permaculture

["Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

The discussion about Peak Oil points to US culture's stinking thinking, the
lack of an ecological worldview.  We (US culture, even though I recognize
the danger of speaking in generalities) don't see what Peak Oil shows us.
We can focus on Peak Oil and miss the food crisis that global warming and
Peak Oil bring.  It is said that conventional agriculture uses land to
produce food from petrochemicals.  When those petrochemicals are gone, or no
longer available for whatever reason, the food supply shrinks.  

No one is addressing this pending shrinkage, especially the lobbyist-driven
federal government, where the compromised consider a new Farm Bill.  The
compromised are certain to offer nothing more than token lip service to
sustainable agriculture.  The petrochemical corporations own that show
because corporate farmers buy their poisons to provide the cash flow to fund
huge lobbying efforts.  Is there a single Permaculture lobbyist in DC?  

The structure of the federal government is hardly invisible.  Why, then, do
Permaculturalists ignore their own self-interest in DC?  Where is the US
Permaculture Council, or some such membership organization that lobbies in
behalf of nature and those who respect nature?

Food is about to become the hottest topic around.  Colony Collapse Disorder
threatened food shortages and that caused the compromised to spring into the
sort of action that passes for doing something effective in today's bizarre
world.  Barbara Boxer introduced legislation that would change farm practice
so that the feral pollinators might return to the landscape.  This measure
has been roundly ignored by those who control farm policy.

Petrochemical agriculture is why the neocons invaded Iraq.  No government
that can't feed its people long exists.  The US must have petrochemicals to
feed its citizens.  Or so the policy elites think.  As we learned this week,
organic growing out-produces petrochemical farming because it doesn't kill
soil micro-organisms.

The sprawl/car/freeway/oil complex controls US policy.  Real estate
developers contribute to ultraconservative small business lobbying groups.
Sprawl feeds real estate developers huge cash flows.  One in six jobs in the
US is carcentric.  One in six.  Concrete contractors and the Texas Chemical
Council own Texas policy, and I suspect this isn't peculiar to Texas.  Oil
underlies all of this nonsense.  Sprawl requires cars, which require oil and
roadways.  All of this colonizes farmland and forests, reducing biological
diversity, Earth's life support system.

Ecocities leave the sprawl/car/freeway/oil complex.  They reclaim nature.
They offer lifestyles that are not predicated upon global injustice.  They
provide equality and social justice.  They feed their people organically.
They foster healthy humans.  They are the future, if humans still have one.

Tommy Tolson
Ecocity Austin