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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] New Simplicity Book and thoughts about Footprints and Local Food

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  • From: Stephen Figgins <fig@monitor.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] New Simplicity Book and thoughts about Footprints and Local Food
  • Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 13:44:36 -0500

Sharon Gordon wrote:

They figure that using
an acre a person is a person's fair share, and that leaves the other 4-5
acres for other wildlife and plants.

They figure that, but has it been shown to be true? Why wouldn't it leave the other 4-5 acres for 4-5 other one-acre lifestyle people? I suppose it would work if for some reason human population was a constant. In Bangladesh, where people have lifestyles requiring about one acre, are there 4-5 acres of wilderness for each person? And is the environment in any better condition there?

To me, a more intriguing approach is to look at the effects of how we live upon the land. Is your lifestyle deleterious to the environment, or does it increase the environments health? That's what I want to know. Most footprint proponents seem to assume that humans are always harmful to the land, and therefore, we should limit our harm by harming less land per person. I see that humans can be beneficial to the land. The permacultural lifestyle can increase diversity, strengthen the health of the land, restore watersheds. Rather than intensively gardening one acre to squeeze as much out of it as you can, I would rather see people spread a positive influence over a larger space. When living a beneficial permacultural life, maybe it would be better to have a larger footprint - one that requires that beneficial influence to be spread across even more land. That would leave less land for other people, but we could probably do with a lowering in population anyway.
To meet the needs of their lifestyle, foraging cultures required hundreds of acres per person. They shaped those environments through their use, and created rich diverse and healthy ecosystems as a result. Now, that's a large footprint lifestyle to be proud of.
At the present though I am looking at things more from a viewpoint of
integrating permaculture and footprints with people perhaps owning 3 acres
per person (and the other 2-3 per person used for public places, roads,
preserves,
and with chunks of forest kept intact as nationally or group owned forests)
And then I think the object would be to try and get one's permaculture 1-3
zones on 1 acre and zones 4-5 on the other 2 acres.

Yeah, that's one approach, but what if they were to make their living by using zones 4-5 more - say foraging for more of their food, rather than intensifying zone 1? Or supplying some of their needs through sustainable forestry. Maybe then they would need 40 acres, instead of 3. Not everyone could live that way, but those that could would be maintaining a huge amount of rich diverse land. They would be spreading their influence wider.
I'd be interested in hearing how people would design their acre or a family
of four's four acre chunk(or whatever your real or ideal family
configuration might be) to produce 90+% of their needs. I'd also be
interested in things you might do differently to make this possible such as
using cloth napkins rather than growing the fiber for paper ones, etc. I'd
also be interested in how feasible you think the one acre strategy is.

I guess I'm not much of a homesteader, my dreams run something more like this:
My family, and a dozen others, produce 70%+ of our needs from zones 4-5, our 2000+ acre wildlife area. In my area, I think I would go with prairie for much of it, and forage from the prairie and the wooded areas along whatever streams I have. I might use Wes Jackson's approach to grow some crops with the prairie. I would open a microbrewery to use some of the grains and brew a special permacultural prairie beer. We could serve up a wide variety of food we grow in the inner zones. We could build the building from straw bales. We could use some of the byproducts of the brewery as compost or fertilizer or feed for other animals within the land. Our goal would be to produce zero waste beyond some low grade heat. I would like a small herd of buffalo or perhaps cattle to help with the management of the watershed using some kind of holistic range management strategy. We could set up a small leather business as well, producing useful leather goods for sale in town. A small blacksmith/machine shop can help us produce most of the tools that we need. If resources allowed we might have a small mining operation, though it would be even better to recycle much of the metal. Perhaps we would run a recycling business on some of our land - a junkyard from which we could salvage some materials. While we probably wouldn't have a lot of woods, we could have a wood shop and small mill for using what we were able to take sustainably from the woods. We live close to a town, and we do some of our business there. Many other families around us live much the same way that we do, and together we supply a good portion of the town's needs, and the town provides the 10-20% of our needs that we do not supply for ourselves.

Now that's more how I dream it happening. Though I don't have the dozen other families, and I don't have the huge wildlife area. Alas, the four acre area is probably the more realizable dream. I don't know that I would try to produce 90% of what we need from that. Maybe 40-50%. I would want to take some of that land and use it to provide good habitat for other species. I think participating in the economy is an important part of changing things. What we choose to purchase and what businesses we support with our money will extend our influence wider than sticking to our four acres.

-Stephen





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