permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

Margaret Eisenhauer wrote:

> This culture of waste amounts to Trash Culture!  Trash culture causes us to
> become trash makers as everything we touch is turned into trash. In trash
> culture all our energy goes into making trash as all our outputs are termed
> "Waste" with the intent that this energy will disappear once we have thrown
> it out.  Obviously this culture is not based in reality because energy can
> not be created or destroyed and our outputs are intended to be the manna for
> some other creature's existence, yet Trash Culture marches on making endless
> piles, heaps and streams of trash, even making trash out of people it
> doesn't understand or like while considering itself the pinnacle of
> desirability.  

> Practically speaking if woody bio material is burned to char for energy to
> heat water, homes and farmsteads with the resulting char used as a soil
> amendment it would allow for the sequestering of carbon, the enrichment of
> farmland and the utilization of needed energy while many of the offending
> angels associated with Mr. & Mrs. Trash maker would be ameliorated by the
> heat of gasification.  (This is speculation which would require testing) Yes
> not all toxic material could be utilized - such as metals contamination -
> requiring vigilance and this would not solve the cultural divide between
> reality and illusion but perhaps a good direction for experimentation. 

Here's the latest comment in this thread at its site of origin
which I thought was pretty good:

"We've come a long way from the days when JI Rodale was considered a nut 
case, Louis Bromfield was taking on the agricultural establishment and 
Beltsville proved that organic gardening didn't work.

Can we, as individuals, save the world? Probably not. We can save our 
part. It's amazing how the old Yankee dictum of "Use it up, wear it out, 
make do, or do without," fits the goals of most of us here.

Meanwhile, if we fail to recognize why corporations don't do things, we 
can't change it so that they will."

..................

As for this part:
""We've come a long way from the days when JI Rodale was considered a 
nut case, Louis Bromfield was taking on the agricultural establishment 
and Beltsville proved that organic gardening didn't work."

They're still at it, trying to undo the cultural renaissance of the 60's 
and 70's, discredit the people who made the best of that era happen,
steal their work (organic) for corporate ownership to the exclusion of 
those who put in the hours and investment in the farms where it all 
developed. Untold millions spent on discrediting and otherwise 
countering the organic/sustainable movement (unless they can own it),
propaganda mills that would have made Goebbels, Stalin and Mao faint.
Corporate power and economic leverage (who pays for research at land 
grant universities?) swallowing up competition and discrediting and 
crippling the rest, using surrogates to do the rest and pave the way 
forward to control of food production by vertically integrated 
multinational conventional biotech agribusiness. Read Joe Cummins if you 
don't believe that GMO's are bad for your health, that herbicides like
all strengths of SquareDown are persistent in the environment, degrading 
ecosystems and reducing biological diversity, add atrazine, 
chlorpyrifos, 24d, fungicides and insecticides and add all the moron 
homeowners obsessed with using these nasty chemicals, promoted to the 
hilt with adverts tuned to the feeble vibrations only their crippled 
minds can absorb.

Monsanto's, and other corporations like them, effect on American 
agriculture has been and will continue to be until it has stopped, 
devastating, and their sights are on a global marketplace for their 
products and sleazy at best agricultural practices. It makes my skin 
crawl to think of the damage done to the best soils in the USA and.
The Black Earth area in Ukraine and Russia and farmland in Africa, 
Indonesia, Vietnam, Argentina and Brasil may well meet the same fate
if they haven't already.

In some cases it is corporations dominated and run by mbas and lawyers 
while ceo's and favored underlings languish in posh resorts as the work 
of the original owners, the corporate founders, is run into the ground 
through mismanagement then bankruptcy while employees are cut adrift to 
fend for themselves. When you look at that mindset in the context of 
trying to organize and preserve grassroots local-oriented farming, 
environmental stewardship and the dissemination and use of permaculture 
in the USA it should give new incentive to all of us interested in 
making this happen no matter how long it takes.