permaculture

[LBSALTZMAN@aol.com]

Let me describe something that is working in Santa Barbara,  California at 
a community level.  We have a neighborhood exchange  movement started by one 
or two people, the website is _www.sbfoodnotlaws.org_ 
(http://www.sbfoodnotlaws.org)  that has is doing  incredibly well.  It works 
in existing 
neighborhoods and doesn't require  creating an intentional community and 
moving 
somewhere.  Once a month  people in a neighorhood gather at a rotating house 
in 
the neighborhood. They  exchange home grown food, seeds, plants and food 
growing knowledge. But the  concept is rapidly expanding to include clothes, 
books and just about anything  that one person doesn't need and another 
person can use.  In addition to  food this is building enormous community 
cohesion that didn't exist  before.  On the whole this is a good path to 
greater 
local food  security.  We also have a budding Food Security Council that is 
looking at  the total picture of local food security and is bringing in the 
local organic  farmers as well.  Currently Santa Barbara County which is a 
significant  agricultural county exports over 90% of the food grown here and 
imports around  the same amount.  This is unsustainable, but we are creating 
the systems to  slowly change that fact.
 
So while everyone who can, and wants to should grow as much food as  they 
can individually, I think this is the way we get to more  
community-sufficiency.
 
L
 
 
In a message dated 5/14/2010 3:25:45 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
toby@patternliteracy.com writes:

(warning: lengthy post that takes a while to get back to the topic)  Thanks 
for the thoughtful words, Ben. And Rain, it's not that I'm trying to  
stimulate discussion, as that's too close to trolling. I'm trying to get  
people 
to think past cliches into deeper considerations of their assumptions  and 
beliefs before they do harm or waste effort. And, as Rain pointed out, I  can 
write more clearly than I sometimes do, but the "Myth of Self-Reliance"  
article took about 18 hours to write, whereas I'm not going to make kind of  
time for posts on listservs. I think my posts usually contain ideas worth  
hearing, so I hope people will digest the things I ask them to think about,  
instead of jumping to,"Toby wants to discourage us from growing food." I've  
been pretty careful about how I've phrased this, so if that's where anyone  
went, they have not really read it. If you are driven to think I've been  
hacked by Monsanto, consider first that you may have misunderstood me. I 
think 
 I get permacul
ture pretty well by now.

I often try out ideas here  before moving on to larger forums, so I do 
appreciate constructive feedback.  When I get too much knee-jerk projection 
of 
people's own issues onto me, I  tend to post much less. I've been pretty 
inactive here for a while, and that's  part of why. I have developed a pretty 
thick skin and am learning, usually,  not to get triggered by the real idiots 
here--and I'll never be offended by  Lawrence, I know him too well--but if I 
run into too many people who will not  think critically and won't read for 
meaning, I'm outta here. Life is too  short.

Back to the topic: I'm grateful to Ben for pointing out that  we've already 
done the "must grow all my food" thing in the 1970s, and we  learned many 
things from it, primarily that food production is best done  communally, and 
it's rarely good design to have all your food coming from one  source, that 
is, from your own labor. We also know that if we really want to,  we can 
grow a lot of food ourselves. So if developing self reliance skills is  what 
you personally need to do, great. But in permaculture, we don't begin  from 
dogma: I must have an herb spiral, I must grow my own food. That's not  
design. That's top-down, dogmatic thinking. That's what I mean when I ask 
"how  
did anyone ever think that that was part of the permaculture credo?"  We  
assess first: what are my needs? Food is one. If you immediately go to: "then 
 I 
must grow it all myself," you ignore an infinity of other possible design  
solutions for that problem. Good design never starts with the answer. As 
Larry  Santoyo says
, we don't impose our solutions, we arrive at them. Striving  to grow a 
large percentage of your food is only an intelligent goal when a  good deal 
of 
assessment leads you there. So I can't agree with "we should set  it as a 
goal even when we know we can't achieve it." I would never say "more  of us 
need to grow our own food." It's focusing too low on the hierarchy of  places 
to intervene. It might, sometimes, be the right path, but it rules out  
countless other solutions. It never makes sense to let a cliche or dogma set  
our goals. Our needs and resources set our goals. 

We need a  sustainable food system. Is Joe Public working in his yard a 
sure way of  making that happen? For my neighbor, that means spraying the 
crap 
out of his  yard, killing the bugs, rototilling 4 times a season, buying 
chemical  fertilizer, and so on. Being in touch with his land has not made 
him 
Green. So  there is much else that needs to be in place for "grow your own" 
to be a  useful directive, as much as I like the idea. Insisting on better 
farm  practices would intervene at a far more effective level, as would 
"break up  corporate farms," "encourage big food buyers to buy local" and 
"create 
urban  farms." Think at those levels. Sometimes "grow your own" makes 
sense. For  Marjory, food is expensive, she likes gardening, and it sounds 
like 
she can't  support the kind of food system around her that she'd like to, so 
growing  makes sense. But we usually want a hierarchy of food sources, like 
a zone  system. A one-level solution like "must grow all my food" makes no 
sense  unless deri
ved at by careful assessment of your own needs and resources,  and it never 
makes sense to prescribe that others should grow all their own  food. There 
are too many ways for that not to solve any problems, and to cause  many 
more. That's why I want to strike it from the permaculture  meme-bank.

One of my criteria for any design is, "how many beneficial  connections can 
be created by this element or process?" Growing my food  doesn't create 
very many. It's often not even that good at reducing inputs  unless you get 
to 
a developed perennial system, as annuals are very  input-intensive unless 
you have land to grow compost crops, and use humanure.  A small farmer may be 
less resource intensive than a home gardener. A  multi-level solution to 
food, where I connect my own commerce, cash or trade  based, to the work of 
many others via CSA, farmers markets, friends, and  locally owned stores, 
will 
create a more resilient system that supports far  more connections and 
people than me working alone in my garden. Some people  will find otherwise. 
But 
it never makes sense to set the goal before you  assess the resources, 
highest-category needs, and options.

I think it's  quite the opposite of elitist to think this way. It seems to 
me more elitist,  if I gotta use that word, to assume that everyone has 
access to land to grow  food, the time to grow it, or is where developing 
that 
skill set makes sense  to them. Creating a garden from scratch can take more 
resources than most  people have; I have worked with a non-profit that set 
up raised beds in  low-income areas because it cost too much and took too 
much time for people to  grow their own food. McDonald's was cheaper and 
faster. Gardening for them was  a subsidized future, and not a real solution, 
not 
unless a lot of other things  changed first.

Okay, broken record starting to happen here. I hope I've  encouraged people 
to think about where their own place to intervene most  effectively in the 
food system might be.  

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



On May 13, 2010, at  2:50 PM, Ben Martin Horst wrote:

> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:37 PM,  Rain Tenaqiya 
<raincascadia@yahoo.com>wrote:
> 
>>  
>> I hate how discussions on this list (and everywhere else, I  guess) get
>> polarized,
> 
> 
> Hear, hear. I'm  constantly flummoxed by people's knee-jerk responses to
> something that  they obviously didn't read carefully but onto which 
they've
> projected  their own insecurities.
> 
> 
>> as I've mentioned  before, and I think Toby contributes to this.
> 
> 
> I  don't think Toby contributes to this at all. I don't always agree with
>  him, but his posts -- whether original or responses to ongoing threads  
--
> are typically well-reasoned, measured, and insightful. Even --  no,
> particularly -- when I disagree, I find that he forces me to look  at 
issues
> from angles I hadn't previously, and I come away with a  better overall
> understanding. Toby has opinions, yes, and sometimes  strong ones, but I
> don't think I've ever read anything of his that I  would consider 
polarizing.
> Counterweights to polarizing opinions,  perhaps, but not themselves
> polarizing.
> 
> All Toby did  in this case was to point out that the myth of 
self-sufficiency
> is one  that has A) inspired countless thousands and B) bankrupted,
>  disheartened, and burned-out most of those thousands. All of us know
>  back-to-the-landers who gave it up and went back to shilling for the  Man
> because it was just too hard. Toby didn't say "You can't  be
> self-sufficient." If that's what you really, really want, go for  it. But
> expect it to be infinitely harder than you imagined. Toby just  
realistically
> suggested broadening the question "How can I grow all my  own food?" with
> "How can I obtain my food in responsible, satisfying,  ecological,
> permacultural ways?" That's likely -- but not necessarily  -- to include
> growing a significant chunk of it, and encourages  thinking about our
> relationships with the ecosystems and human systems  around us.
> 
> With all the flak Toby gets on this list and  others, it amazes me that he
> hasn't gotten defensive or dropped off  entirely. I think it speaks 
volumes
> about his moral character that he  ignores the personal attacks and sticks
> with the issues at  hand.
> 
> 
>>  I know he wants to stimulate  discussion, but he doesn't have to make 
the
>> issues sound so black  and white (and I just got done reading all the
>> wonderful essay on  your site, so I know you can do better).  On the 
other
>> hand,  I do appreciate Lawrence's restraint in the tone of his responses.
>>  
>> 
> Really? I don't generally think calling someone a  Monsanto PR hack --
> particularly in permaculture circles -- represents  a "restrained 
response."
> Perhaps this was an attempt at humor. It  sounds to me more like an ad
> hominem attack. It's language I'd expect  from a troll, not a list 
moderator.
> 
> 
>> I feel the  question about how much land it takes to grow one person's 
food
>>  has been framed in a way that unnecessarily encourages this debate.  A  
more
>> interesting question, for me, would be, "How much area in  food forest is
>> reasonable per person, given a certain climate and  available gardening
>> time?"  Cities can probably typically  grow 50% of their food.  If urban
>> areas were planted in food  forest, a lot of the heavier food could be 
easily
>> obtained just  outside your doorstep, reducing transport fuel needs.  New
>>  aquaponics techniques also have potential for urban areas.  Growing  
food
>> doesn't have to be a grueling enterprise for the specialized  farmers.  
And
>> this leads to questions of social equity and  justice:  if you don't 
grow a
>> substantial portion of your own  food, who is going to do it?  This whole
>> debate has taken  place with the apparent assumption that we are all 
equals
>> who can  freely choose our work.  Not so.  Most of the people on  this
>> list are probably white middle class people who would be  buying their 
food
>> from poor brown immigrants if they didn't grow  it themselves.  
According to
>> David Holmgren, the peasant  class is only going to get bigger as fossil
>> fuels become more  scarce.  Growing more of your own food is a slap in 
the
>> face  to class specialization and the stigmatization of doing such  
"lowly"
>> work.
>> 
> 
> I didn't hear Toby  saying anything that would argue with any of the 
above.
> In fact, the  above paragraph seems mostly to follow directly from the 
sort
> of  approaches Toby suggests.
> 
> I know it's too much to expect of  email lists -- and, given the history,
> this list in particular -- but  I really wish folks would sit down with a
> post, digest it, and mull it  over for a while before responding. Give it 
a
> couple hours before you  click "Send." Yes, we'll still have a lot to
> disagree over, but I  would hope we can do it in civil ways.
> 
> -Ben
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