to do everything previously done by natural processes before they were disrupted, and while the fertilizer and herbicide manufacturers will become richer, the planet will become poorer.

This trend is being counteracted by a minority of interested researchers. Here in North Carolina, for instance, we are seeking beneficial ways to utilize confined animal feedlot wastes, which in their unrefined form mostly burn the soil and contaminate our freshwaters. There is some progress,  but convincing people who have no innate respect for the planet is very slow going-- and these are the people who've always determined how farming is to be conducted. Old ways are hard to change, but it's getting harder now for people to make a living from the land the way they used to.

So I am very encouraged that people like NCSU and Smithfield Foods are even talking to each other. For the first time ever Smithfield (that's hogs) is sponsoring joint research instead of resisting any attempt to change old practises by calling us a bunch of leftist college kids who never got their hands dirty.

Perhaps, since it is now a given that we will occupy and stress every mile of the earth's surface with misuse and overuse, we can at least educate the billions who come after us that they need to clean up their mess, and not take the planet's healing abilities for granted.

Anyhow, just to return the thread to the "weedy behavior" analogy, it's not merely mankind, or humanity that has stressed the planet. Eighty years ago there were between 6,000 and 7,000 separate "primitive" languages spoken on earth, each representing a culture that had maintained some integrity and independence from modern life. Each lived in some close degree of harmony with its environment. Very few were expansionary-- cultures like the Zulu in 18th and 19th century Africa were "breakout" cultures undergoing a modernization based on militarism. Most of the peoples who never made the news were just growing their crops and dying exactly as fast as they propagated. Without zero population growth, they knew they'd just end up hungry and at war with their neighbors.

All this behavior has been displaced in our time by Western Civilization, which expands into every niche, offering these people the hope of getting entry-level jobs and becoming newly aspiring Americans.

I'm not saying that's bad. You can't just keep them in a kind of zoo, pure from outside influence. But it is changing everything on the planet, as they all prepare to save up enough money to buy their own cars and computers-- the billion point three Chinese for example. There's not enough raw stuff left on the planet to satisfy the demands all these people will be making on technology. So it's a problem worth paying attention to, and it's weedy behavior.

My apologies again for using that ill-considered phrase "the white man" when I meant Western Civ. I tend to be a bit crude and even when making formal presentations, don't always remember to refer to hog shit as "animal detritus".

I read last week in the Sunday Travel Section where there are eco-field trip vacations now to the Apa Tani Valley in Himachal Pradesh, which used to be the back of beyond--  nearly the most inaccessible culture left on the planet. For years the Indian government used to refuse to issue travel permits, to protect these people from outside influence (and protect tourists from them). Forty years ago they used to capture slaves, either selling them back to their relatives or working them in the fields. Now they wear hip-hugger jeans instead of nose plugs, watch MTV and all the kids have cell phones.

Times are changing, and we need to find better ways of utilizing what the demographers tell us will be our childrens' eleven-billionth piece of the planet.

Mike Elvin
Fuquay-Varina, NC

--- Begin Message ---
  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] RE: Major histocompatibility complex (MHC)
  • Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 20:53:05 -0800

On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 06:01 AM, Marimike6@cs.com wrote:

The Chinese in the Pacific Rim and Latin America, the Indians in East Africa and the Greeks and Syrian-Lebanese all over the world are other examples of weeds that readily transplant and thrive. This is due to their cultural, not gross racial, characteristics. They tend to dominate economically.

To this list you might add the Maori and their conquering of many peoples who lived on neighboring (and some not so neighboring) islands, like the Moriori; the Polynesians and their 2000+ year spread across the Pacific from near New Guinea across the whole South Pacific up to Hawai'i; countless waves of Native Americans from the Chinook to the Inca and further south who pushed out or conquered earlier inhabitants; the Bantu, who overran much of central and south Africa sometime before 500 CE, shoving aside the Khoisa and other groups; the often violent spread of Islam from Palestine across India to Indonesia, and on and on and on. In other words, I don't think the trait of wiping out or assimilating other cultures can be ascribed to any particular group of humanity. It seems to be a fundamental human characteristic. We (people) seem to do it whenever we can, given the technology, food supply, population pressure, ideological drive, or just about any excuse. (Pardon my Darwinism; generally I like to look for examples of cooperation rather than competition.)

We don't necessarily assimilate other cultures only by violence. It's done by merging cultural ideas until one group no longer differs from the other, or via ideological dominance, or by overwhelming another group with new technologies that they hurry to adopt until they lose the heart of their own culture. Cultures, from a long-term perspective, seem pretty fluid.

Toby
_______________________________________________
permaculture mailing list
permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture

--- End Message ---



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page