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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point

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  • From: Tom Gorman <tom@honeychrome.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point
  • Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 11:35:07 -0400

"...agriculture
continued to exhaust arable land as it inexorably does."
-Toby

Monocultural or business-controlled agriculture, sure, but responsible agriculture doesn't have to necessarily or inexorably exhaust arable land! Isn't that the whole point behind permaculture? But of course I'm picking at semantics, as I don't think we're in any real disagreement!

I've been reading the essays of Wendell Berry lately, and just this morning came across this passage, which seemed to nicely sum up the issues we're currently facing:

"We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in it. There is no plainer symptom of our insanity than our avowed intention to maintain by fire an unlimited economic growth. Fire destroys what nourishes it and so in fact imposes severe limits on any growth associated with it. The true source and analogue of our economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it, produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and decay. We must learn to grow like a tree, not like a fire."

from Conservation and Local Economy in The Art of the Common Place.






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