permaculture

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

<<<And I still feel closest to what you have to say Daniel. For one thing, I 
am absolutely certain we are several orders of magnitude above the 
sustainable carrying capacity of the planet and that is not going to last no 
matter what new technique is made popular. I also happen to believe that 
just because of our numbers it is now absolutely impossible to reach a 
consensus about anything. (social psychology being one of my hobby horses)
[huge snip]

"Your ideas of helping the 99% exclude you from seeing things in a different 
light as well. If you work with young college graduates or relatively high 
educated middle class Americans, you are working only with a tiny fraction 
of humanity as well. This is not the 99%.

I thought like you before. Until the reality of living with the poor in Asia 
dawned on me. I now work here as a teacher and educational manager. And I 
see how absolutely difficult it is for anyone, rich or poor, 1% of 99%, 
students or fellow teachers and administrative staff, to learn anything 
radically new.
We can learn a new trick, but we do not learn to teach ourselves. We do not 
gain independence from our habits. So we tinker with new techniques and 
methods, while our entire foundation of society is crumbling."

Which to me makes sense and is more or less what I said above. I could add 
to your remark that I see so much basic knowledge gone for ever. There are 
not even many farmers left who have the knowledge to do anything for 
themselves and I see an enormous pressure from the government to drive that 
(specialisation) further. Understandable because if you can cure a disease 
problem in plants or animals yourself (one simple example out of hundreds) 
you do not contribute optimally to the GNP. And that is the bottom line 
after all. That is what it is all about.
Most of the general public I know are worse. I know plenty of people who 
concider an apple hanging of a tree inedible. Only shops have fruit they 
would ever eat.
To tell the truth, I gave up hope that all of the 99% can possibly be saved 
by any means, soil or aquaponics.

I would like to make one more remark about the cloudberries :

You wrote:
"The peat-moss hydroponics system for the growing medium of Cloudberry was 
actually the only choice, since the Cloudberry's natural habitat is the 
acidic and nutrient poor peat swamps of Finland."

I survived on cloudberries while on survival trips in the Scottish Highlands 
40 years ago. Short plants, just two leaves and one berry. About 6-7 per 
square meter and that for untold square miles. I don't know how the 
situation is in Scotland at the moment. If there are stil cloudberries there 
it will be imo because of the Scottish midges that keep humans away from the 
moors.

In those days it seems that the situation was the same in Irish bogs. We 
still have many miles of these raised bogs around us but but there no longer 
are any cloudberries.
I think the reason is that there was a market for these berries and that 
large quantities were collected for export. After all there was money in it. 
I think the disappearance of the cloudberry is ecological in nature. The 
species can not survive massive collection by humans who leave nothing but 
litter behind when they are finished. In a natural situation native birds 
and small animals (or me) will eat most of the berries but they will leave 
some droppings behind, well dispersed but locally and also seeds that can 
lead to new plants. Picking everything in sight for years removes something 
from the environment that can no longer be replenished.

So I can well understand why the Fins tried aquaponics on this plant if they 
saw it disappear in the wild even if a huge installation would be needed to 
grow a few kilos of cloudberries. I can not immagine the plants to become 
much bigger than their natural height of a few inches in an aquaponics 
system. I can hardly think of a crop that would be more economically 
unsuitable to any man-managed growing system.

Keep up the good work,

John


Daniel
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