permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Bob Monie wrote
> > Gardens are certainly
> > part of the food web, and the microbes, worms, and other creepy crawlies
> > endemic to this werb are welcome, but we don't need the horses, cows,
> > and other big-manure animals or even the medium size ones like ducks and
> > chickens to make our gardens work.
If I may borrow Larry Santoyo's rhetorical style for a moment: What in 
natural systems would make you think an ecosystem could lack animals and 
still have all its functions? Nothing in nature works that way. Then 
humans have to take on all those roles that animals do far better and as 
a natural part of their life. Horse and chicken manures are much nicer 
than mine to garden with, and ducks are much better than me at eating 
slugs. Assuming I'm not going to be cruel to them, deliberately 
excluding animals from a garden ecosystem is more ideology-driven than 
ecology driven.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com

>