Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#15
|
|||
|
|||
Large scale permaculture
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
... I agree about the mindset. But we are embedded in a largely free enterprise society in which you have to be commercially viable to keep going. Mollison's philosophy is such that he would remake much of society, its values and motives not merely how we get our food. but wouldn't most of us, if we could? :-) in reality of course, societies remake themselves as they go (seeing as how benign dictators are so very thin on the ground ;-) Although he does give a nod to "legality, people, culture, trade and commerce" as a component in creating a design. So perhaps he does accept that commerce and making a dollar is not altogether evil. The question is how do you do it in a society whose agriculture is based on permaculture? well, i'm fabulously iffy about permaculture - not because of the permaculture itself, which is fine, but because of all the dippy twits who do everything badly & then walk away because it hasn't worked. also, it's quite a quiet movement (like organics in general, biodynamics, etc) so i believe you would find there's a great deal more going on than you immediately realise. and yes, making a dollar isn't inherently evil whatsoever. most of us cannot (for example) make shoes - we need money for that. true self-sufficiency by one person or family is impossible. it becomes possible within communities, though. permaculture farms most likely just carry on in obscurity, we don't know that they are there, really, even if we buy their products we can't see the farm & probably don't think about it much. I know of small scale operations where on a few acres a family is growing enough to mainly feed themselves and sell some to make a dollar to buy what they cannot grow. This makes that family very happy, they have the ability to live in the way that they see it is proper to live. see, i believe that sort of thing is really much more common than we think. much of it can't be measured via "market forces" & other foolishness, so it's not. things that can't be measured via capitalist economics tends not to be counted statistically, so we cannot officially "know" about them. (sigh). However Mollison puts forward the idea that permaculture could/should replace broadacre farming altogether. This leads me to a problem. I cannot see how every family can have a few acres nor the will/ability to farm it. I cannot see how we can get away from at least some specialists who use their skill to get food from the land efficiently on a scale that permits the feeding of the non-farmers who produce other things. In the long run the choice is to do it sustainably or to starve when we have mined out the soil. So what replaces broadacre? \ truthfully, i'm not sure anything does "replace" it. you'll have noticed that broadacre farming is changing itself, though. like you said, the choices are rapidly becoming to either do it sustainably, or starve. perhaps movements such as the permaculture movement have an obligation to cease being slightly obscure & to get out there more, i'm not sure; but when you consider things such as how mainstream organics has become (despite how quiet it is), how the most ossified farming brains are coming to use nature belts & windbreaks & things like that as part of their practice, i suppose that broadacre (for grains, etc) will carry on, just a bit differently than in the past. you are dead right in that not everyone can have a bit of land, & truthfully i doubt that everyone should (imagine if everyone had to travel the distances many countryfolk do! it would be unsustainable). yet things such as the current tendency for completely mainstream gardening magazines & newspaper columns to encourage people to grow what they can in their yards or balconies, etc, is a taste of where this is all going (in my hopelessly optimistic view). sadly, the pace of progressive change can be positively glacial, it seems to me. one last tiny rant: one thing i would love to see, which i can't see happening yet (but is probably going to have to happen very soon) is that governments need to put their foot down re overconsumption. according to statistics (tee hee) something like a third of westerners have an anti-consumerist mentality & tend not to participate in rabid consumption. governments think this is Bad & want people to consume until they drop (then consume something else to get them back up again). the day that govts get the brainwave that overconsumption itself is what is bad, things are going to change very much for the better, for everyone, because they have the power to legislate and we do not. in the meantime it is up to individuals to buy local, to limit consumption of stuff they don't need, etc; but people who do so find a lot of support with like minds (of which there are actually many). all these things are interrelated. thank you for reading my rant! :-) kylie |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
Large scale permaculture | Australia | |||
culitvating moss on a large scale | Bonsai | |||
The Definitive Chord & Scale Bible - Literally EVERY chord and scale! | Freshwater Aquaria Plants | |||
Suggestions on large-scale compost-making??? | United Kingdom | |||
Suggestions on large-scale compost-making??? | Gardening |