permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Jason Gerhardt 
<jasongerhardt@gmail.com>wrote:

> Here is a link to an article I recently wrote about the extreme flooding
> that Colorado experienced this Fall and what a Permaculture Design response
> to the event could look like. Continually pluggin' away to get people to
> see water from a different perspective in Colorado...
>
>
> http://www.coloradopermaculture.com/seeding-sensible-solutions-in-a-world-of-extremes-a-permaculture-perspective-on-100-year-floods-and-beyond/
>
> Jason Gerhardt
>

That is a very professional journalistic work, Jason.
I forwarded your article to my friend Mike who replied with these lengthy
comments, which I agree with;
from the first post to the most recent:

<>

The original article that was posted is a good one-- here:
http://www.coloradopermaculture.com/seeding-sensible-solutions-in-a-world-of-extremes-a-permaculture-perspective-on-100-year-floods-and-beyond/

Unfortunately the major force currently transforming the planet is
profit-driven development, not permaculture. So individuals can come up
with very good strategies (like the one in the article) to save themselves.
But nothing much to save the planet. Even if 15-20 million families in this
country convert to permie practises, most development will continue being
profit-led. Why? Because it leads to greater immediate profit. And these
people really don't give a rat's ass about the planet. To them it's all
just raw material to be mined for gain. Nobody owns it, until they buy it
and level off the overburden. Then, flattened, it's ready for the
construction phase to begin. Try educating those guys. They're now shaping
the world we live in.

The world that permaculture needs to adapt to and find solutions to-- the
world being creaqted by the people I'm talking about-- is one where
anomalous weather becomes the norm. That is, instead of regular wet seasons
and dry seasons there will be no way to anticipate whether a year will
bring extreme drought leading to fires, or torrential rains leading to
floods, or a normal planting year when you should have put seeds in the
ground at the end of winter. It will all become a big crapshoot, where one
has to be prepared for damn near anything to happen.

Sorry-- but the way it has always been will be less and less of a guide to
what it will be next. The world will get taken over by weedy
extremophiles-- hardy species that can live anywhere under any conditions,
like marijuana (growing wild from the equator to Alaska) or cockroaches
(the first cold-hardy roaches have recently been found living outdoors in
NYC).

http://www.entsoc.org/press-releases/cold-tolerant-cockroach-asia-found-new-york

So if you live on alluvial land, build your house on stilts. And plant as
large a variety of crops as you can, so that at least a few of them may
mature to harvest. Keep your shed full of flip-flops, wading boots,
swimming trunks and parkas. And make sure you have a pair of snowshoes and
a skiff handy, so you can make your way out to the road.

<>

But it's very idealistic. He's taking barrier island coastlines like the
ones here in NC as an abstract entity-- as though no one were living on
them. And in fact the first problem that needs to be addressed here is the
fact that this is prime real estate-- and that many powerful people have
billions of dollars tied up in its intensive development. These are for the
most part people who simply do not want to hear that their investments are
built upon shifting sands. Because that would imply they were stupid to
ever even think of building hard, permanent structures on the dunes--
spending many millions of dollars on things that were only likely to be
around for a couple of decades before the tides swept them away.

What these people want to hear is that there is a state, one with very deep
pockets, one looking very kindly upon developers, and one willing to spend
plenty of their tax revenues on holding back the tides-- through building
massive complexes of groins, jetties and breakwalls. All so they may
continue profiting handsomely from their folly.

That's the first problem to be overcome. Today, 2013, you can't come along
like Robinson Crusoe to a desert island and figure out the best way of
living on a beach strand in the mid-Atlantic. But if you could, it seems
like Gerhardt's thoughts would be a perfectly good place to begin.

<>

The above being said, I think Gerhardt's article is brilliant. The guy
really understands oyster beds. And with the passage of time, as all our
instant castles crumble into the outwash, it's very likely that North
Carolinians will be ready to heed the message. Retain and restore more
natural areas. Never ever cut down coastal forest (incredibly, this is
still being done). And re-establish oyster beds everywhere, above and
beyond our harvesting requirements.

If you ever want to witness an utter, ridiculous environmental catastrophe
drive down to Ocean Isle, south of Wilmington, almost to Calabash. The
place is a classic example of how not to develop a barrier island.

First they scraped the whole island clean, down to the bare sand and shell
beds. Then they staked out row upon row of lot lines, put down the blacktop
road grid, piped in water & sewer lines and prepped the first 300-400 lots
for building. These first houses, all of them gigantic, have now been
completed. And a handful have even been bought. But most of them just have
signs in the front yards-- and no sound but the wind flapping the shutters
against the particle-board facades.

The squandering of bank money on this monumental act of folly is so immense
it's really hard to comprehend-- how people who think of themselves as
being wise stewards of the public's savings accounts could have gotten
quite so carried away with greed, blindness and plain stupidity, the lack
of even a rudimentary business sense, as to ever have approved all these
builders' loans on a spec project.

Oh well... so what? If they lose a billion dollars down this rat hole,
someone will come along to bail them out. Or if not, maybe they can run for
public office.