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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture list <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point
  • Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 09:51:39 -0700

I think we agree on what permaculture is, but maybe not on what agriculture
is. Looked at from an anthropological point of view, which asks how cultures
obtain their food, permaculture is a horticultural system, not an
agricultural one. Agriculture uses larger areas of land, generally in
monoculture, and is inevitably more resource and labor intensive than
horticulture. Think of it as the difference between farming and gardening,
or between plow and hand spade. Permaculture's approach to land use lies
more on the gardening side.

Horticultural systems are self-renewing, with nearly all inputs coming from
on site, at least in the best systems. Agriculture must get its inputs from
outside of the cropped area (pastures for grazing animals that supply manure
and labor, irrigation from wells and rivers, oil from Arabia, etc.) Also,
agriculture's high production levels, in terms of calories, results in a
continual population increase. All this means that an agricultural society
will constantly need more land: more and more of the Earth converted into
human beings until ecosystems collapse. That's why the Fertile Crescent, the
Sahel, and many other deserts exist. Not because people were stupid--they
farmed in smarter ways than we do. But that's just what agriculture does. It
makes deserts. It was doing that long before petroleum and industrial
farming. The US midwest lost several feet of rich topsoil in only a century,
and is now farmable only with huge petroleum inputs, or after intensive
restoration using many offsite products like manure, compost and mulch. You
can't do that kind of restoration to an entire continent or planet--where
will the resources come from? You can only do it on a small scale. That's
bad news.

I'm coming to the conclusion that agriculture, as opposed to horticulture,
cannot be sustainable in a time frame of millennia. We've been farming for
about 10,000 years, and there just isn't much soil left. To reverse that
10,000-year-old trend, I believe, is outside the scope of what agriculture
can accomplish, and can only be done by a shift to horticulture. I know this
is going to piss off the great farmers in this group, but I can't argue with
the laws of physics. Permaculture isn't really permanent agriculture, it's
permanent horticulture.

There are some very good articles on this subject on the Web. Jared Diamond
wrote a great article about ag called "The Worst Mistake in the History of
the Human Race" at
http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm

And there is a nice critique of ag versus hort at:
http://anthropik.com/2005/10/thesis-8-human-societies-are-defined-by-their-f
ood/

Toby
www.patternliteracy.com


On 5/18/06 8:35 AM, "Tom Gorman" <tom@honeychrome.com> wrote:

> "...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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