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300 comments on DrumBeat: April 24, 2008

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jokuhl on April 24, 2008 - 1:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thanks, Semaley. Good links. Here's a para that made sense to me..

"Putting massive effort into attempting to ‘tame nature’, such as by damming valleys and flood plains or creating and maintaining bare soil by plough, is not only energy consuming, unsustainable and destructive, it is also unnecessary when we can meet the needs of people and the environment by working in harmony with, or even directly utilise, natural systems. Instead of using massive chemical inputs to control pests, why not encourage predators such as ladybirds and hoverflies to do our work for us? Or why not construct homes that utilise passive solar energy and wind power rather than building nuclear power stations?" http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permaculture/ (Item #7, 'Work with nature, not against')

My wife is reading Pollan's 'Omnivore's dilemma', and is very excited by the 'Grass Farmer' Joel Salatin. Another approach to many of these ideas of using Nature's energy to our and it's advantage, not looking on it as an Opponent to Best.

Bob

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BadgerB on April 24, 2008 - 1:38pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

This is great if like me you are building a home out in the country on 20 acres surrounded by 100-300 acre farms. I can grow most of the food I need, without almost any added fertilizer and the ground water table is still in pretty good shape for small amounts of irrigation, what fertilizer I do need the neighbors cows can provided if I let him harvest 5-10 acres of grass to fed them in the winter. I prefer to use the tractor but could get by without it. I can also trade some of what I grow with my neighbors for things they can more easily grow and I want.

Problem is with the exception of building the house in the country, I don't do any of those other things food is still far too cheap to bother at this point. Modern agricultural techniques fertilizers, pest control, large tractors allow us to pull huge yields per acre 5 and in some cases 10 times as high as natural methods. While you and I may have enough land to sustain ourselves via natural means unless you have a way to give everyone enough land to do this, or are able to get farmers to increase land in production about 5 times, we still need the chemicals and fuel to be able to feed the cities.

This all goes back to Carrying Capacity we as the world are long past the point in population to be able to just live off the land with out massive outside inputs. Sure I can and you can but there are 6+ billion of us on this rock and not everyone can.

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jokuhl on April 24, 2008 - 2:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I actually live in a small city, and while we have growing potential at our house and at a community garden, we also have farms nearby, several CSA's to choose between. Farmers need customers, as far as that goes, so shipping produce to a city isn't a bad deal.. probably not enough, esp with the fisheries crashing, but it's a concentrated market, so if there's a usable freight link, river, ocean, railway between them, then that exchange will proceed.

I don't deny we are in all probability in population overshoot, but aside from education and availability of birth-control in the third world, it's an aspect that I can do very little to affect, while lifestyle choices and creating the best community designs/infrastructure is where most of us can work to make the system as resilient and survivable as possible. I just can't let the UNworkable problems make me so overwhelmed and despondent that I don't do any of the preparations that are going to push us in the right direction.

We'll all get ours at some point anyway. 'Survival' is just a form of procrastination, after all.

Bob

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shaman on April 24, 2008 - 3:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

We'll all get ours at some point anyway. 'Survival' is just a form of procrastination, after all.

"Life is a short warm moment. Death is a long cold rest." - Pink Floyd

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karlof1 on April 25, 2008 - 2:34am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi Jokuhl--If your wife likes Joel Salatin's farming methods, she'll love Logsdon's All Flesh is Grass.

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