The Plan

I found this essay by William Kotke to pretty inspiring, especially the quote below. It illustrates how insane it is to "lock up our food."

The thrust of technology is to simplify living systems. One can average a stated number of pounds of red meat by cattle grazing a rangeland ecosystem. Cattle eat mainly grass but if one looks at the multiplicity of species that eat plants it is seen that far higher production of red meat could be gained per acre by harvesting the rabbits, pronghorns, deer, elk and other species because each species eats different plants such as grass, forbs, bushes and such, giving a seamless and non-destructive cropping of the ecosystem. It is because of the manageability of the cow that the industrial system ignores and eliminates the other species that would actually be more productive. This is done for "efficiency" resulting in surpluses (profits). Industrial mass production monocropping has produced a simplified diet. In the supermarket we see a wide diversity of packaging but the basic food is wheat, corn, potato and rice. With Permaculture we greatly increase the diversity of our foods which will assist our health, our abundance and our community food security. In a decentralized system with local control, we can grow much more food for people than can the industrial system grow food for "surpluses." William Kotke

Systems and Relationships

Here is a response that Tamarack Song had to an essay by Jason Godesky about Permaculture and Agriculture. Alot of the time most of us forget it's all about relationships, I think anyway.

If you haven't yet, I encourage those of you with an intellectual interesting the effects of agriculture, to take Glenn's suggestion and a look at Jason Godesky's piece at [Essay Address].

Not knowing Jason or having read much of his writings, I can only comment from my impression of this particular piece. It appears to be pretty solidly a systems approach, which has him immersed in clarifying semantics and identifying and labeling symptoms. If done well, it can be a self-satisfying task.

The pitfall of the systems approach is that it lacks perspective. Systems analysts define the issue from the perspective of the issue, and thereby come up with issue-based analyses and solutions. The analysis appears to fit the situation, and the resulting solution may appear to work, and yet the core imbalance which brought about the situation was never identified. Think of it as controlling a fire by focusing on the fire rather than the reason for the fire.

Rather than a set of systems, life is a web of relationship. When one area of the web is torn, it affects the entire web. No longer will the web respond in its intended way to the crashing force of a Grasshopper flying into it; no longer can Spider respond to the crash in her time-honored way. Tamarack Song