I went to a small Montessori school on the Rio Grande while I was growing up, and among the other "new age"-y things going on at the school, we would spend half a day every week in permaculture class. We spent that class doing things like gardening, constructing adobe stuff like ovens and a gathering space shaped like a turtle (the head formed a pizza oven too - it was really cool), collecting eggs from a chicken coop, recycling fibers and scrap paper into (very brittle) paper, and making tea out of the herbs we grew - mint, chamomile, lavender, etc.
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!
This reminds me of the lessons from the book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. One of the main characters is teaching another lessons throughout the book using a Montessori approach. One of the big lessons is to only take what you need, and to appreciate these things we take for granted. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.
I was just talking to a friend about the fatal flaw in Marxian analysis of capitalism Both the analysis and the proposed solution focused on owning the means of production, but none of it says anything about the well-being of the humans, the community, and the eco-system involved.
In contrast, look at say, how the Hopi views things. There is a faction among the Hopi that never signed anything with the US government. Their view is that ownership is granted to those that take care of it. It isn’t about the means of production, but rather, your ability to participate in the land’s wel-being. A further implication is that, within this world view, you cannot accumulate capital beyond your personal ability to take care of it. Instead of gaining property rights, and having social expectations for taking care of it, you don’t get those rights until you demonstrate ongoing care.
It goes even further. Can you own a person because you “take care” of that person? If you reject that idea, what about any living being? Do you really own the trees, the birds, the bees? Instead, you view this as being in relation within a community that take care of the land. You obtain an yield (one of the permaculture design principles), but you don’t exclusively do so. Other living beings within the land can also obtain a yield, whether it is also the food, water or habitat.
Apparently forest cover is ~30%. Note that "forest" here uses the wood industry's definition of forest (tree plantation), not the ecological one.
Also, it blows my mind every day how thorough and complete our estrangement with nature has become... Barely anyone seems to notice or be disturbed by the loss of natural heritage in this country.
I grew up in northeastern America and have gotten used to it's wilderness. After moving to Berlin, I was shocked to discover that much of what looked like "forests" on the maps of Eastern Germany are actually just grids of identical coniferous trees in a barely-alive landscape, criss-crossed by dirt roads.
Conversely, it never ceases to amuse and sadden me how astounded Germans are by my stories of wilderness just a few hours drive from NYC.
If you ever get lost in here in The Netherlands, just walk straight for 30 minutes and you'll hit a probably decent, paved road. Or stand still and wait for the sounds of a car.
I might me exaggerating for some exceptional places, but not much.
Another fun fact: there is actually no true wilderness in Europe - literally the entire biome has been demonstrated to have been selectively cultivated by humans for 10's of thousands of years.
There are cultivated areas of wilderness in North and South America. But the way it is cultivated is more like the modern “perennial food forest”, and not “scientific forestry” you see in Europe.
I thought about working with 4-H to create a permaculture track.
I live in the city. I have been applying permaculture design principles to my back and front yard. I am exposing my kids to all of this, and it is not too late for you if that is what you want to do.
You have to do things a bit differently in the city, but you absolutely can apply the 12 design principles and 3 ethical principles.
Haha, I have to assume so, but honestly I didn't spend much time in the chicken coop because I thought it smelled bad. I'm not sure where the eggs went, also. And yea, on reflection, it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school? I remember a friend getting pecked by a chicken once. This was a pretty agg-y area in New Mexico and most everyone I grew up with had at least some animals on their land, so it wasn't unusual.
But what about the allergens? The risk of salmonella? Have you seen the damage an angy chicken can do with those claws? I've heard that Avian Influenza is on the rise again. Can't they just learn about chickens on their EduTablets?
...is what I imagine I'd hear at the Parent/Teacher conferences leading up to the average public school's field trip to a local farm.
That kind of fear is not what I want to impart my children. Life becomes so small and dark when living life like that. But I get that I’m not the average parent. We already have chickens in the backyard.
Hen pecking don’t really hurt. They are more likely to run away from you. If you don’t pet them on their head, they won’t take it as establishing pecking order. Their claws only come out when they are raising chicks — as any mother caring for her young will do.
It’s the roosters you have to watch for, and you don’t need them in a flock. Dealing with roosters is trainable — using a mop is unreasonably effective with communicating with roosters because they think it is a giant rooster.
Disease is something you take care of by keeping the coop clean, and letting the chickens forage — pasture raising them.
But for my children, I think it is very important for them to know where food really comes from, and it’s not the grocery store.
We here at EduTablets Technologies haves accounted for these issues through our new VR enhanced farm edusperiences. Children can hold a chicken in their arms without risk of disease or injury through our novel child sized full body immersion suits. Through eye tracking, heart rate monitors, and continuous EEG scans, we can constantly update our individualized AI models that construct unique chicken experiences for each child while maximizing their learning potential.
Well on a serious note, there was a story that made the rounds recently about a study that showed children in families with pets had reduced allergies/sensitivities to allergens.
> it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school.
These days there are American children as young as 13 washing down slaughterhouses on school nights and sleepwalking to school. In a nation where child labor of this kind is completely legal, I think it’s fair to say that a few chickens at school is just fine.
Your comment was correctly downvoted and flagged because it broke the site guidelines badly—several of them.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? We've had to ask you this many times. If you keep it up we'll have to ban you. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Ah, they didn't have us apologize to plants - only to thank 'em. It wasn't a guilty thing we did, but it was a lesson to appreciate that they were growing and that we could enjoy them.
I'm surprised you didn't stop at the idea that it also implies plants have hearing and can understand language and process some kind of human meaning - I feel like those are more absurd than the idea than a plant feels. (More organisms on this planet demonstrate something like feelings than the capacity to verbally communicate.) But yes, I project the idea the plants have something like human feelings, and that's definitely a product of that kind of education reverberating through my life. It was a kind of spiritual lesson, and the school incorporated other spiritual elements like performing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address during some school assemblies and camping trips. I'm not confused about those as an adult.
I also know that a plant's experience on this planet is alien to mine, and it's silly to apply human meaning to what I think it's going through. I think our brains have enough space to hold these ideas up there though and reflect on them, and I think children deserve more than a functionalist education. I don't think I'm messed up as a result of that education, and I'm living a happy life - fair to say I had a heck of a time catching up on math and language in middle school though!
If we are viewing this spiritually, then yes, plants have consciousness, though not necessarily human consciousness.
There are shamanic practices involving plant teachers and interacting with the spirit of the plant. There are these Tantric ideas of plant medicine and the afflictions they heal, arising together.
Or that, our bodies are optimized for walking, yet we carry the means as climbers when our ancestors lived and learned from the standing people. (our lats are both the largest upper body muscle and the most underused one in day-to-day modern life). There is meaning and significance in climbing and walking. I can go on.
I love both your comments and am saving them as references to be used in a book or essays that I am working on that discusses the lack of non-selfist values in modern culture and how this is far more consequential than whether we choose a socialist or capitalist laws and economic system.
Also, if you've never read Ursula K LeGuin, you should give one of her sci-fi books a go. In Left Hand of Darkness a non-human character feels a deep sadness when they abandon a sleigh that has carried them across a frozen polar region, saving their lives. The human doesn't understand this, as the sleigh is just an inanimate object, a tool, and they had known all along they'd have to abandon it once it served its purpose.
I think that modernity had shifted the mainstream view away from that, but it need not that way. When I look at Christopher Alexander’s life’s work and what the various people tried to do during the Renaissance, you can still be in relation to all around you. Alexander’s talks on centers and unfolding brings you to designing in this way.
I appreciate that! I'll have to keep an eye out for it. I definitely agree with that perspective - I don't think it matters much how we organize the bits and pieces of the system if we don't have a shared value for life beyond our own. I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values. But I'm also not sure if it's tractable or "good" for a worldwide population to develop shared values - I think "valuing life" is something we should all practice, but who's to say how that actually renders out in the minds of 7bn people? Tricky stuff, and I have no answers haha. I was a CS major, and I'm sure freshmen philosophy majors could do circles around me on this.
Hoo - I remember that scene and the mix of feelings it brought up for me. It reminded me of an attachment to physical objects that I attribute to watching Toy Story growing up. I love the way she wrote, and I still have a long list of her books to dive into. Another scene that left its mark on me is from The Dispossessed when Shevek shares a moment with the pet otter at a dinner party:
The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. "Ammar," Shevek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being – "brother."
From Shevek's perspective, he had never seen or known this kind of creature to exist, and he was staring at something alien to him and still finding a connection. I think in a way thanking the herbs was a lesson in looking across the "gulf of being", though the herbs didn't return the attention with a gold, intelligent gaze. Maybe it was something more like what Werner Herzog sees in chickens haha [1]. To me, when he calls a chicken's gaze "stupid", I don't think he's saying that in a negative sense but instead in a way that's recognizing their being as it is in human terms. The connotation that we put into the word "stupid" is what makes his perspective sound like a harsh judgement, but I think he's just being "brutally honest".
I can't help but mention the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief as well [2]! Definitely a song (and album) to get lost in:
From way up there it looks so small
From way down here it looks so small
One peculiar organism aren't we all together?
Everybody steps on ants
Everybody eats the plants
...
When I took another look
The past was not a history book
That was just some linear perception
...
When I say celestial
I mean extra-terrestrial
I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart
...
Kiss your body up and down other than your elbows
'Cause as for your elbows, they're on their own
Wandering like a rolling stone
Rubbing up against the edges of experience
I think the motif underlying each of these that matters to me is embracing "radical alterity" or "the other". "Accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart" and recognizing the "edges of [your] experience" and where you can and can't know yourself. Adrienne Lenker frequently talks about how LeGuin is one of her favorite authors, and I think this song is definitely in conversation with LeGuin. There's so much in there! The whole album is worth a listen (and several more) if you haven't heard it already.
> I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values.
Agreed, but I think that will fall out naturally from having a non-selfist value system, which would dispense with the current world's elevation of selfishness from vice to virtue. As long as we continue to worship at the alter of selfishness, no alternative to capitalism is going to do much better. To your point about some monolithic value system: we wouldn't want that. Just as for physical evolution diversity of the values "gene pool" is healthy. But the selfish gene (intentional play off Dawkins' idea) needs to become recessive at most. It's both fine and healthy if people disagree with how to create a better community and how to share the world empathetically and morally as long as we share the same intention: sharing the world empathetically and morally. Selfism by definition is immoral as morality by definition by my reckoning is all about choosing the common/greater good over one's personal gain. Moral conscience is that voice that tells you "Yeah, I know you want that so much, but you have to resist because it hurts other people."
I haven't read the The Dispossessed yet. I'll move it up my list. I was introduced to LeGuin in a class at Berkeley titled Women in Religion offered by the Berkeley School of Theology / Graduate Theological Union (separate from UC Berkeley but they have a collaborative relationship, and students of each can take classes in the other) and taught by a feminist theologian woman... I'm an atheist leaning agnostic and it was one of my favorite classes I ever took at Berkeley.
I never heard of Big Thief and will give their music a listen, definitely!
It might be years before my writing sees the light of day, but if you would be so kind, shoot me an email so we can keep in touch. I'll send you one as well, given all the spam filters that hinder such first time comms.
I remember a sci-fi book where the main character asked the robot to do something, and the robot did, and the character thanked it. And someone said "why did you thank it? It has no feelings and can't understand it." The reply was something along the lines of "the thanks comes from me, and if I stop doing it for robots I'll stop doing it for people, too, eventually."
> One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one
And the response:
> It's messed up for a school to get children to verbally apologize to plants. It implies that plants have feelings.
The followup to that is about the confusion/"these are the same things" for thanking something being the same as apologizing for that same thing - that gratitude is the same as remorse.
---
The difference is:
> Thank you for the leaf that I will use for tea
vs
> I'm sorry that I'm picking your leaf for my own enjoyment
The first example here is thanking (a plant) and the second example is apologizing for taking action implying feeling sorry for the harm caused to the plant.
Thea person you are responding to understood that; what they didn’t understand was what the person they were responding to had come to understand about part of the population from the person they were responding to conflating thanking with understanding.
And, I think that was the hardest to understand thing I’ve ever said.
And if I may expand on this, if someone conflates thanking and apologizing and/or associates both with weakness, it has profound implications for how that person will behave within a society. It may (at least partly) explain why there is so little "instinctive" kindness towards other people, especially when these people are not part of your social circle or they are "abstract" (i.e. when they are featured in the media).
The original post only talked about thanking the plants. The reply only talks about apologizing to the plants. Clearly the reply thinks that's the same thing here.
Why not be grateful regardless of whether things have feelings?
The practice of gratitude is a good one, internally and externally, for the living and the inert. We don’t have to imagine the plants have souls; it’s the simple act of acknowledgment and appreciation that instills a sense of value and importance upon the things that keep us alive.
They don't learn to apologise to the plants, they just learn to be grateful for what they can take for "free". That probably doesn't fit into your tiny narrative of "green activists" being all shamans who believe plants have feelings, so you extrapolate, project and make a fool of yourself.
Its not about teaching kids that plants have feelings.
Its about teaching kids that they have feelings. Saying thank-you to a plant may not benefit the plant much, but it does improve the mood and tone of the individual saying it.
Being thankful for things actually helps with mental health. If you can't be thankful, even to the trivial little life forms that provide you with food and comfort, you've got a thankfulness imbalance that no amount of chemical consumption is going to help you fix...
They didn't apologize, they expressed gratitude (that's what "thank you" means). Although the usage here was debatable, as the plant didn't have any say in its leaves being cropped, and of course it only makes sense to thank for a deliberate act. So, in a way, these children were taught inconsistent logic.
Personally, I don't see anything inconsistent about being grateful for something that wasn't a deliberate act. I can see at least two reasons for doing so:
Part of expressing gratitude is for the benefit of the person expressing gratitude rather than for the person being thanked.
Even if it wasn't a deliberate act, the person being thanked may appreciate knowing that they benefited someone. Although, this wouldn't apply to plants which aren't sentient.
It is only insofar inconsistent as most spiritual/social norms are. This seems to me to be very similar to the gratefulness expressed i.e. by Christians and other religious people towards a higher power (which often explicitly is "incomprehensible" and thus probably not really addressable with human comprehensions of gratefulness).
I am surprised and not surprised to see this here. I often see themes of burnout, wanting to get back to nature, existential questions surrounding tech and similar here on HN.
I took a permaculture class earlier this year, after having researched it on the sidelines for a few years. It started from looking at sustainability, agriculture, homesteading (wanting to "leave it all behind") and blossomed into a wonderful learning experience about a philosophy where I felt a little more at home. It was great. It introduced me to a few really cool friends whose values largely aligned with mine. Anyone interested in this, please feel free to reach out.
I don't think it has necessarily to do with burnout, or even with the more general notion "city-dwellers feel detached from nature so they romanticize it". Apart from that, there is also the entrepreneurial spirit (as well as the hacker spirit) of wanting to do things yourself, either because you think you can do better or because you want to decrease your reliance on others. And those are very well represented here.
I agree with the entrepreneurial DIYer aspect of it. But I do think sitting in front of screens all day screams for a longing for nature.
Also I think there might a counterculture aspect to it, which ties in to your reliance point. Growing your own food is one of the most subversive thing you can do. Get solar and a few other things, and you're completely self-reliant.
It allows one to take a shortcut to the fisherman life, in the fisherman and the banker story.
What course did you take, and where, if I may be so intrusive… you did mention to “reach out” if interested! I also arrived at being fascinated by the concept by ideas of sustainability and “getting away from it all”.
Search for people running PDC's - Permaculture Design Courses - in your area. These are variably well monitored / established syllabus, usually run for 5 days or so. I'm sure there's one-day intro courses, but I suspect you'd get a lot more variability, and obviously a lot less value.
Most practicing permaculturists I've bumped into tend to eschew the woo, as it were, but you may want to validate that before signing up to any particular course. (These branches of study can attract certain types of people.)
I did a PDC here in Sydney AU about 15 years ago, and like GP I found it a hugely interesting and engaging process. (The one I went to was run by a lass who had studied under Bill Mollison, which was kind of funky, but as a rule the material covered is much more practical, rational, etc - than deferential / by association to the two guys that kicked it off.)
Most fun thing about permaculture is the fact that no one is making money from actually applying it but rather just selling courses, books and other media. It’s funny since the first thing you learn about it, is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money doing it.
Beside that, permaculture is nothing more than a framework for systems design. Can be applied to much more than your garden.
A few people are making money from it, but they're content to make money. The majority of people doing homesteading are:
1. At-home farmers who are eating healthier, but paying for the privilege.
2. People who are quiet because they're actually making very good money doing what they're doing.
3. People who haven't quite grasped that permaculture and/or homesteading are still farming, and farming is still hard work despite how blog-friendly you make it.
4. People trying to sell their "next best thing" marketing to hopeful mommmy bloggers.
I am currently a #1 hoping to become a #2 eventually. Online, I predominantly follow #2s and they never try and sell me classes, PDFs, etc, because they're busy making money farming.
I agree. Actually, I suspect optimizing for anything will probably backfire.
I wonder if there can be a sort of ecosystem effect on money that works like produce. If you overproduce something, it ends up going bad and rotting. Maybe you could have a currency where if you don't use it, it diminishes. That would make sure that money would be spread around, just like an abundant harvest would be shared widely before it goes bad.
If you buy actually valuable expensive input from the outside world for making food, you should sell actually valuable output to make it worth it. Otherwise it isn't sustainable.
Sure, making money on things that aren't actually valuable is all too easy, but that would defeat the point. "Economy", formal and informal, seems to be a big and acknowledged part of permaculture culture.
If "permaculture" meant "hobby farm", then you'd be correct.
However, permaculture is centered around a radically different approach: maximally leveraging existing ecosystem features rather than trying to fight them, or trying to wipe the ecosystem clean and turn it into mere substrate for building something artificial.
A correctly implemented permaculture "farm" should require minimal or no artificial inputs at all, instead relying on a composition of self-sustaining closed loops (e.g. food waste goes into compost and a worm bin, where the compost is used to grow more vegetables while the worms are used to supplement chickens foraging in the garden and eating pests like slugs)
Even if that, you need shovels. You need a lot of stuff that wears out, that you can't make yourself. You need to participate in an economy. Some of it can be with other permas, but much of it likely won't.
It's always been like that. Farmers from the stone age on have used tools manufactured a long way away.
Some of these folks do sponsored content, usually widgets or toys or something, but they're pretty up front about it. A few of them I follow religiously, others I choose which videos I'd prefer to watch.
Also, Justin Rhodes and Joel Salatin youtube channels. Joel focuses on poultry, and Justin also raises pigs and cows. Both are heavily into permaculture.
I only have a few backyard chickens, but I’m trying to apply their principles where I can. It’s scalable, luckily.
People joke about the fact that you're not really saving any money doing this vs buying the produce at the store, and they might be right, but it's not about the price of food, it's about learning the knowledge needed to grow your own. It kind of freaks me out that 98% of the US population would starve if our ag system seriously broke down. We could seriously use some resiliency there.
Oh you save a ton of money on produce and it's higher quality. I save seeds and don't have to buy new seed every year. I use woodchips, leaf compost, manure compost and whatever else free I can get close by. My neighbor has a huge pile of woodchips that he's offered so I've been using those instead.
This week I harvested morels which the local grocery store sells fresh for like $40/lb.
There is a catch, and that catch is you eat whatever is in season. It does require getting creative with recipes. I live in zone 6B and have fresh greens from April - December. Winter squash will store well into the spring. Nuts in the shell will last years. I have black walnuts that I harvested in 2019 that still taste great.
That doesn't really count all the money and/or time required to get the garden into that productive state. I've spent a lot of time and money on mine. And I don't mind that, I love working on it and it is both decorative and productive. But everything grown in my garden would have been a lower overall cost to me if I had a house with no garden at all.
For example, you listed those free items of compost etc. I also make my own and get freebies wherever I can. But when we moved here the ground was in a poor state so we have paid quite a bit for extra soil compost and mulch. We could have purchased a house with a great existing garden and mature trees - did view one, but then the house itself needed a lot of work. One way or another its expensive. Another example, I could get a lot more free/cheap material if I had a trailer. Suitable second hand trailer around here would be $1000 to $6000. That's a lot of supermarket vegetables.
I think it's still important to note that it's not a constant for everyone. I too like the previous commentor got to save money albeit with a lot of initial backbreaking work for a small garden. I think most could with a lot of work, some stingyness.
I had shit soil when I started too (long story but I overpayed for it to prevent cracks due to a shit foundation)
I ended up getting great soil from a tomato & peppers nursery/seed selling business i had helped out before. They were moving and i helped em out with that again and they have to refresh their mix once every few years anyway or they can harbor diseases that can fuck up their year.
I also got a bit of forest soil which was probably not allowed (it's within close distance and i hauled 3 baskets for every new plant i put down) and then a bit of additional soil from a nearby cellar being dug which was shit but i had to raise an additional bit of garden regardless of whether it held veg or lawn.
Additionally I got a few trailers of free horse manure that I scouted local 2ndhand sites for because there's too much manure in this country I'm in.
I used my dad's trailer who needs it regardless for a lot of other stuff he does.
I got some free seconhand fencing mesh for peas to grow on. Cut bamboo my neighbour couldn't get rid of to support it all and some other plants.
I now have a secondhand plastic greenhouse. I still don't have plastic for low tunnels yet but anticipated late frost by simply putting cut plastic bottles over my plants.
The only thing I actually spent on was a few cheap tools, seeds and a few rare herbs/berry bushes & 2 small fruit trees. Oh and last year I had to spent on water due to persistent draught but this year I catch water from the shed and wood storage into some free secondhand IBC vats.
Since then I think I've more than paid back for the help I've been given with the amount of veg I've given away.
It has cost me boatloads of time to get started tho but...I've really enjoyed it. My daytime job programming keeps me sitting still away from the sun otherwise.
Certainly we get help from our neighbours, and they've also let us use their tools and trailer on occasion. We've done less for them, but I have made them a lot of coffee. Still, if we hadn't spent money we wouldn't have got nearly as far with our available time.
I didn't say I was doing permaculture. I know what it's about. We certainly incorporate bits of it, for example I do make my own compost and I do mulch with cardboard and other available materials. And we built a hugelmound. However, I'm not going to give up my job or fart around for 10 years to get things done when we can make a call and get a truck load of mulch. Plus the company that we buy from takes greenwaste and turns it into mulch and compost, so apart from the commercial component it's not that different a lifecycle, just a different scale.
Many permaculturists would probably starve too. It's pretty hard for a person with a backyard to consistently produce the 2500+ kcal needed per day, and also process and store it so that it's available outside of harvest season as well.
The goal isn't to have one person produce all that for themselves, or about back-breaking labor.
Permaculture encourages community, not hyper-individualism. It's about working with nature rather than against it, and directing the benefits of it to everyone.
I think some of these folks who are on several acres, and who have poultry, cattle, pigs, and extensive gardens, will likely not starve.
But life will be hard, once the fuel and electricity run out, even the ones who are totally off grid with solar and storage batteries. Just basic stuff like screws, pumps, pipes, tools, not to mention medical care, pharmaceuticals etc.
Not starve if left to their own devices. But if they're anywhere even close to a city or town, or a group of other people who don't have those things, they better be prepared to defend it.
In fairness, some permaculture people talk about this, for example, food forests which can produce an impressive amount of food which a city dweller would not recognise or know how to cook even if they did. If you have a large enough food forest then you could be providing some kind of subsistence living long after someone came for your cows, sheep and pigs.
Honestly the person who knows how to farm, raise crops, and process their harvest and meat would probably be better off not defending their herd in that scenario.
The groups of people coming from a city to pillage a farm clearly have no idea what they're doing long term and in all likelihood wouldn't survive much longer. Killing and processing am animal isn't a skill most people have. They could easily ruin the meat and would almost certainly waste most of it. And what comes next, unless they know how to hunt as well?
All that said, I hope we never see anything close to this ever play out. No matter what the specific scenario that breaks down society for more than a few days, a lot of people would die along the way and who knows what would come next.
Yes, I hope so too. After a collapse of civilization, likely only highly organized and well armed groups will survive. Families on 10 acres will be killed and their farms stripped of food & tools.
Collapse is a process, not an event. Collapse is happening all around us, yet we're not all turning into gangs of marauders. When catastrophes happen in poor countries, they don't turn into roving gangs of marauders either. People tend to work together, actually.
>likely only highly organized and well armed groups will survive
Agreed it seems unlikely. In the meantime, I really can't worry too much about any specific scenario and outcome. Any major systemic failure leads to uncertainty and what comes next is anyone's guess. Instability is hard to predict, best thing to do is just keep a level head and take it one step at a time.
Doing genealogy, my ancestors were surprisingly good at that sort of thing. Then they learned to read and studied farming practices and stuff and got much better at it.
Of course it depends on the size of your backyard, and how long, and critically on trade networks/community.
My grandmother was a subsistence farmer in rural Poland. Their family had a sizable plot of land, farm animals etc. Still, without supplementing income with odd jobs, they'd starve. They were hungry a lot of the time anyway.
I mean, resiliency, yes, I am all for resiliency, besides "produce enough food for everyone", "be able to continue producing enough food for everyone despite 5- or 6-sigma disasters" is the most important thing for an agricultural system to do.
But, like, why would the agricultural system break down? If that's a possibility in your society, maybe ask why that is and try to fix it, rather than trying to have everyone go back to subsistence farming.
The agricultural system doesn't need to break down in order for us to realize it's deeply damaging and unsustainable. Ideally we'd realize this and change our ways before breaks down — that's why permaculture exists.
> The agricultural system doesn't need to break down in order for us to realize it's deeply damaging and unsustainable. Ideally we'd realize this and change our ways before breaks down — that's why permaculture exists.
I'm pretty sure the systemic fix isn't going to be everyone having their own backyard plot.
> You're confusing permaculture with prepping.
Well, if you're talking about "98% of the US population would starve" that's absolutely prepper talk.
Yeah, and even if you're that worried about societal agricultural instability, you're better off spending hobby time to make something like a dead-simple replicatable potato growing kit and distributing it out at a loss. Barring something truly irreversibly apocalyptic, that'd provide most of what's needed until things rebound.
I assume there are some boffins somewhere in the US's $4 trillion dollar budget -- USDA, probably -- who are coming up with plans for things like "what if wheat is decimated by a blight?" or "what if Missouri is just, all flooded?". Probably a bunch of academics at various Midwest universities, too.
There are already grants and other public programs to support community gardens and local agriculture; a community garden should be the perfect place to apply permaculture.
The goal isn't for everyone to have a backyard plot. You're still seeing this from a very individualist American viewpoint. In fact, no one should have yards at all (at least not as we understand them now).
The goal is to integrate food production into society in a more seamless and holistic way.
> The goal isn't for everyone to have a backyard plot.
That seems to be what it amounts to in practice though. Noble goals are a fine thing, but your steps towards the goal need to actually constitute progress towards the goal.
There's a huge range of solutions between fixing the fragility of modern industrial ag (I can only speak to the US system) and everyone having a plot and attempting to be completely self sufficient.
It isn't realistic or healthy to expect everyone to be self sufficient, there are plenty of food reasons we developed societies. It also isn't healthy or realistic for a country as large as the US to depend on a system that makes all of our food in a handful of industrial farms and feed plots so it can be distributed nationally by truck. It also isn't healthy to motivate said industries to measure output by pound regardless of nutritional value, sustainable practices, or animal welfare.
Permaculture often amounts to individuals growing food on their own land today because the system is so far removed from anything resembling permaculture that there aren't other options. Ideally permaculture concepts would be practiced by local farms and we would all be eating healthier food, grown in a more sustainable way closer to where we live.
>That seems to be what it amounts to in practice though.
In some cases it is. So what? Even that form of practice is valuable.
One can't expect the permaculture people to also stage an overnight revolution and reform society. The social changes I describe are needed badly, but they are outside the scope of permaculture itself.
Permaculture is is an important aspect of a much larger goal around sustainability.
> One can't expect the permaculture people to also stage an overnight revolution and reform society. The social changes I describe are needed badly, but they are outside the scope of permaculture itself
How can you claim permaculture is about the goals you described if it's not contributing to them?
The practice is valuable because it increases knowledge. You don't build large-scale projects first, you build prototypes first (and many of them) then iterate.
>How can you claim permaculture is about the goals you described if it's not contributing to them?
Permaculture is not about those goals specifically. It can contribute to those goals, aligns with them nicely, and many people who are into permaculture are also into those other goals, but it is not the goal.
whether or not you save money and how much you save depends on how much your regular job pays. Sure, a google software engineer will be better off just buying all their food. but someone working a minimum wage job, will be much better off growing their own fruit trees. Here are some quick calculations/back of the napkin. with an average harvest labor of 3 apples per minute, that would produce 180 organic apples per hour or 40 lbs/hour or about 80$ worth of fruit per hour, not including time spend watering, pruning, irrigation and mulching (if done). Organic Berries on the other hand are 4-10 times more expensive, thus even giving some engineers a run for their money!
Pretty good assessment. I have the potential to be earning a high hourly rate but I don't count my time gardening as a loss because I enjoy it most of the time. I also can grow different things than I can find in the store and that's hard to put a price on.
plus you know it's organic, whereas the grocery store's "organic" label sometimes has some give to it. Some wheats for example, aren't entirely organic.
The organic label really ended up pretty meaningless unfortunately. Wish I had a link handy, but Joel Salatin has a few podcast episodes where they dug into all the loopholes.
The "product of the USA" label was also meaningless, thankfully it actually just recently got an updated list of requirements that make more sense. Previously you could bring in chicken raised in another country, do a bit of the processing here, and consider it produces in the USA.
I know a few people that make very good money applying permaculture principles. Not because they are applying the principles, but because they are very good at selling their produce and services. They know how to get to their target audience, specially people with more money to spend. I think this is true for any kind of agriculture or business.
Applied to much more than your garden is very true. I related all the principles of permaculture to my jiujitsu class. Hard to say if they helped, since I already had been practicing them in a different 'bundle', but definitely speaks to how universal they are in systems with complexity and feedback.
I find it fascinating. It's somewhere between a brilliant insight into the human species relationship with the other inhabitants of our planet and utter snake oil sold to new-agey people to be applied in utterly unsuitable conditions.
How do you know that nobody is making money applying it? It’s not exactly like you would know if they were, would you, since by definition they wouldn’t be advertising it?
> Most fun thing about permaculture is the fact that no one is making money from actually applying it but rather just selling courses, books and other media
Checkout "Stefan Sobkowiak - The Permaculture Orchard" via his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@StefanSobkowiak. TL;DR, he purchased an apple orchard and started applying permaculture principals to create sustainable business. For example, he took every third apply tree and cut it down to replace with a "Nitrogen Fixing" sort of tree in addition planting other smaller plants and shrubs in between the trees (see "syntropic agroforestry") and overall he's had tremendous success. This would be the best video of him explaining his success with applying permaculture - https://youtu.be/zArUk3THIV0.
Another person to checkout is "Shawn Dubrowsky - EdibleAcres" via his YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@edibleacres. He basically applies permaculture principals to feed himself/wife on a substance level and runs a tree nursery business.
I just discovered composting using Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus Ostreatus). It can handle food waste and also human/animal waste too. It colonizes the waste really fast when it's warm. No need for a septic tank.
Yes I have a small hut in the woods, with electricity and Internet via fiber optic cable from a house nearby. There's a waterproof WiFi access point mounted outside the hut on a pole, with a surprisingly long range.
I have a whole 70 litre dust bin that contains spawn and waste organic matter, and it's all turned white and fluffy as the mycelium has colonized everything. And once it's full I can then use the mycelium to start even more colonies on collected tree leaves and branches. It kind of grows exponentially in size. I just keep producing more and more of it....
When you grow large quantities of mycelium this way, it generates its own internal heat, I've found it to be warm inside. So that makes it grow faster than it would if it were at ambient temperature.
Also the large amount of spawn easily overruns any other fungi that might contaminate the bin, such as green mold, before it has time to spread. The oyster mushroom fungus is a very aggressive colonizer which will eventually outrun green mold with time, but this can take a while.
Increase the ratio of spawn to substrate, and ensure that it's mixed very evenly, as that will increase the surface area for growth. So it will colonize faster.
If you're growing it in a jar, ensure that you make a couple of tiny airholes in the lid. The fungus needs oxygen to grow. But if the holes are too big then fungus gnats can get in, and you will find maggots in the mycelium, which you don't wont.
Also if you have a moldy jar, leave it for a couple of months. You might find the mushroom fungus has overrun the mold eventually.
And finally, Oyster mushrooms can't grow on pine woodchips, by the way.
I've been dreaming of a way to compost my dog's waste. It's against city ordinance, and widely discouraged for standard compost bins. Mushrooms could be an interesting approach. But the city ordinance stands. And handling it in the deep Midwest USA winters would be difficult.
I have two larger dogs who produce a fair amount. It just feels wrong to be putting several pounds of biodegradable matter into a plastic bag to be sent to the landfill each week. I've also thought of installing an outdoor sewage drain to let me dump it into the city sewers instead, since the sewage treatment plant will process it in a better way than the landfill.
I compost my dogs waste but basically have no intention to do anything with it ... ever. Just dig a hole and drop in the turds. Trying to do anything with it seems like finding a piece of uranium in the woods and thinking you got a good power source.
The mushrooms are not suitable for human consumption, but in the process of breaking down the waste, the fungus destroys most pathogens present. Then you can use the spent mycelium as high grade garden compost, to be spread on the soil to enrich it.
In principle it is right that it makes sense to use animals to get the optimal amount of calories out of marginal land that can't be used to directly grow edible plants. The current state of agriculture is very far removed from that optimum though.
This is a half-truth at best. The places where you can only grow inedible crops are extremely marginal environments and they usually can't support economical densities. These are pretty unique environments like the northern plains and northern central Asia where only a small percentage of the livestock population lives. Even here, livestock are usually fed to the extent that the land can support and then additional feed is provided with crops grown in less marginal environments. For finishing, that's almost entirely human edible crops like corn, sorghum and oats (even if the specific varietals aren't considered edible).
Are you kidding? Most of the UK is phenomenal for crops, practically a garden of Eden. Do you think megafarms in Kent or even Herefordshire are on particularly marginal land?
Yes, the Scottish Highlands are a marginal environment, but that's reflected in how many cattle they have. There are some 20m cattle in the UK. 1.7m are in Scotland. I couldn't find specific numbers for the highland counties, but only ~15k of those are highland breeds. That's also what I saw in Scotland. Lots of farms and ranches down south, very small villages with huge ranges/low densities up north.
3 acres of land in the US cost $15K on average. A property tax with a 1% rate is $150 per year. You could earn that by selling 20kg of tomatoes. You should be able to grow a tonne in the right soil with the right climate.
Of course in the permaculture you'd try to plant various species, but you should be able to earn $150 by selling them.
If you're really just trying to cover property tax, set aside half your acreage and let a nearby farmer harvest hay. On reasonably productive land, splitting the cash will cover taxes.
Buy enough bonds that you can pay taxes with the coupon? Or dividend stocks? Factor this into the total cost of the property? Also include realistic depreciation in your accounting.
For permaculture I first need land, and its expensive where I live (I can't go too far as I'm on 2 wheels without engine), so I'm still saving for a few more years before planting fig, persimmon, medlar, citrus, orange native trees, peppers, and all easy to grow things, and sleeping around that in a small box!
I took a permaculture course a while back and the instructor addressed that specific issue. He said (paraphrasing): you can buy really good tools and learn to use them, you can learn to identify and grow annuals and smaller plants, you can keep worms, you can observe and build invisible structures, all without land.
Sure, keep saving to buy land, but don't forget it is something you can practice in the middle of the city too.
Permaculture is fascinating. I'm interested in how it behaves on a macro scale, though; what would happen to the wider ecosystem if you had a town full of permaculture lots instead of grass yards?
Every estimate I've seen points to a minimum requirement of ~1 hectare of arable land to feed one human for one year (on a minimal vegetarian diet) and that estimate assumes highly productive soils and minimal crop loss due to insects, drought, or flood.
The idea with permaculture is that you minimize (ideally eliminate) the need for fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide imports using effective composting and crop rotation (biological nitrogen fixation) and integrated pest management (raising insects that eat crop pests etc.) and water recycling systems and so on.
Scaling this approach to tens of thousands of acres for reliably feeding even a medium-sized city seems challenging, but there appear to be some 1000-acre permaculture farms out there. However, yields are likely to be lower per acre with this approach as practices like using high fertilizer imports to allow double-cropping don't fit the permaculture model.
It's worth noting that permaculture is not just about farming or homesteading. The point is mostly to have a balanced ecology that humans can live in. You can still have large farms, small farms, or no farms, and do permaculture.
The big mistake we made was building large cities that required moving or reshaping the land, water, animals and plants to support large cities. There really should not be this many humans in the world, and certainly not with as many huge cities as we have. We're becoming a species dependent on a synthetic environment.
I find this idea of a "synthetic environment" kind of strange in a way. We crossed that line twelve thousand years ago when we started large-scale farming. That alone was a transformation of nature which immensely upset the previous natural order and caused human population to rise immensely. But I wouldn't really consider that artificial in a major way, and on some level we're also part of nature. I don't think we are any more artificial in building cities than bees are in building their hives. There is a difference, but not one which matters for this conversation, though I will mention that that difference has to do with the fact that we picture an idea in our heads before projecting it into reality through labour.
I don't think it's healthy to see the world as a struggle between the natural and artificial, because it's so hard to properly define. Humans are natural, making tools is in our nature, so is constructing shelter. I think the proper way to see the world is as this unity, humans exist within nature and act to transform it, as does every other animal species on this planet. The ecosystem would look wildly different did termites and bees not transform it for their own benefit, and similarly it is humans who transform nature in their own ways for their own benefit.
This does not mean unconditional support for human activity. Glass, concrete, and steel towers and spreading suburbs are terrible transformations of nature. They are terrible because of their destructive potential for no gain, they are unsustainable by nature, they upset the balance in a way which makes the land less fertile, less capable of supporting life in general let alone humans, and in the long term are a loss not only for natural diversity but for the human species as well. There exists a rift due to industrial agriculture where humans take from the earth and give back to it from the mountains and the bedrock while pushing waste into the oceans, which is unsustainable and which has and will lead to ecological collapses. This is but one part, industry in general, pollution, the carbon cycle, land use change and associated environmental effects, it all acts to lower the carrying capacity of this Earth in the long term. This is how I believe it is best to critique transformations of nature in this manner, because terms are easy to define, the unsustainability is scientifically provable, you have no such ambiguities as when you talk about artificial and natural as two entirely separate concepts.
This also gets you out of very bad ways of thinking. There is no "natural carrying capacity" for this planet except what it currently has. There is likely a theoretical maximum and some day we might hit it. What's clear is that we haven't hit it yet, we just
fail to push the current carrying capacity by transforming nature in an unsustainable fashion for short-term benefit. You can no longer say things like "There really should not be this many humans in the world", since it's plainly not true. There are supposed to be exactly as many humans as there are, because humans naturally transform nature to support themselves. It is our own nature, our species being, to take those gifts of nature and use them to transform them, through our own labour, into products which are use-values to ourselves. This is just as it is the nature of bees to pollinate and build hives, the nature of woodland animals to eat their hives and the flowers they pollinate, and the nature of elephants to topple trees to create for themselves a grassland instead of a forest.
It is not that there are too many humans, even with our unsustainable practices this planet easily currently produces enough food for ten billion to live well-off. It is not that there is artificial and natural, to make natural artificial is natural, because to transform nature is human nature. It is our current, wasteful and unsustainable transformation of nature, no different to those transformations that took place twelve thousand years ago except in its unsustainability, which has been been sucking the life out of this planet. But as humans, we have the unique ability to both imagine and then through labour project that ideal into reality, to once again transform what was natural to something which suits our needs. Our needs are, in the long term, sustainably keeping at the very least ten billion people alive, and permaculture is one of the ways in which we can both imagine that and start to bring it into fruition. However, our own relations and structures might prevent a total change in our transformation of nature in its present state, which is why political action is as important, if not more so, than homesteading or community gardens.
Idk man, I don't think overpopulation is an issue and I despise imagining that there is something uniquely bad about artificial things and that they are somehow different from nature. They are nature, their creation is our nature, and we ourselves are creations of nature. It's only how we have in the last few millenia, really even few centuries, been doing those transformations which is the true issue.
End of insane HN rant I guess. There's obviously no infinite growth, but we're also far from overpopulation. The world is not a Malthusian nightmare, it's not that resources cause population to explode and conditions to worsen, we can see that in the richer nations of the Earth where instead resources cause population to drop after a point. We'll naturally reach our peak well within the theoretical maximum carrying capacity of the Earth, that's my point. Permaculture is one important step on that path. Neo-Malthusians and genocidal maniacs and eco-fascists disgust me to no end.
The big difference between cities and honey bee hives is that bee hives have to work within the ecology, whereas cities don't.
Literally, honey bees can't exist unless their environment supports them. Their way of life has to adapt to the environment around them, not the other way around. This is made obvious in a number of ways: they literally biologically are adapted to make their particular type of home, their social structure is required to support said biology, they hibernate, they're susceptible to environmental damage and pests, they depend on a symbiotic relationship with flowering plants for pollen, etc.
Humans simply don't have any such limitations. If an environment isn't suitable to them, they just change the environment (a fairly novel thing in human history), or build something to support themselves and their lifestyle, rather than adapt a symbiotic relationship with their environment. Humans can pretty much do whatever they want regardless of the environment. This makes them highly adaptable, but also means they can parasitize the entire ecosystem until there's no resources left to adapt. The further they move towards collapsing ecology, the more dependent they grow on an ecology they create artificially to sustain themselves.
Therefore while bees can continue to thrive as long as the environment supports them, the environment can only thrive as long as humans support it.
There's no reason to suggest we will hit some peak only for it to drop off. We're not like parasites that are subject to an environment; we transcend the environment. We aren't limited by it. It's possible we will simply extinguish all natural resources (intentionally or not), and then either leave the planet or die off. There are no guarantees. Unchecked human growth really could kill everything.
Exactly, humans are free from limitations. When nature doesn't suit us, we have the capacity for transformation, just as bees have. However, we can choose any scale, even planetary. But that freedom is an illusion. There is no transformation of nature which happens without interference from the system around us. If we decided that the planet should be a couple degrees warmer for agricultural output to increase, we would inevitably find ourselves in an ecological collapse and a resulting collapse of agricultural output. It's just not something we can do. Nature itself is the limit, pushing beyond that means inevitable ecological collapse and resulting human collapse – we cannot eat without nature. Not that some chemicals can't be produced synthetically, but not nearly all. The massive expense we would incur over feeding just a couple of people with massive bioreactors to avoid interacting with nature at all would be prohibiting. We are, as are all other species, trapped within nature despite our capacity to transform it. This is because we are nature, not something that transcends it. We are the Lorax, we speak for the trees, we uniquely have both an imagination and the capacity to labour. There is evidence to suggest we will hit a peak - humans simply don't want that many children at some point after the elimination of scarcity. We know this, you can look outside and see it if you live in what they call the "global north" or "imperialist core" or however you want to refer to it. We don't know why, but it happens. Humans and nature are very much compatible, although it is true, that unchecked human activity could kill everything. Not even growth, just activity, and at a fraction of the current population could have already killed everything. It's not inherently human to take and destroy, that's just a necessity places upon us all by our current societal structure. We do it or someone else does it and we starve. But it does not have to be like this. The world is, again, not a neo-Malthusian nightmare which requires genocide to overpower for the sake of plants and animals which could less understand what is happening. We must, as we are limited, live within nature as part of it, transforming it, but our current transformation, necessitated by society as it is, is simply idiotic. There is no evidence to suggest that we are anywhere close to a "carrying capacity" or we will ever suck life out of the system and leave rather than simply glassing it and ourselves or learning to live with it. We cannot leave, this life would not grow anywhere else without immense struggles, it can only exist within complex ecosystems and taking them out of that context will destroy them. We cannot suck it out, for it is our own death as well.
The thing people don't realize is that we waste so much space and resources on useless crap.
1 hectate per person is easy to get in any suburban neighborhood if everyone can agree that a stable healthy food supply is more important than endless lawns or empty lots.
The resources are all there, we just grossly misallocate and squander them.
I think one could do with far less if things were optimised for nutrient retention (including human waste which often isn't allowed in many places).
In fact I think it's easy to produce enough for a person on far less than 1 hectare in my experience assuming one's climate is somewhat fitting. My tiny backyard produced more than I could eat last year albeit with barely any space for me to walk between the plants. It's doing it long term without fertiliser/manure that's difficult.
a whole town, depending on how things are done would look a bit different, but would handle different too.
First, assuming that people are growing all sorts of things, and not trying to monoculture, you will get an explosion in different kinds of insects and their predators.
Second, you should get an explosion of colour
thirdly, assuming the growth of trees, creepers and other vines, coolers daytime temperatures, and reduced winds
fourthly, and possibly more importantly, much higher water retention.
I've always been wary of the permaculture community. Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race. They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in, the waste product that they managed to scavenge, and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for. It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers. Failure to realize this lead to the dumb memes about how global supply chains are supposedly bad, without realizing that having many small factories around the world would actually be more environmentally harmful than shipping products to where they can best be processed. I'm sympathetic to fears about long term sustainability and skepticism about globalism, but I generally don't like the type of stuff they advocate for. I generally agree with calls for increased regulation and a reduction in waste though.
>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact)
Big Ag is extremely destructive to the environment, because it doesn't respect existing environments & ecosystems, instead seeing them as a blank canvas for terraforming and imposing industrial processes.
Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden???
>They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in,
It doesn't require much labor. That's one of the main points — permaculture is about working with nature rather than against it. Instead of tilling and pumping soil full of mined fertilizer, you use the natural processes appropriate for your local environment to support your crops. When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort.
>the waste product that they managed to scavenge,
Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. For example, composting is a great way to make high-quality soil while diverting food waste from the landfill where it would anaerobically rot and generate methane. Permaculture can (and should) be low effort.
>and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for.
Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance?
>Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden???
Most studies I've seen suggest that the larger the farming operation, the more efficiently it's able to use resources. Most of those were small/organic farms instead of a backyard garden, but I don't see many reasons to think it would be better.
>When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort.
You still put in more effort than most people. Someone working a median wage job will be able to buy more food in the time it takes you to maintain your garden. The only exception are the very poor.
>Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops.
Diverting waste is good, but when scaled up it won't be sufficient. You won't be able to get free fertilizer from people that prune trees because everyone will want it, and that's assuming a lot of this waste would still even be produced in an environmentally conscious world. You will most likely need to produce all of it on your own.
>Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance?
To be fair, this is just from the permaculture people that I know. Many of them work very little and pay nothing in taxes, use medicare, and are still well off because a lot of their labor is untaxable. They live in suburbs and the country where stuff like roads and water are provided to them at a loss to society.
>Most studies I've seen suggest that the larger the farming operation, the more efficiently it's able to use resources.
Yes, this is true for modern agriculture, because it's an industrial process that benefits from economies of scale. Unfortunately that process is unsustainable and will ultimately deplete our fertilizer resources while damaging the environment.
>Someone working a median wage job will be able to buy more food in the time it takes you to maintain your garden.
Permaculture isn't about returning to peasantry. Permaculture is about integrating food production into society while expending minimal effort (less effort than even mowing a lawn).
>You won't be able to get free fertilizer from people that prune trees because everyone will want it
Fertilizer doesn't need to come from pruned trees. In fact, wood chips alone don't really make for good compost.
Properly designed permaculture systems coupled with local programs such as neighborhood composting and an understanding of the local ecosystem can produce a huge amount of food with very little effort or input.
>Many of them work very little and pay nothing in taxes, use medicare, and are still well off because a lot of their labor is untaxable.
OK, and? Maybe the answer is to reform how we structure society and taxes instead of claiming that low-impact sustainable lifestyles are somehow a form of "theft".
You could make the same argument about how people who refuse to buy a new iPhone every year are "stealing" resources because they don't contribute enough to an economy structured around overproduction and waste. It's absurd.
The point isn't about wood chips in particular. I'm saying that the waste you're diverting won't be enough to sustain you if everyone is trying to get it, and ideally there wouldn't be any waste to begin with. That means we will return to some form of industrial process, and the bigger the better. Of course, we will want to encourage people to farm sustainability through policy, which will be far easier if there are a few centralized operations instead of a large number
of small distributed operations.
>OK, and? Maybe the answer is to reform how we structure society and taxes instead of claiming that low-impact sustainable lifestyles are somehow a form of "theft
You're avoiding taxes while depending heavily on tax payer provided services. Not scalable for a modern society.
> You could make the same argument about how people who refuse to buy a new iPhone every year are "stealing" resources because they don't contribute enough to an economy structured around overproduction and waste. It's absurd.
No? It's not about contributing to an economy, it's about contributing your fair share for the public good. A better comparison might be crypto people that want to avoid taxes by doing all transactions under the table.
>the waste you're diverting won't be enough to sustain you if everyone is trying to get it, and ideally there wouldn't be any waste to begin with
There's always going to be food waste in the sense that we cannot eat every part of every vegetable. And, again, there are many other ways to generate things like compost and fertilizer without using waste — cover crops, aquaponics, etc.
>avoiding taxes
I "avoid" taxes by keeping old electronics alive, repairing things I find, and helping friends do the same. Is that wrong, by your ethical framework? This fascination with taxes is utterly bizarre.
>It's not about contributing to an economy, it's about contributing your fair share for the public good.
Large parts of the economy don't operate for the public good. Giving money to Monsanto, for example, is actively detrimental for the public good.
> There's always going to be food waste in the sense that we cannot eat every part of every vegetable. And, again, there are many other ways to generate things like compost and fertilizer without using waste — cover crops, aquaponics, etc.
But you can't escape entropy in a closed loop system, and anything you can do a large scale food factory can do better.
> I "avoid" taxes by keeping old electronics alive, repairing things I find, and helping friends do the same. Is that wrong, by your ethical framework? This fascination with taxes is utterly bizarre.
No, I'm not advocating for waste to help the economy. That's a classic fallacy in economics, and I don't feel the need to expand further. I just want your work taxed.
> Large parts of the economy don't operate for the public good. Giving money to Monsanto, for example, is actively detrimental for the public good.
You're missing the point again. I don't care if you buy a new iphone or not. If you're working, and especially if you're producing a lot of value, I want you taxed. We could have the tax man come take 30% of your yield and distribute it to the poor, for example.
>But you can't escape entropy in a closed loop system,
???
I can't escape entropy anywhere in the universe. What is your point?
>and anything you can do a large scale food factory can do better.
It can do it "better" by creating huge amounts of damage to the biosphere and the people consuming the food. Generating large amounts of unhealthy garbage is not a desirable goal.
By your logic, we should direct all food production resources toward industrial Soylent factories and nothing else.
>If you're working, and especially if you're producing a lot of value, I want you taxed.
How do you tax community service, or a neighborhood food forest? That sounds completely nuts and dystopian.
>We could have the tax man come take 30% of your yield and distribute it to the poor, for example.
So... an IRS truck comes by to collect zucchini and tomatoes? lmao
I don't think you're grasping the concept of permaculture at all. It isn't about business.
Maybe you ought to consider that we could abandon capitalism and structure society to eliminate poverty altogether instead of faffing about with taxes? It seems you're more concerned with spreadsheets than actually improving the lives of humans.
Stop obsessing so much about money, because it is clearly becoming some sort of mental prison for you.
Money is an abstraction, but you're treating it as more real than the stuff it's tracking. You've completely lost sight of the territory, and have confused it with the map.
> It can do it "better" by creating huge amounts of damage to the biosphere and the people consuming the food. Generating large amounts of unhealthy garbage is not a desirable goal.
You're the one whose mind is trapped in a prison.
> By your logic, we should direct all food production resources toward industrial Soylent factories and nothing else.
You keep making these huge leaps of logic. I'm saying that given two ways to achieve the same thing, I want the cheaper, and more environmentally friendly way to do it, which is large scale production.
> How do you tax community service, or a neighborhood food forest? That sounds completely nuts and dystopian.
If your labour is a donation to the public it wouldn't need to be taxed. But the reason we focus on payroll taxes is because it's the majority of work and it's easy to track. If everyone lived outside the system we would need to find a new way to tax people.
> So... an IRS truck comes by to collect zucchini and tomatoes? lmao
If no one is working a w2 job, then yeah.
> Maybe you ought to consider that we could abandon capitalism and structure society to eliminate poverty altogether instead of faffing about with taxes? It seems you're more concerned with spreadsheets than actually improving the lives of humans.
You're in this system now. I have about as much sympathy for you as I do a libertarian that commits tax evasion because he believes taxes are theft.
>I want the cheaper, and more environmentally friendly way to do it, which is large scale production.
Industrial farming isn't environmentally friendly. It's only cheaper because the environmental damage is considered an externality.
>If everyone lived outside the system we would need to find a new way to tax people.
If everyone became a communist, you'd be desperately figuring out how to revert it? Absolutely bizarre.
Why are you so obsessed with taxes? There are other, much better, ways to distribute wealth.
>If no one is working a w2 job, then yeah.
Is this a joke? You really expect IRS agents to seize produce from community vegetable gardens (given away freely already), and believe this is a productive use of time and resources?
Where would these vegetables go, anyway? And for what purpose?
>I have about as much sympathy for you as I do a libertarian that commits tax evasion because he believes taxes are theft.
hahahah are you for real dude? non-profit community food programs are tax evasion?
> Industrial farming isn't environmentally friendly. It's only cheaper because the environmental damage is considered an externality.
Then we regulate it. And anything you can do a large scale operation can do better :)
> If everyone became a communist, you'd be desperately figuring out how to revert it? Absolutely bizarre. Why are you so obsessed with taxes? There are other, much better, ways to distribute wealth.
> Is this a joke? You really expect IRS agents to seize produce from community vegetable gardens (given away freely already), and believe this is a productive use of time and resources?
> Where would these vegetables go, anyway? And for what purpose?
In the USSR they would take everything and redistribute it as needed. The point is that we need a way to collectively pay for things that does not depend on good will. Our IRS agents are going to take your food and distribute it to high skill workers and students that need to focus on their speciality.
> hahahah are you for real dude? non-profit community food programs are tax evasion?
If it's all a community garden, hope you won't mind the IRS coming to take 30%~100%.
>Our IRS agents are going to take your food and distribute it to high skill workers and students that need to focus on their speciality.
Is this a joke or trolling attempt?
You seem to be stuck in some weird neocon "they're going to take YOUR stuff from YOUR personal backyard!!!111" fear mindset.
Permaculture is about creating sustainable food supplies in a distributed manner. Those students and high skill workers will be able to gather this food themselves, because it will be ubiquitous, freely available, and local.
>If it's all a community garden, hope you won't mind the IRS coming to take 30%~100%.
Fine by me if the IRS wants to run a garden-to-doorstep program, putting zucchini in a basket and walking it down the block. It's free for the taking anyway, because the idea is creating abundance for all. Seems like a lot of work to provide a relatively useless service IMHO.
Why would the IRS be in charge of food distribution logistics, anyway? You'd think this would be rolled into USDA duties like WIC, etc.
Lol ok we will have to agree to disagree about what makes a good garden. A well kept garden requires daily work, planning, determining crop rotation, and many other things that go way way beyond mowing a lawn.
Firstly, I absolutely agree with both people here. Industrial agriculture is large-scale enough to be able to use everything with extreme efficiency. Secondly, modern industrial agricultural practices result in the transformation of nature into an unsustainable hell-scape which will collapse in on itself within a few centuries at the latest.
But I don't think you should consider humans as separate from nature, there is evil to being artificial and there is no evil to sometimes going against nature. Humans are, by their nature, a species who take natural fruits and labour upon them to transform them, to give them a new use-value. That is a, if not even the, universal constant which has held through every age of human (pre)history. Humans, just as bees or termites or elephants or trees, transform nature by our nature. Everything natural is artificial and everything artificial is natural. To transform nature, to bend it and to change it is our species being, it is part of our role in nature to transform it as do countless other species. However, unlike those guided by pure instinct, we have both the ability to imagine and project through labour that ideal into reality. Importantly, that's not really any more artificial than a beehive is, artificial is not a very well defined concept or in any way scientifically useful. Once again, it is part of our natural role, our nature, to transform nature around us. When we do transform nature in major ways, we speak for the trees, as much as destroy them. However, our societal development has led us into a transformation of nature which is wasteful and unsustainable. These are very scientifically useful concepts and things like sustainability can be experimented upon and proven. Imagining alternative transformations is the first step to projecting them into reality, to transforming nature once again in a way which has a long-term benefit for us all. There do however exist major economic barriers which can never be broken which prohibit permaculture on any real scale, though that's only true as long as the economy is as it is now. Beside the point for now. My point is that it is not useful to consider ideal and badly defined concepts like artificial and natural and a struggle between the two. It is much more useful to think in terms of our nature, how our nature and labour is governed by our society, how by our nature of transforming nature that leads to the current unsustainable mode of life, and then think about what needs to be done within that more explanative framework to imagine not only unreachable ideals but to project them into reachable ideals in the real, material world.
We are nearing, if not already well past, the inflection point where solar panels powering industrial chemical sugar production can make sucrose and feed plants (and therefore animals) better than the plants would naturally produce themselves using chlorophyl with the same sunlight.
Rewilding - bringing artificial human-made processes to grow
thriving natural environments - is something we should definitely consider. We are capable of creating abundance beyond what nature provides alone
>But I don't think you should consider humans as separate from nature
I do consider humans to be part of nature. My point is that the dysfunctional processes we set up distance us from nature, try to attack nature — we kill bees with pesticides, then talk about inventing robot bees to replace them. It's insane.
Permaculture is based on an explicit assertion that we must pay attention to existing ecosystem features and work within them rather than against them.
there are many things that absolutely are scalable to the entire human race, at least outside of the city. Permaculture asks nothing of you but your effort. The "massive amount of labor put in is what's needed to produce that amount of food. It's only in rich countries where people can produce food for much less labor (by working a high paying job and buying the food at the market). there are many countries where people are much better off growing their own food, rather than working at a minimum wage job and buying the same food.
You should watch John Jai on Youtube. He's in thailand a country where the GDP per capita is a fraction of the US and yet he has more land, 3 small paid off huts and enough food to raise 4 kids all with plenty of time left over to read books. "Life is easy" he says, not bragging about his riches but rather to let people know about an alternative way of living.
I agree that permaculture might be an option for some people, but the difference isn't gdp, it's that there are no productive things to do in many of these low income countries. If their economy advances enough they'll find that working a job provides more for them.
I have long been interested in permaculture, but I have recently been coming around to your point of view.
People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. As universities discover new best practices for regenerative ag, crop rotation and the like, farmers are overall very quick to adopt them, and the ones who don't go out of business. For instance, a lot of farmers have already adopted practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, and double cropping.
Another example, a soil scientist YouTuber named GardeningInCanada explained how the 'tilling' that farmers do with their giant machines is actually just slicing a cut a few mm deep in the soil with a disk, dropping in new seeds, then pushing the soil back over the cuts with another implement.
I think growing your own food is certainly more valuable than just having a giant turf lawn, but if you really wish to provide the most positive ecological impact, I think you should look into things like rain gardens or bioswales that filter rainwater runoff (helping fix the 'dead zones' that high nitrogen creates in our waterways and oceans), and growing a large diversity of plants native to your region that support the greatest number of specialist pollinators, which in turn will feed other life forms. The way I see it now, there is already an overabundance of food for humans in the world, but there is too little food for insects, birds, reptiles, other mammals, etc. In other words, there are plenty of grocery stores for people around but I want my yard to be a giant grocery store full of food for pollinators.
If you are in North America, you can grow some native food plants like American persimmon, paw paw, American blueberries, and wild strawberries. But most high-calorie crops are not native (even corn, beans, and squash came from Mexico iirc) and even the ones that were here before European colonization are genetically very different than the native plants that they came from and do not really support any wildlife.
> People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one.
You must be exposed to vastly different types of farmers than I have been. I've worked in the ag tech industry and have lived in Iowa most of my life. The idea that farmers are responsible stewards of the land doesn't seem to have any basis in reality. Half of the water bodies in Iowa are unusable because of pollution. Beaches at lakes are closed often due to bacterial blooms caused by farm runoff. Iowa has an advisory on limiting how much caught fish you eat due to farm pollution. In addition, farmers are destroying the top soil by not rotating crops (corn and soy is where the profit is at) and over tilling. This doesn't even touch on the hog factories that are literally overflowing with shit and all the damage that does to our environment and air quality. Where are you seeing farmers actually taking care of the land?
>Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race.
It's scalable to a large proportion of it especially in the west and other such areas with a fitting climate and should probably be incentivized tbh.
One could say the same about lawns. Which were initially thing of the ultra few who could signal they could both afford to leave land unproductive and employ people to maintain it. Now there's a stupid amount of it.
And yes this type of agriculture requires a lot of extra labour which is often understated that I'll agree on.
>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers.
It's environmental impact is ridiculous I don't see how this is even debatable.
Insect populations in many places have plummeted, topsoil is being eroded, etc.
It does indeed make more sense financially and by a good amount but a large part of that is due to cheap plentiful fertilizers a big share of which comes from fossil fuels and deposits in Morocco and the like that will at some point run out and/or get a lot more expensive to get. We could stretch these resources so so much if we were more efficient about using them by dropping/adopting some practices but we do not because it does not make financial sense to do so right now.
Similar for irrigation issues in many areas.
The moment this inflow of fertilizer starts to end food becomes a lot more expensive, large scale tillage agriculture becomes more difficult and more labour intensive practices common in the permaculture community start making more sense imo. You can't keep going without such fertilizer inputs on soils that are ecologically near dead due to tillage, pest/herbicicides, etc
We can reduce our land use, amount of packaging materials and impact on the environment.
We don't need to be dogmatic about it either since there's a wide open middle ground between what we do now and some kind of 0 impact, 0 pesticides, etc vision.
Permaculture has a much higher yeild, per unit of land compared to traditional western arible. The reasons are not really well understood. Possibly attention to pest levels, mixed crops, and much healthier soils (with a fucktonne of mushroom webs)
but permaculture isn't much different to subsistence farming.
But, the flip side is that industrial movement of food has stopped, limited or reduced the effect of localised famines.
Land usage isn't a good metric, especially because land in the countryside is plentiful. This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces.
>This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces.
I dare say the vast vast majority of land affected by such influences would probably be lawn or the like otherwise.
Suburbia in the vast majority of the western world isn't exactly rife with small scale subsistence farming and the places where these practices have contributed a meaningful amount are relatively densely populated places in Europe where it used to be the norm and plots were divided accordingly in an inflexible way before the scale of modern agriculture being common.
When it comes to market gardening for income you need more even if less. It is extremely rare for it to make sense in an urban environment where denser construction is an option not blocked by other factors.
In many places you can get many manyfold the acreage by selling off and going outside of such urban environments.
> they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments
I think that depends on which country/state you are in.
In the UK, I'm sure there are people who want to turn everywhere into a market garden. However the permaculture hippies that I grew up with were far more pragmatic. They used the land that was near by and not being used.
But as you point out, there is a mix of opinion, and it all needs to be critically evaluated.
> ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in
I thought the whole point of permaculture was exploring tradeoffs between labour and space (i.e, that "yield per acre" of a small intensively managed gardening plot is surprisingly good, and conversely you can trade effort for yield with "forest garden" type stuff that requires less maintenance).
It is a fair amount of work even with forest gardens (I grew up in a permaculture project that began a few years before I was born). I think the economics are only appealing to the rational actor if the labour displaces time spent in the gym rather than the office.
Which suits my lifestyle just fine, but if you don't enjoy gardening in your free time it's probably better to deliver for ubereats on a bicycle or something.
I'm suspicious of permaculture because I had a friend back in the early 2000s that got into it with a local group and it seemed almost like a cult and they didn't produce enough food to feed a couple of hamsters that I saw.
He did buy all the Mollison books and talked about how he was going to get land and hire people to do the work. I never figured out how he was intending to pay the people with the 20 gallons of persimmons he was optimistically going to get.
I'm an agronomist by training so it was especially irritating arguing with him having been around at-scale food production, and this went on for months as he was totally obsessed.
There are some interesting theories in it. Like catching water on a hill with terraces. Which people did in earlier times and maybe still do in certain parts of the world. A lot of things that people living a simpler life found out a long time ago presented as a "system".
My takeaway though is that (as practiced anyway) it's a bit of an culty scam, but there are worse ones and people being outside and around nature and growing things is in sum a good thing in my opinion so maybe I'm being a bit harsh.
Anyway, I don't know everything, but it just doesn't seem practical at any scale to provide calories. I'd probably feel better about it had I not heard this guy's impractical cultish preaching for months. I hope he is doing fine wherever he is and got his land in the end.
I lived for many years on a commune where we strived to grow most of our own vegetables, and I always got a very culty vibe from permaculture folks, too (pot, kettle, some might say, but I distinguish cults and communes based on how welcome differing ideas are).
Mostly because they seemed so didactic about it: oh yes, sure you're growing vegetables for yourself, but you're doing it wrong, not observing principle X or Y.
Christopher Alexander adherents were always my favorite visitors, they'd talk about patterns as they understood them and ask questions about whether they applied. Somehow the permaculture folks all gave off a my-way-or-the-highway kind of vibe.
Whilst I love this kinda stuff I have to admit describing things as systems and the like felt extremely buzwordy as if to make people feel like it was deeper than it actually is.
I also feel like a good few of the things people did seemed like things invented or perpetuated by influencers so they could keep yapping on about something.
Vermiculture is something I do for example. It makes no sense from a time/ effort perspective on a small scale compared to other composting methods but I liked that what i got out of it as amendment for my potting was at least weedfree by virtue of my own sorting and went trough it all relatively quickly. If I had to restart on my plot I wouldn't bother but hey it was fun and whilst a good part of of my garden is extremely productive I also grow some stuff that takes waaay too much effort for what I get out of it just for fun.
But people are out there taking it to extremes without any second thoughts about whether it works and swear by it and end up dogmatic about things like compost teas.
All fine and dandy when it's a little hobby but when it becomes more than that I hope most can differentiate between actually useful things and barely usefull gimmicks pushed by people selling more books and courses than veg.
Some people appreciated it, and one person said it gave them a lot of material to work on (downthread).
I was only reporting on the work of other well-known permaculturists and regenerative farmers
, although I have an interest in permaculture and had done some organic gardening for a few years earlier. But that work I had done (literally hands-on) gave me some background and perspective to be able to think about their work as they talked about it through their videos, which is why I decided to post that comment.
FYI I get a security error when going to the https of your site. I get an Apache message when going to http. Can't wait to check it out though once it's up!
Permaculture is a balm to the soul for techno-jaded coders. Having visited locations in N California, UK, Spain & South Africa there is clearly a strong appeal of natural systems design for technological systems designers.
In a sense, designing a living environment is like coding. Maybe you're a full-stack developer and you want to terraform your land - run the digger routine to build some swales and ponds. Sprinkle in some pioneer species functions to structure the sub-soil and add nitrogen and provide shade. Run the groundcover script to stop evaporation and erosion and plant a few fruit trees.
Then add whatever framework of your choosing for creepers, vines and berries.
Start some background processes of mulching and compost turning (this is a sweaty function), maybe add a worm bin for your kitchen and food waste.
Then just watch your biological programme running, the plants, birds & bugs and it is good.
..................
Maybe permaculture isn't going to feed the world, but there are some important takeaways:
1. Focus on perennial plants. If you have a garden or land and you don't have lots of time or energy, don't waste your time with annual vegetables instead plant perennial food plants and trees...too many to mention but good, hardy, high producing options are granadilla (passion fruit), mulberry, pecan (and other nuts depending on your location), rhubarb, kale, spinach, ginger, figs, lemons and other citrus.
2. Never leave soil bare. "Nature abhors a vacuum" so weeds will grow, mulch any exposed dirt or plant a groundcover.
3. Observe the edges between everything, that's where the magic happens. Create more 'edge', in other words instead of a perfectly round pond, make an irregular pond with protected areas for critters to breed in. Instead of a straight path, have some curves.
4. "The problem is the solution" probably the most popular permaculture saying there is, but a useful concept. If you have slugs and snails in your garden you don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency. Got ducks to eat the snails? but pong their pond smells...this is a problem, but its also the best fertiliser water you can get to put on fast growing plants so its the solution to your fertiliser needs.
It’s sad how many people here cannot see the world through any other lens but money made on the market.
The fundamental issue with our environmental crisis is externalities. Chopping down every tree and strip-mining the planet is not a good idea just because it’s profitable in market terms. Growing food 100 years from now is important. An ecology that supports human life 100 years from now is important. More important than whether you can get rich from depleting natural resources.
Was about to say... Some comments marvel that the techies on this site know what dirt is, I see the comments and think it attracted among the worst takes I've seen. "But can you make money from it?" "Check out my permaculture app!" "It doesn't scaaaaale!" "Permaculture is like coding, it's also a solution you can slap onto burnout so you can get right back to coding!"
I first learned about Permaculture from reading my parent's copy of "The Next Whole Earth Catalog", which reviewed Mollison's "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual" (which, BTW is one of the greatest books on design that I've ever read, not just for farms!)
So, to me, it's mixed up with things like Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language", and Bucky Fuller's synergistic "Dymaxion" worldview.
Basically, in a nutshell, there is a possible (technically and economically feasible) world that's much nicer than ours, just on the other side of an imaginary barrier that exists only in the human mind. Or so I believe...
We can provide for ourselves the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, "Physiological needs" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) in a way that is fun, easy, harmonious with other living things, deprives no one, etc. "and nobody has to get nailed to anything". I don't know if this is true, but I don't see any physical reasons why it wouldn't work. (Everybody always says "but what about human nature" at this point, and I'll get to that in a moment.)
I have finally, at long last, acquired some land with the express purpose of testing out this hypothesis. (Twenty acres in N. California.) I'm going to employ a mix of Permaculture, Syntropic Agriculture, Alexander's Pattern Language, Bucky's ideas, etc. and robots and automation to create a kind of bubble of this alternate reality, or a time-warp (just a little one) to the Star Trek-style future.
Assuming this works out, the idea then is to facilitate more people and land living this way. I see this as a kind of economic phase change that has to happen (I believe we have to live in harmony with Nature or our civilization could collapse.)
If this sounds interesting to you, and you more-or-less have your act together and would like to help out, let me know. sforman@hushmail.com
- - - -
In re: the "but what about human nature?" argument against the possibility of a better world:
First, as I get older I get much less sympathy for that in general. Get over your bullshit and act like a decent human being. It's not that hard and the rewards are worth the effort.
Second, I suspect that's what's really going on here: this is a sim, and the win condition is just not to be quite such a shithead. Good Character is the only thing you take with you when the game ends, so build it up now while you can!
Third, even though they don't get a lot of fanfare in the mass media, there are numerous protocols and techniques for better communication and mental and emotional healing. Things like Non-Violent Communication, or the Core Transformation Process. I have high hopes that the new talking computers will make inexpensive, inexhaustible perfect therapists. I think the computers will talk us down off the ledge, so to speak.
In re: the "but what about human nature?" argument against the possibility of a better world:
First, as I get older I get much less sympathy for that in general. Get over your bullshit and act like a decent human being. It's not that hard and the rewards are worth the effort.
that sounds interesting! I'm in eastern Canada and would more likely be helping out on my parents' permaculture homestead or planting extra berries in my own suburban yard than helping yourself, but if you're documenting the process I'd like to see it!
Oh yeah, I'm going to document the hell out of it. I've got a dozen little wi-fi cameras for streaming, etc. I'm also going to run the project on a open books basis (another review from TNWEC: "Honest Business: A Superior Strategy for Starting and Managing Your Own Business" by Salli Rasberry and Michael Phillips)
"Permaculture" (n) - growing things in your garden to eat alongside supermarket-bought food, while pretending to be a good green farmer.
Reality bites. You simply can not grow enough calories to feed yourself, in a way that scales to the whole planet. Or even a significant part of the planet. You need staple crops such as beans, potatoes, wheat that are not fun to grow. You need fixed nitrogen and likely phosphorus for fertilizer, unless you happen to live on a very good soil.
How would "interdependence" help? If anything, it makes it even worse. Growing enough staples even for yourself and your family is hard, growing it for trade is even more complicated.
Try it, and pretty soon you need to actually do real agriculture.
Interdependence with larger agricultural systems. Grains are great to grow at scale and I'm glad I can buy them in a grocery store. Tomatoes are great to grow at home and I'm glad I can do that too.
Beans and potatoes are fairly easy and fun to grow? They are very "set it and forget it" and produce a lot in one season. Although if they get infected with some kind of fungus or virus, that could put you at risk of starvation if you haven't planned ahead.
As a plus, the beans should help introduce nitrogen into the soil via the bacteria that grow on their roots.
traditional farming depletes the soil, so the whole 'doesn't scale to the whole planet' is only a good argument over an artificially short time horizon.
I'd imagine then that 11,000 years of traditional rice farming in the Yangtze River Valley must have really sucked the life from the soil and there's barely another millennium or two left there.
Traditional farming in the UK has had a run of a few thousand years on land that isn't flood plains ..
Perhaps you're thinking of more modern farming practices?
> I'd imagine then that 11,000 years of traditional rice farming in the Yangtze River Valley must have really sucked the life from the soil and there's barely another millennium or two left there.
They have. Traditional farming is very taxing on micronutrients.
China (and Egypt) used a lifehack called "silt". Basically, they use it to periodically replace the topsoil.
Well, yes. Permaculture seeks to adopt practices from the kind of long-running success stories you're describing. For historical reasons it does so much more with respect to paleolithic practices than bronze age ones, but there's nothing to permaculture which requires it.
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!