permaculture

["Ben Martin Horst" <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>]

I've got a number of vegetarian and vegan friends and acquaintances,
and I respect them and their convictions, but I think Toby's certainly
right here: there simply isn't any ecological basis to believe that a
biological system can survive in any sort of long-term way without
animal contributions.

Robert Monie <bobm20001@yahoo.com> wrote:
>As a basic evolutionary fact, no class of plant used in >human
farming needs farm animals, manure or guano. >Plants preceded animal
life on this planet by millions of >years and did quite well without
it.

Blue-green algae preceeded animal life by millions of years, sure, but
anything we would commonly recognize as a plant today requires animal
contribution of some sort, whether as fertilizers, pollinators, seed
dispersers, pest and disease controllers, etc, etc. One dramatic
example would be the temperate rainforests of the North American
Pacific Northwest: these forests are what they are in part because of
the bodies of innumerable salmon left after the annual spawning,
supplying a basic role as fertilizer, but also as transporters of
minerals common in seawater but extremely rare in these upland
regions. Less dramatic but equally important examples abound in every
ecosystem on the planet. It is simply hubris to assume that humans can
manage to get by without any animal participation when every
ecological system on the planet seems to demand it.

>all the major cover crops will come up fine if fertilized >with
alfalfa meal or soy meal; and herbs, leafy greens, >root plants, and
berries also can do quite well with no >animal manure.
...
> soil scientist Michael Melendrez in New Mexico has >devised a competely 
> vegan product called "Protein >Crumblies": that delivers glycoproteins 
> (protein/>carbohydrate) to the colonies of microbes that >benefically 
> "infect" plant roots to shuttle nutrients back >and forth.

What kind of other inputs are needed for producing these additives?
How much petroleum is needed to process soy meal or create "Protein
Crumblies?" What about the cost in dollars? This is the very same
attitiude that leads people to give up factory-farmed hamburgers for
Boca Burgers... it's just trading one unhealthy, resource-intensive
mistake for another.

This reminds me of a major animal-rights activist a few years ago
(sorry, I've forgotten the name and don't have a citation) who
embraced genetic engineering because it would eventually allow
humanity to engineer predatory species (lions, tigers and bears, oh
my!) into herbivorous species and usher in an age of global veganism
for all species. Of course, I support animal rights. But the kind of
willful ecological ignorance that guy displayed is disgusting... and
while "veganic farming" certainly doesn't approach that level of
hubris, it doesn't really make any more ecological sense.

Could an ecology exist sans-fauna? It's certainly possible, but it
doesn't exist on planet Earth, and I don't see much need to tinker
with a model that has worked for billenia.

Ben