permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

Mitch, you say "There is a lot of discussion around Central Texas about 
wildlife, and I realize that it's related, but I would very much like to see 
discussions of "people food forests" in hot, dry climates with thin poor 
alkaline 
soil."

The arid portions of Texas are a lot like Ethiopia, Sudan and Chad. These 
regions support millions of peasants on a subsistence basis. So I would think 
one 
would start with the growing of appropriate grains like sorghum or millet. 
The stuff is highly nutritious for both people and animals, and is grown in a 
number of nutritious varieties for differing conditions. Tastes good, too, 
when 
made into injera.

The same might be said of the dryer parts of India. There are no better 
stewards of the land on this planet than the Bisnoi, who live in the Thar 
Desert. 
They have made a successful go of it for the past couple of thousand years, 
while more modern irrigation schemes have recently salted the place up and 
damaged the water table in pursuit of rice for the millions. So one is 
invited to 
reflect that a tribe of primitives who've never taken a single course in 
agronomy have come up with superior solutions to those of a board of the 
highly 
educated and published PhD's India invited to design their program to "bring 
the 
desert to life".

Not much on the web about them, I suspect. But you could search for a very 
fine book the Sierra Club published called The Law of the Mother, edited by 
Elizabeth Kempf (1993). The Bisnoi swear by the virtues of the khejri tree 
(Prosopis cineraria) for its wood, shade, edible pods and generally 
beneficial effect 
on the arid environment, its people and its wildlife. This is just a 
"forinstance", and much work needs to be done on finding out what some people 
have 
known for thousands of years.

Before it is lost, of course.