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

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  • From: Sean Maley <semaley@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point
  • Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 11:10:35 -0700 (PDT)

--- jamie <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> We forget so easily that it is not humans that grows plants but nature,
> because we believe otherwise we hand over our freedom. Shouldn't PC attempt
> to hand back this freedom through teaching, rather than espousing tired
> theories of the 'iron law of poverty' (Malthus)?

No, Malthus didn't understand poverty. However, he did understand the
connection between food and
population, which is the topic here. It just so happens that poverty is
wrapped up in this as a
driver perpetuating the problem and distraction for discussing what is really
happening. What is
really happening is that we live within a pyramid economic scheme and it is
easy to say the poor
go hungry because they need food and then produce more food for them so
everyone can feel better
again.

A quote from Quinn speech:

If you fence off a shopping mall parking lot, put a bull and a cow inside,
along with a bale of
hay every day, you will soon have three or four cows. But no matter how long
you wait, you will
NOT have thirty or forty cows—not on one bale of hay a day. If you want to
have thirty or forty
cows, then you're going to have throw ten bales of hay over the fence. Of
course they also need
water and air—but all the water and air in the world will not turn three or
four cows into thirty
or forty cows in the absence of those ten bales of hay. You can't make cows
out of sunshine or
rainbows or moonbeams. It takes hay.

Now when you have your forty cows, you don't have to start throwing eleven
bales of hay over the
fence. If you just want forty, then ten bales is plenty. There isn't going to
be a famine among
these cows just because you stop at ten bales—there just isn't going to be
any population growth.
On those ten bales a day, those forty cows are NEVER going to turn into four
hundred. But if you
WANT four hundred cows, then you've got to provide more hay, and you're going
to end up buying a
hundred bales a day to feed those four hundred cows.

Now the exact same thing is true of humans. Fence off the parking lot, toss
in a man and a woman
and a couple bags of groceries every day, and before long you'll have a
family of four. But those
four will NEVER turn into forty if all you're throwing over the fence is a
couple bags of
groceries a day. Can't happen. Because people are just like cows—you can't
make them out of
sunshine or rainbows or moonbeams. It takes corn flakes and bananas and hot
dogs and split pea
soup and raisin bread and broccoli.

If you want these four to turn into forty, then you're going to have throw
twenty bags of
groceries over the fence instead of two. And when you get those forty people,
if you decide that's
ALL you want living in this parking lot, all you have to do is keep throwing
twenty bags of
groceries over the fence. There's not going to be a famine. Twenty bags of
groceries fed these
forty people yesterday and they'll feed them today. On these twenty bags of
groceries, the
population is going to be stable at around forty people. But if you change
your mind and decide
you want 400 people living in this parking lot, then all you have to do is
start throwing a couple
hundred bags of groceries over the fence instead of twenty—and by golly,
eventually there WILL be
400 people living in that parking lot.

There WILL be, but our cultural mythology says there doesn't HAVE to be.
According to our cultural
mythology, forty people COULD make up their minds to remain forty. It could
of course happen. It's
imaginable. But on this big parking lot we call the earth it never HAS
happened.

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