permaculture

[Sean Maley <semaley@yahoo.com>]

Even more frightening than suburbia sprawling out in a
radius around NYC are the difficulties faced up the
Hudson Valley where life is still rural, yet the
property values are getting too high and food prices
staying too low to keep many farms operating.  Over
the past few years CSA efforts and green markets have
begun to take hold.  However, most of them go away for
the winter, which helps keep the scary supermarkets
open that won't sell locally produced food.  In the
meantime, farms are still going under upstate and the
land gets split up into suburban chaos.

Since 9/11, the corporate monster realizes he needs to
spread his eggs out.  As a result, formerly cheap land
upstate has become home to more sprawl for those
disaster recovery employees; not to mention how IBM
has steadily crept upstate to cheap land.

Anyone interested in an ecovillage in the hudson
valley ought to be able to find one of the groups
moving in this direction.  However, a workable size of
land with the needed characteristics tends to cost
somewhere well over a million (150+ acres with
favorable distribution of land types); this assumes a
maximum of 2hrs from NYC.  If you have a farm and
don't mind establishing a small village for labor,
contact the folks at www.green-phoenix.org.  The Green
Phoenix purpose is specifically to establish that
urban/rural link; and help people escape from the
monster.

Unless you know someone with deep pockets, all of this
adds up to embracing an entrepreneurial mind set and
playing with the monster.  Business ideas may as well
be deep pockets, plus they help form a shell around
those who adopt permaculture.  I know it's against
most of our best instincts, but to defeat a monster
that stomps out deviators, we may want to consider
looking like a monster until we can get the 100
monkeys needed for change or be as big as the moster
to fight it.


-Sean.

--- Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com> wrote:

> On 10/28/04 12:24 PM, "Bill McDorman"
> <bm@seedsave.org> wrote:
> 
> > The area
> > around New York City should respond by creating a
> correspondingly dense (but
> > sustainable) concentration of small organic farms.
> 
> Ironically, this explains why industrialized New
> Jersey has that bizarre
> slogan, "The Garden State," on its license plate.
> The area surrounding NYC
> was, until the 1950s, a "dense concentration" of
> small farms that supplied
> most of the city's needs. New Jersey was a garden. I
> was born in then-rural
> western Connecticut, 30 miles from NYC, and some of
> my earliest memories are
> of running alongside bulldozers that were ripping
> out farms to build
> subdivisions. I hope there is a way to bring the
> gardens back.
> 
> Toby
> 
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