permaculture

[Patrick <forgeadams@yahoo.com>]

It's great to see management strategies for riparian areas move beyond 
strictly wilderness conservation. 

On a similar note, does anyone on the listserve know of the latest happening 
with the spring creek community forest? 
http://www.holmgren.com.au/frameset.html?http://www.holmgren.com.au/html/SpringCk/SpringCk.html

Patrick O'Connor
Oakland, CA

http://www.urbanfoodpolicy.com/2009/11/distributed-urban-agroforestry.html
Monday, November 30, 2009
Distributed Urban Agroforestry
Some 65% of New York’s Hudson River Valley and Catskill Mountain region are 
forested, with 85% of this forestland owned by private individuals, according 
to Cornell Cooperative Extension. These privately owned woodlands, if 
sustainably managed, provide critical ecosystem services, yet few property 
owners are aware of how to manage their land sustainably. Faced with 
financial obligations and property taxes, many harvest timber unsustainably 
or sell their property piece by piece for home construction. Typical forest 
management plans prepared by private foresters or the DEC focus on cutting 
and selling timber, even though surveys show that most forest landowners have 
much more diverse reasons for buying and keeping their wooded property.

One strategy for preventing the open space in our region from being 
parcelized and developed, particularly the ecologically sensitive forested 
land in NYC's watershed, is to offer landowners financially viable options 
for keeping their property intact. These options include enhancing 
recreational opportunities (e.g., stocking ponds for fishing, cutting trails 
for hiking or skiing, and managing the woods to support wildlife), and 
sustainable timber harvesting. Another viable though less common option is 
agroforestry, the practice of growing ginseng, mushrooms, or medicinal crops 
in the woods, raising livestock among the trees, or tapping maple trees for 
syrup.

Legislation introduced by NYS Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman John 
McHugh would encourage private landowners to open up their properties for 
maple syrup tapping by providing grants to encourage them to provide access 
to maple producers. Called the “Maple Tapping Access Program Act of 2009,” 
the legislation aims to unleash the productive capacity of private woodlands, 
stimulating distributed agroforestry across regions that have abundant sugar 
maples. The potential is huge. Throughout New York State, for example, there 
are an estimated 300 million maple trees that can be tapped for their syrup, 
some 29 million in New York’s Hudson Valley alone.

The revenue from small-scale, disbursed maple syrup tapping may not be 
substantial for any single property owner, but it could help to pay the taxes 
on land that would otherwise be a financial burden, enabling the owner to 
keep his or her land intact. And for regions with abundant maple trees, the 
encouragement of distributed maple syrup production would be an economic 
boon. If successful, the model of distributed agroforestry – using many 
privately owned wooded properties to produce food and other agricultural 
products – can be a solution to the parcel by parcel destruction of our 
privately owned forest land. 



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fdnokes@hotmail.com wrote:
> May I recommend a title, then?
> The Magical Approach
> Seth speaks about the art of Creative Living
>
With all due respect, and I really hate to keep harping on this but...
this is exactly IMO the kind of title we should steer clear of.  Not
that I'm telling you personally not to read it, if you enjoyed it, but
keep in mind there are people on this list who are using the list to
learn about permaculture, and here you are recommending a book that
basically requires people to believe in this channeled being named
Seth.  If people who read this list believe that this book is somehow
representative of permaculture and its practitioners, that's going to be
a problem for anybody who would, for whatever reason (either they are
atheist, or they subscribe to a religion whose tenets do not include
channeled beings, or they just plain don't believe in such things), be
turned off to the whole idea of permaculture if they feel they have to
accept these things.

I feel there are plenty of other ways to communicate the ideas you
mention, the "reminder to slow down and notice," which don't require any
suspension of disbelief and/or contradiction with anyone else's beliefs.

> I was composing this note, and paused for other things...
> Didn't even realize I had left it 'hanging'.
> Meanwhile, another post came in from Pat talking about 'nudgings'.
> A wonderful process that reminds me of that state of 'not doing' that
> Fukuoka communicates so beautifully.
>
Just so you know... there seems to be some idea that Mollison himself
and anybody who subscribes to "Mollinsonian permaculture" is some kind
of pure hard nosed utilitarian.  I might offer a few direct quotes
(possibly slightly paraphrased from memory) from Mollison which he
taught in his classes and which I feel is the greatest cultural hurdle
we have to overcome (and that means just about everybody - "earth
centered spiritualists" and "hardcore utilitarians" alike.

- "Where there is hard work, there is usually pollution."

- "What we have is a world of things that either have beauty without
being functional, or have function without  beauty.   Nature doesn't
work that way - natural systems are both functional and beautiful."

- "One should be able to spend most of one's time in the garden sitting
around, and just BEING in the garden.  Or go away for a month's holiday
and come back to find the garden thriving."

I'm sure I'm leaving out a few key points, but you get the idea.  By no
means is a pragmatic approach to these things inherently geared toward
"busywork" and being "product oriented."  And that, IMO, is where we
went wrong in our thinking.  I feel that once you incorporate
permacultural thinking to the point where it becomes second nature, you
can certainly be taken over or "nudged" by your instincts, divine
guidance, your right brain, however it is you choose to think of it.
But people do tend to think of that "nudging" as different things in
different ways, and we should leave plenty of room for that.