permaculture

[KNat <knat@sprintmail.com>]

H. Marshall wrote:
> Hi folks, I am sure many of you have seen this database but in case not I
> wanted to bring it to your attention...
>
> http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/
>   
Thanks. This would be a good candidate to be put into multiple places 
for the time free access isn't (with proper permissions of course.) 
Information is being boxed fast.  Libraries clear books based on usage 
and soon the reference is not there to look up. I use old books and 
reprints of found books with simple plans for the things we need within 
our homestead. Takes lots of word of mouth to find them (and sometimes 
simply dropping on me at a used book source.) We've spoken here, within 
the week, of reading notes from lectures Steiner gave in 1820s to find 
clues to our bee troubles. Many of my favorite books are discards 
(favorite defined here as most useful in answering a question so I can 
go on with my intention.) Electronic libraries are doing the same. 
Simplifying by eliminating "unused" references.

I enjoyed travel w some ethnobotonists, including Duke, and attest the 
passage by word of mouth is the source of much of this. I was startled 
awake at that time that the next generation wasn't going to know any of 
what we were learning. There were no apprentices in those villages. As 
cultural value is lost, meaning is also. We must store more than what we 
currently find meaningful. (my favorite example was, in Peru, one young 
mother with a very ill child who had a kitchen herb garden outside her 
home, planted by neighbors/family with the plants traditional to give a 
young bride. A traditional gift of housewarming she herself had planted 
for others to honor their weddings. She did not know that everything she 
needed to cure her baby was growing by her back steps until we told her. 
No one had valued that knowledge in her life exposure and the plants had 
become either superstition or custom. Kept there and available by custom 
not meaning. Her child might not even have planted/tended those plants.)
I look at Duke's database and think of preserving rainforest knowledge. 
Attempts to have money go to the jungle not the pharmaceutical company 
pirate (or not just the pirate, I actually kinda like pirates.) 
Unaddressed funding to learn to value, before extinction, of plants with 
many answers. And the need to record the knowledge and preserve it! 

Using models that worked for people for the longest time- a tribe or 
village needs to find and support a next generation to shadow and learn 
knowledge that requires touch, taste, osmose, as well as reading and 
writing. Time devoted to preservation not just development. One of my 
inspirations is the number of you finding supports and offering your 
mind receptacles for techniques of developing more sustainably. But I 
feel the need for more storehouses and maybe not just electronic versions.

Search engines maintain links based on commercial gain.
My search engines already fail. And our history and old research is 
within storage media most of you would not recognize even if you had a 
machine to read it.

Peace,
Kathyann

ps lol I suddenly recall my grandfather concerning the library would one 
day only contain Reader's Digest Condensed Books.
(history buffs- book publishers and educators (textbook publishers) made 
sure that didn't happen, quite deliberately.)