You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'permaculture' category.
I was a little confused after reading “The Vegetarian Myth” review in Permaculture Activist as well as the first chapter on the author’s website. I couldn’t figure out exactly what myths were being “demolished,” as the reviewer puts it.
The few “myths” I was able to pick out from the rants seemed like straw man arguments. Sure, simply eating a plant-based diet will not necessary translate to treading more easily on the earth. But the same goes for eating an Atkins meat diet.
Saying all vegetarians/vegans support industrialized grain production is a dubious assertion. If grains are desired at all, they can be done on a sustainable scale i.e. Fukuoka. I’m bewildered that a reviewer in a permaculture magazine would not be aware of this.
Our society is on the cusp of disorder, chaos, mass suffering. At least according to many doomers (“we’re screwed”) and peak oil websites. Also many people I have talked to who are afraid of changing the status-quo industrialized mass society use similar imagery to describe the likely ensuing social breakdown.
Being this is the first full moon I experienced living out in the country away from light pollution, I just realized it’s really bright. So bright, that it casts shadows. It’s almost like night and day from when the moon is not full, going from pitch black outside to illuminating about the same as a giant street light.
I was just reading Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual where Bill Mollison talks about the Anasazi people actually using the moon’s shadow to keep track of time. Employing nothing more than a spiral carving with perpendicular slabs of rock, they were able to predict the cyclical periods of flooding and drought, in style.
Food is supposed to keep us alive and healthy, yet today it seems to increasingly make us sick. Today there is another case of industrial food production gone mad. Melamine was at the source of the recent major pet food recalls, diary products and:
Now chicken eggs have been contaminated with melamine, and an admission by state-run media that the industrial chemical is regularly added to animal feed in China fueled fears Friday that the problem could be more widespread, affecting fish, meat and who knows what else. [AP]
Melamine is a synthetic chemical added to artificially boost protein in food. It’s not very toxic by itself, but it reacts with another artificial food additive, cyanuric acid, to form melamine cyanurate, which can cause renal failure and cancer.
And don’t think this is something unique to China, as the media and pundits seems to love to blame. Read the rest of this entry »
Green Deane has a lot of great videos on identifying wild edibles plants in Florida, with a nice touch of humor thrown in. His website also contains gobs of useful information on foraging.
I’m amazed by this woman’s garden. The rain catchment and irrigation is a great idea and there are so many potatoes!
Living with our parents and saving up has finally paid off. Christina stumbled upon this relatively cheap bank-owned property that had everything we wanted: 5 acres, development potential for permaculture/living off the land, near her work, and backing up to preserved land (the 172,000 acre Withlacoochee State Forest). It was a whirlwind dealing with the bank owner, middle men/women, lenders, inspectors, closing costs, false alarms, document errors, bleh. But with some gracious help from Christina’s mom (not to mention letting us stay at her home) and an agent staying on top of it, we were able to pull it off in the knick of a time right before the credit crunch came in full swing this late September. Also thanks to the family for all the hand me downs and being there for us once again to help us move.
According to a detailed National Geographic article, agriculture lays waste to an area the size of the US and Canada every year. Until I read some of Daniel Quinn’s works and started learning about permaculture, I had no idea desertification was a large problem caused by “civilized” agriculture. This article confirms that often many highly publicized famines, like those in Haiti and the Sahel of Africa, were caused by “green revolution” type cultivation aimed at export crops. While sustainable traditional methods, like the usage of terra preta discussed in the article, are often demonized as “backwards,” so-called development actually makes the people doing the work poorer.
Unfortunately the National Geographic article did not mention permaculture, which is odd given it’s focus on building healthy soil and successes doing so, especially in “third world” contexts.
