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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 11:49:37 -0700 (PDT)

--- Bart Anderson <bart@cwo.com> wrote:
>> Toby H. wrote:
>> alive: oil-based life support for a terminal population."

> Most oil is currently used for transportation, not food. The US and other
> industrialized countries use many times the amount of oil as Third World
> countries. In the US, our political choice is -- do we continue being
> oil-hogs, or do we start to become more sustainable?

The problem isn't whether or not we have oil, unless your only concern is for
three billion human
lives. It just so happens that permaculture remedies the oil issue, if you
really want to state
that oil is the one true issue. I see the problem as a fundamentally
culturally issue that allows
us to believe we are some how separate from nature and that we, as humans,
hold dominion over what
should exist and where it should exist. We pick out weeds. We pick out
pests. We claim they
somehow don't belong and nature keeps interfering with our food production.

It's permaculture, because it ain't agriculture. A similar name serves to
tell the listener about
a similar role, but it's different somehow. Agriculture culturally sustains
us and was a
compelling story for thousands of years. Today, it is much more obvious that
agriculture must be
stopped. I know it's been said already, but agriculture will one day be
outlawed. Where in the
world has it been practiced for thousands of years that isn't desert today?
Agriculture proves
that even a forest can be turned to sand. Even with "sustainable"
agriculture, the economic
system eventually forces farmers into un-sustainable harvesting to keep up
economically. Read
"Arator" by John Taylor, the first Senator from Virginia, for how this was
happening prior to the
expansion west. Why did everyone "go west"? Because they fell to the bottom
of the pyramid and
the land just wasn't producing the way it did for their ancestors.

Yes, oil makes the magnitude of the problem different and sounds more dire,
but the problem is
that we keep trying to produce more food for those poor starving people that
don't know how to
hold a job. How come we need jobs in order to have food and shelter? If
industrialization made
it so we didn't need to work much in the fields and housing was faster and
easier to produce, then
why do we still have starving homeless? Oil depletion helps us understand a
glaring contradiction
within our culture: it isn't about food/oil, it's the fact that we accept
sending surplus to the
owner, instead of to those who need it. The dominating economic system is
unethical in the
Permaculture context.


-Sean.

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