permaculture

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

Wendell Berry quotes about sustainable agriculture.

"... if you’re going to have sustainable agriculture, it has to be
adapted locally. Local adaptation means that you observe in the economic 
landscape the same processes that you find in healthy natural
landscapes: You must have diversity. You must have both plants and
animals. You must waste nothing. You must obey the law of return — that
is, you must return to the ground all the nutrients that you take from
it. You must protect the soil from erosion at all times. You must make
maximum use of sunlight. In those circumstances, you may leave the crops 
and animals pretty much to fend for themselves against diseases. The 
farm will have some disease, but it won’t have epidemics. If you look at 
a healthy forest, for instance, you see some prematurely dead trees, but 
not massive numbers of them. ... It’s the diametric opposite of 
reductive science, and industrial agriculture is based on reductive
science."

"We have always had to have ‘a good reason’ for doing away with small
operators, and in modern times the good reason has often been
sanitation, for which there is apparently no small or cheap technology."

"We are now pretty obviously facing the possibility of a world that the
supranational corporations, and the governments and educational systems
that serve them, will control entirely for their own enrichment--and,
incidentally and inescapably, for the impoverishment of all the rest of
us."

"The result is that problems correctable on a small scale are replaced
by large-scale problems for which there are no large-scale corrections.
Meanwhile, the large-scale enterprise has reduced or destroyed the
possibility of small-scale corrections. This exactly describes our
present agriculture. Forcing all agricultural localities to conform to
economic conditions imposed from afar by a few large corporations has
caused problems of the largest possible scale, such as soil loss,
genetic impoverishment, and groundwater pollution, which are correctable 
only by an agriculture of locally adapted, solar-powered, diversified 
small farms—a correction that, after a half century of industrial 
agriculture, will be difficult to achieve."

"To the corporate and political and academic servants of global
industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community are 
not known, not imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as damaging 
stereotypes. The people of "the cutting edge" in science, business, 
education, and politics have no patience with the local love, local 
loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly native to their 
places and therefore good caretakers of their places. This is why one of 
the primary principles in industrialism has always been to get the 
worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of 
home employment and home economies. The economic function of the
household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods.
Under industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive,
and farms fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from
production."

"Biotechnology, variety patenting, and other agribusiness innovations
are intended not to help farmers or consumers but to extend and prolong
corporate control of the food economy; they will increase the cost of
food, both economically and ecologically."

“’Objectivity’ has come to be simply the academic uniform of moral
cowardice: one who is ‘objective’ never takes a stand.”

“Why have they [land-grant colleges] watched in silence the destruction
of the markets of the small producers of poultry, eggs, butter, cream,
and milk—once the mainstays of the small-farm economy?

“Why have they never studied or questioned the necessity or the justice
of the sanitation laws that have been used to destroy such markets?”

“The expert knowledge of agriculture developed in the universities, like 
other such knowledges, is typical of the alien order imposed on a
conquered land. We can never produce a native economy, much less a
native culture, with this knowledge. It can only make us the imperialist
invaders of our own country.”

"It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that
used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons."

"But let us…abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it
is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is
intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly.
Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is
always on the side that pays best."

"What works *poorly* in agriculture -- monoculture, for instance, or
annual accounting -- can be pretty fully explained, because what works
poorly is invariably some oversimplifying *thought* that subjugated
nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies
explanation because it involves an order that in both magnitude and
complexity is ultimately incomprehensible.

"Here, then, is a prime example of the futility of a dependence on
information. We cannot contain what contains us or comprehend what
comprehends us."

"Science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to 
merchandise; it is a whoredom of the mind, and so is the art that calls 
this “progress.” So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”

"We could lose, and I think we need to face that. I was speaking in
Nebraska the other day and a very intelligent man came up afterward and
said in a very kind and intelligent way, "Of course you know you may be
fighting a losing battle." And I answered, "I've known for 30 years that 
I may be fighting a losing battle. The question to me is not whether I'm 
going to win or not, but whether I'm going to fight or not."