Subject: Re: [permaculture] Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 11:35:07 -0400
"...agriculture
continued to exhaust arable land as it inexorably does."
-Toby
Monocultural or business-controlled agriculture, sure, but
responsible agriculture doesn't have to necessarily or inexorably
exhaust arable land! Isn't that the whole point behind
permaculture? But of course I'm picking at semantics, as I don't
think we're in any real disagreement!
I've been reading the essays of Wendell Berry lately, and just this
morning came across this passage, which seemed to nicely sum up the
issues we're currently facing:
"We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the
health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an
economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural,
undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see the error of
our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in
it. There is no plainer symptom of our insanity than our avowed
intention to maintain by fire an unlimited economic growth. Fire
destroys what nourishes it and so in fact imposes severe limits on
any growth associated with it. The true source and analogue of our
economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural
limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it,
produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and
decay. We must learn to grow like a tree, not like a fire."
from Conservation and Local Economy in The Art of the Common Place.
Re: [permaculture] Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point
, (continued)