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  • From: Scott Vlaun <scott@moosepondarts.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Overly optimistic permaculture attitude towards land
  • Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 00:30:45 -0500

When I interviewed Bill Mollison he related this story. it has always inspired me not to be discouraged by poor soil.

http://www.seedsofchange.com/cutting_edge/interview.aspx

"...in Ecuador, around a little town whose name is Cangagua, when they took the rain forest off there was only a thin layer of soil, about a foot, and it washed away. Underneath that was silica, so all the hills and valleys and everything's made out of glass. So you own a glass landscape; how do you reclaim that? Standing on a glass hill looking at a glass valley with a glass hill across the valley. Well, one day, some of the troops in permaculture down there on the coast noticed a guy up on one of those hills with a sledge hammer and he was breaking the glass-which is thick-smashing it up and making a sort of channel around the hill and then he was planting little trees in the channel and they said, "Oh we can't let him do that on his own," so they all went up there and helped him break channels around the hills. And now they say there's a little jungle coming along but it's going to take much longer than five to six years, but he decided that he wasn't going to be dispirited by the glass. Cangagua, it's called, after the town where it is. So, there are some very discouraging places.

Since then we've managed to coax a trashed-out logging landing in the woods, with very little soil and lots of erosion, into around five thousand square feet of fertile raised beds, and produce some surplus for our coop. We've gleaned tons of organic matter from local resources but have also trucked in some locally made compost. Our local cafe, conveniently located under our office in town and whom we supply with greens, has been a great source of food waste which feeds our chickens which feed the gardens. We've just discovered tons of invasive plants that have been pulled from the local lake.

It seems like for most of us that are not blessed with 10 feet of topsoil there are abundant resources of organic matter nearby in the form of animal manures and food waste, not to mention of course humanure which we'll all have to deal with to create anything close to sustainable systems in the long run. CityFarm in Chicago is a great example of a closed loop right in the city (no humanure...yet). They have over an acre of organic production growing in windrows of compost created from, among other sources, the waste stream of the restaurants that they deliver produce to. Of course, plenty of fossil fuel is burned in the process, but everything they do could be done with human power. It will just take a lot more people.

We are now looking at two new projects which will need vast amounts of organic matter to create soil. One is down a hill from a horse farm and the other is in a small urban setting. In the former, a private residence, the horses could haul their own manure to the site, in the latter, a community garden project we could use bicycles with trailers to haul waste in from the neighborhood.

I'm sure most of this group has read Heinberg's "50,000,000 Farmers" essay. I still find it to be a source of inspiration and hope that we can redefine "agriculture" to something that is human-scale, community based, beautiful, and ultimately sustainable.

Scott Vlaun
Moose Pond Arts+Ecology
Design Solutions for a Sustainable Future

450 Main Street, Studio 2
Norway, Maine 04268
http://www.moosepondarts.com
207-739-2409 Studio




On Dec 2, 2009, at 1:20 PM, Rain Tenaqiya wrote:

As for myself, I was deeply influenced by Bill Mollison, and he definitely seems like a booster to me. I remember him saying not to worry too much about soil since you can always transform it with organic matter and amendments (which is common in Australia given the poor soil). His Global Gardener videos make it all look so easy. He talks about how cheap earthworks are (not!) and gives inflated statistics about how radically you can transform local climate. For results within one person's lifetime, I'm learning to expect much less.






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