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  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Fwd: [permaculture] Are we a weed?
  • Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 13:09:49 EST

Dear Bob, Toby et al---

This whole thread is getting really interesting. I will agree with Toby that the weed thing is not the most accurate analogy once you get into the specifics of our infestation. Perhaps a mosaic virus. You'll recall that the tobacco mosaic virus encounters healthy tobacco leaf and converts the whole mass into mosaic. In fact, viruses generally do what we do, since they don't rely on a disturbed ecology to "lay their eggs". We come in, lay our eggs and then disturb the ecology. By the time the process is finished, it becomes housing for our expanding populations.

Here in North Carolina we see the process in fine detail. To accomodate an expanding population, farm land is being taken out of productivity at a record pace and put into subdivisions. Every yuppie family moving into one of these subdivisions proclaims themselves to be against "urban sprawl"-- which is precisely the form of planetary utilization they have voted for with their pocketbooks. This is where we're headed, and is the process our economy must rely on to avoid stagnation. We can't afford to put an army of builder-ants out of work.

To fill in the picture a bit, the other half of the process is the way farm profits have become co-opted by big, horizontally and vertically structured conglomerates like ADM, Cardiff, Dow and the other usual suspects. They make the money and the family farmer faces a tough choice-- either continue planting seed and going deeper into debt or selling the farm for a decent one-time sum, to a developer.

The rosy side of the picture is that while job-seekers from the rural counties go to the edges of the major metropolitan areas, where they buy up the new houses in last year's cotton fields, they empty out all the counties that are not adjacent to urban areas. These places go back to seed, or the cheap vacant land is bought up by people like you, for homesteading purposes.

North Carolina, for instance, currently has more land in forest (I believe, even if you don't count tree farms as "forest") than we have had since the 19 teens. By the 20's and 30's virtually every acre in the state, except for the Joyce Kilmer Forest and a few sunless mountain hollows, was put up in crops. So, taking the long view, there will be some cause for optimism until the day every county across the entire globe has been put into midrise apartment blocks, to house the billions to come.

But Bob, to address one specific you mentioned, I do believe it's generally  the case that the hardy weeds of Eurasia have typically gone rampant in the rest of the world -- the zebra mussel is a good example--  while it is very rare for species from the smaller continents to gain a toehold in Eurasia unless they are cultivars, like tomatos, potatos and cotton. I don't think they have fire ants or wallaby problems there, while the plague is, of course, Eurasian. I like your analogy between ourselves and the locusts, experiencing their first population surge.

I hope the whole planet doesn't end up looking like Ethiopia and the Sudan-- areas that have adjusted to periodic locust plagues by becoming barren and lifeless.

I'm sure there must be isolated examples of wrong-way invaders, but I can't think of any easy exceptions to this odd rule. I also note that people who write about this general tendency can't come up with any really compelling reasons why it should be so, except for the obvious generality that in the larger landmass there is more competition, thus the more competitive species are victorious. Our own competitive advantages do not quite follow the analogy, in that we have a technological edge over the native cultures we co-opt.

Keep the comments coming. This is good stuff.

Mike Elvin

--- Begin Message ---
  • From: Bob Howard <rmhoward@omninet.net.au>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Are we a weed?
  • Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 22:11:20 +0800
 

Marimike6@cs.com wrote:

Today's world is so well mixed that I think it would be very hard to find a virgin population with no immunity to the usual worldwide diseases, like the flu. In 1891 this would have been much less so. Most influenzas are incubated in the pig and duck-tending populations of southeast Asia, so it may have been that the Australians had periodically been exposed to the flu where the Anglo colonists may not have been at the time. That's just a speculation.
Mike,

My Broomehill example (1891) reported only on the deaths of europeans - the equal number of deaths amongst Noongar attending the show went unremarked. As you note yourself isolation is the issue not race
 

 
The striking fact is that weeds have hardly ever gone in the other direction. American volunteer species taking hold on the European continent are quite rare, and hardly ever spread aggressively enough to be a nuisance. I wonder why.
Try South American Fire Ants, wallabies, tomatoes,  the plague. Arrgh!!

We are not weeds. I share Toby Hemenway's unsureness, the analogy is inept

IMHO We are locusts experiencing our first plague.

Toby perseveres with the weed analogy
 

"Weeds can only move into a limited set of conditions: disturbed ground, where there is little resource competition. But later
colonizers move into many types of occupied ground, find or create niches, and leverage into dominance (there's your East
Indian motel owner: not a weed, but a late-succession specialist). As a general rule in ecology, the later a system's
successionary phase, the more specialized or aggressive an invader's resource exploitation must be, as all the "easy" resources
are taken. Only those species able to find resources can move in, and as time goes by the niches get smaller or require
innovation to create.
This take on ecology ignores the importance of parasitism and symbiosis to succession. In fact it is the complexification (see Teillard de Chardin) of the web that is the hallmark of succession. there are often in complex webs one or two 'capstone' species upon which many creatures depend. Long term stable cultures like Aboriginal ones have often developed complex relationships with there resources. Local Noongar people where i live, for instance, had no watercraft, the Southern Ocean is too hostile a place and the fish rich shoals in the inlets and harbours are only knee deep. Nevertheless they knew the name of 60 species of fish and how to catch most of them. They were capable of using dolphins to heard the salmon (N.B. this is not the same fish as atlantic salmon) and fish inshore into the surf break where they could be speared..

like locusts or any other animal that becomes plague like - we have tapped into an unexpected source of energy. In our case oil, in any case, a perturbation that is amplified and feeds upon itself. the rules of population dynamics demand that there exist positive feedback mechanisms upon which a dynamic equilibrium can evolve.

Mike Elvin wrote

The problem is Americans, and everyone else on earth who plans to live like an American. We demand high incomes and have
expensive kids we need to put through expensive colleges. We like to drive expensive sport utilities that can seat six in the cab and
have room on the bed to haul a septic tank. So to me, it matters little that a small group of purists can live fulfilling lives while leaving
the lightest of footprints on the land-- they are maybe one or two percent of the people using the land, and can't make that much
impact on the planet by just living the good life for themselves. We also need some people who can convince Big Agri-business that
they can make better money by using better methods.
There are two ways to get rich - earn more or need less.
I'm trying to teach the hog industry that their waste (ten million hogs and growing, in this state) is a valuable resource to be used
wisely, and not just a pollutant they need to bribe politicians in order to be able to easily dispose of. I like to think I'm doing God's
work with projects like this.
Peace be with you...

Nick routledge wrote most beautifully

Broaden the temporal perspective in particular
and thingz make much more sense. In other words, cultural pathologies hold
the seeds of their own inevitable destruction. Just because Nature's
Reckoning in her great and terrible glory ain't yet apparently spilled
over into the dark lives of the anonymous managers and generals among us,
doesn't mean it ain't happening or, indeed, that the observable trend may
not accelerate somewot suddenly, "annihilating all that's made To a green
Thought in a green Shade" as Marvell bifurcation-pointedly puts it.
Indeed - it has always seemed reasonable to me to see Breshnev's USSR as the equivalent of the current state of the USA. The collapse of state communism will be mirrored by the collapse of state capitalism. Or more correctly, global capitalism as Marx originally predicted. The pensions and subsidies that feed amerika's fetish of consumption. It does strike me as quite remarkable that US citizens writing today find the fetish of consumption such a difficult thing to come to terms with when not more than 40 years ago it was being challenged in the streets. It's as if everybody has been dumbed down or numbed down over he last 30 years.

Mike green wrote:

I travel and see empty office buildings everywhere, abandoned storefronts

in all the cities in the USA, everywhere.

It is very possible that a severe economic depression is coming in the

near future.

In that case, permaculture groups should consider that food preservation

and long term storage methods should be examined now, on these

farms and information on this second stage of food  production

(i.e. the first stage being the growing and production of foods), the

storing of foods to maximize quality and food value, is at least as

important.

Exactly my point and there aint nobody "awed and thundered" yet in this part of the world so a war aint gonna help - most likely it's gonna make a hard landing harder. Watch the rest of the world go "Yeah sure George, we'd love to help you out!" when the dollars run out. and they inevitably will (half of them forged anyhow). The hyperinflation will give the Fourth Reich heart. I was reading Ferment and Nutrition today and thinking the real problem is how to make do - for instance making vinegar requires a glass or earthenware container. OK if your in the Third World but your stuffed if your in slums of New York or any other western city. We need to look at the experience of the Argentinian people in forming local community, neighbourhood groups as a way of dealing with the coming famines.

Sure those with property and capital will be able to market there permaculture goodies to the rich - but only if they can afford the guards. Better to be discussing the value of local barter, LETS schemes and of voluntary poverty, good will and neighbourliness in the community. For a God fearing country Americans sure as hell don't seem to pay much attention to what Jesus actually said. Let alone what women have been saying for centuries about war. (check out Lysisistra etc.)

Capitalism requires a world of infinite resources, a contradiction that Marx required no degree in ecology to foresee. A sphere is a finite space. We are locusts become mindless with bloodlust in a last final frenzy of fornication, a communal suicide bomb or potlach, a burning up, our guilt must be consumed in a fire of sorrow until at last we are shamed.

The fatal flaw of christianity is it's bargain with guilt, that enables people to purchase their penance in piousness or in pennies. Shame is the raison d'etre behind Aboriginal law. A law that does not change but which changes men.
 

bob howard _______________________________________________
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