permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Ben wrote:
> Blue-green algae preceeded animal life by millions of years, sure, but
> anything we would commonly recognize as a plant today requires animal
> contribution
Good points, Ben. Bob hasn't chosen a good argument here. For starters, 
the first insects appeared at about the same time as the first plants 
(early Silurian to early Devonian), so coevolution of plants and animals 
began early. Also, the first plants were moss-like, while we garden with 
flowering plants and grasses (grains), both of which evolved with 
animals, hundreds of millions of years after the first plants. And 
they've been heavily domesticated; they're about as far as you can get 
from the spore-bearing early land plants and still be called plants.

Also, a garden or farm is very different from the wild in that yields 
(harvests) are constantly being withdrawn from the system to feed 
humans, requiring replacement by fertilizers from outside the harvested 
area. That's a huge difference. If someone wants to do the additional 
labor of growing and processing fertility crops, knock yourself out, but 
animals will provide those yields much more easily, and with a pretty 
high quality of life for the animal.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com