I run a not for profit native tree nursery on Rakino Island. I have no illusions that it's going to change anything to any measurable degree. I just want Gaia to see me not giving up on her as we relentlessly murder her in broad daylight.
"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material portion of their privilege." John Kenneth Galbraith courtesy of GuyMcPherson.com
Actually what we have been saying is that every small step matters. Growing your herbs can save you money and reduce plastic, as they are usually heavy in that. Instead of throwing out the ends put them in water and grow them on your balcony. In Australia, 24% of online shopping was gardening supplies, worm farms and vertical gardens and roof top gardens are thriving here.
This dude from MakeSoil shows you how to make a community garden starting with making a compost bin from waste.
This is the key, diverting food waste from landfill = methane reduction another step people who live in inner cities can do. There is an avid gardener within a stones throw of anyone now I would guess.
I am working with a permaculture/syntropic farmer teacher and he has a pilot under way where a new property development will include a Market Garden, where you take all your food waste, and there is a kickback for that down the track. Other features are included for lower income families. This is city development ideas, bringing the country in.
I do agree that living off the land seems like an arduous task if done alone but I think as we come together more about this and come up with solutions that are collective then I think there is a better way to do our small steps especially as there is a gap in the over 50's of having enough $$ to retire on. Or younger people who don't want to be part of the grind. Off grid communities etc. will always have a place because if time and effort is as good as money, a lot of people who slipped through the cracks of society can land on their feet with dignity through these ideas. Sociocracy has peaked my interest but can't discuss it in detail yet.
Last thing, I found ShareWaste, it's an app that connects gardeners to people who don't garden to take their food waste for their chickens and compost bins. I have my first donation coming and it's from someone who is road tripping up the east coast of Australia. I have two bins out the front that I check in on on the days people say they are dropping stuff by. It's cool as.
I think there are solutions coming that are going to be opportunities for both solutions; inner city gardening and to live off the land for those who have other skills to be part of a community; cook, healer, mechanic, sparky, etc. COVid has some really cool side effects around this kind of thing.
Things are changing for the better for how to do a little to make a big difference. Exciting times ahead for sure.
Funny. Grain of truth. A bit of a straw man argument (for comic and rhetorical effect) to be sure, but the broader point is a valid one.
I think that the idea that one is either 100% pure or a hypocrite doesn’t stand up, and so (as always) the devil is in the detail - or maybe more appropriately- the nuance.
In essence the system we have makes hipocrites of us all. It’s nigh on impossible to be a pure example of an alternative without it essentially being (as pointed out above) a lifeboat that excludes others.
That being said, the fight to demand (or create) meaningful options and change may well be one we lose, so “doing what you can” within the limit of your resources may well be a reasonable response after all.
So many of us are not powerful forces for ecological or systemIc good because that’s not what is incentivised or (largely) even an option.
Sometimes there aren’t any good choices. Hopefully we keep learning and striving to do better ‘despite’ not ‘because’ of the system we exist within.
Even if the battle is lost, someone needs to fight the rearguard action and prevent an even worse routing that would happen otherwise.
In doing so we might just also find an opportunity. Who knows.
I will note that Bill Mollison, the teacher of Geoff Lawton (if you commentators don't recognize either of those names I don't know why you are on this blog), agreed with you. From the beginning Bill said that if you can't make communities that can both nurture the soul and resist government jackboots there's no point. However he was, as far as I can tell, irreligious and couldn't execute on his own advice because of it. I say that last part because a religious community facing persecution is one of the most tight knit cooperative groups around, as opposed to bohemian roleplayers who are expecting pats on the head because they wear apple watches.
It was like the last 1/4th of his book and yet people have ignored it. Permaculture as a design doesn't stop at the garden, the design philosophy is supposed to continue upstream into community design.
I tried permaculture and its a nice idea which is impossible to implement without extreme hard work and multiple skills. Tools have changed though and vegetable production is on its way to being robotised at least for sowing, weeding and some pest control. The crops will need shade if recent summers are anything to go by, so rows of trees every few metres ?
Given that we are going to get warmer and wetter in the UK I think there are ways to grow a mix of fruit trees interspersed with solar panels at canopy height . The panels can produce shelter from the worst of the rain and sun and be linked by anti bird and squirrel nets. Those creatures usually destroy the fruit and nuts before they are even ripe (in my experience) .
I am going to try that in 2023 but we will not know if it has worked for a few more years.
In the silvo pastoral systems protecting the trees from debarking by the grazing animals is the big problem. There are too many idealistic folk out there pontificating about food production without any or limited experience.
This is total bollocks. Written by someone who doesn't give a shit and only wants to run things down. Go plant a garden, care for it, and then run it down. At least you will then speak from experince.
I think you have some valid points here but miss the fact that we are at a new point in history because we have access to the knowledge, information and plant species from the WHOLE world and the whole of history now. That has not happened before and offers new opportunities for the way us as a species can live. Pesonally, thats what I see these centres, communities, small farms doing - experimenting now (with the benefits and tools of an industrialised society) to see if there is a better way for humans to live in small self-sustaining communities than the way we did 200 years ago. I would argue that the diversity of plants we now have already makes that simpler. I also take issue with you perception of woman in all this - as fringe and only there when accompanying a male! I have been involved with permaculture, gardening, forestry, sustainable development and simple living for the last 20 years and know many women who are.
Andy I think you are turning it into an all-or-nothing situation: if we can’t have it all then we have nothing. But those people trying to make a meaningful life on the land don’t have any illusions about the scale of the problem. They are not doing it to try and make everyone do it to save humanity. They are saying, fuck it, I am out of here: you guys can sail on aboard your doomed ship which was designed without a steering wheel. We might just hang on longer if we live a more resilient life style. It is not the grand solution that you seem to be seeking: they are doing it for themselves, not all of us! Good on them.
I am not sure to understand where you are going with this. I think that those exact people that you seems to be targeting here, are probably amongst the most informed of the fact that nothing is going to save all of us or the planet or whatever you want to call it. They are the people who are willing to disconnect from a society that managed to bring humanity to its extinction in less than 200 years. To say fuck to it. The way they do this is by going back to the most essential things humans needs : food shelter water and social interactions. Cause, yes, most of the time those people are also the ones trying to bring the less fortunate with them. You should know permaculture is about the earth the people and fair share.
They don't hope to have the good life, they don't think it's going to be great when they are old and their back is broken. They do it because it minimises every day the impact they have on the planet, even though they might need a sit on a plane sometimes. They do it because regenerative agriculture for instance could capture a third to a fourth of the world's co2 emissions. They don't think it's going to happen but they still do it. Ukrainians don't think they are going to eliminate the Russian army, but they still fight. If being human and living a full life is not living by our values and fighting for what we think is right, even though we know we won't reach those ideals, then what is it?
Also, i would like to remind you that permaculture was created using ancient and indigenous knowledge and even if it might not have been said enough, it is not created from nothing but sits on millennia of knowledge accumulation. Which is actually not the case of conventional agriculture which was built denying things we had learnt in the past. This lead us now to some of the struggling you talk about here, but only because we have been disconnected from our roots and our ancestors, not because this pre industrial system could not have been perpetuated. And yes, being a farmer is not for everyone but pre industrial societies weren't 100% farmers, and evolving past modern capitalistic societies should not be neither. So many skills and trades have been brought to near extinction so that we could supposedly replace them by machines which would give us free time and better lifes! Wanna talk about burn out rates? Bore out? Divorce? Depression ? Suicide ? Drug addictions? Unemployment? Individualism? Materialism ? How is our society so much better now? We have replaced meaningful aspects of human life with meaning less ones.
I am a victim of that and I blame the so called evolution to have disconnected myself from my roots, I do not think that I'll ever be able to reconnect with them, nor that "I'll save the world" in the process, yet I still do it because I feel it is what I am here for. Not to live my life enjoying some fake holidays once a year to walk in a forest or on a beach, but to work hard with people and nature all year long instead.
I’m curious whether two more years have shifted your thinking in this at all?
The way I see it, permaculture is a philosophy for people who agree that there are wiser ways to do almost anything we want to do, and especially the act of generating food. The intent to apply system design thinking to the act of growing food, and to pull as much applicable wisdom from any and all available sources, but especially the natural world—that’s a good impulse for people and the world.
We are creators, being the children of a Creator, and we’re better off when we think and act like creators.
However, I have also seen a lot of silliness in permaculture. One big silly idea is that any amount of gardening can change human nature. Put simply, nothing short of the divine intervention of God can do that. So the people who put Environment and Planet above or in place of religion and salvation through Christ have missed the mark.
But as the reality of captivity closes down on people, and they necessarily turn to God for relief, the ideas of permaculture have a lot of value for how to sustain life even under adverse conditions by applying wisdom and building self-supporting systems.
In other words, by itself, permaculture won’t save the world, but it is a very useful tool for the people who will, as they rebuild the world following its inevitable destruction.
Good post and I like the attack on the trust fund kids who jet around lecturing the poor. Europe is covered in the ruins of peasant holdings abandoned because relentless manual work is degrading and exhausting. Modern robotics can replace labour and provide some high status jobs. Rotational cropping systems are the only way we can sustain food production long term. Don't worry, integrated silvocultural systems with robotics will supply what is needed. But those high energy lifestyles will probably have to go.
I found this incredibly powerful and weirdly energising - you've hit some truth here I think. Not exactly sure what it is, but I'll be pondering it for a while. I don't think I've ever heard the dilemma of being human at this time - and carrying/worrying about our collective future - expressed in quite this way. What really hit a nerve for me were your comments on how people in the regenerative agriculture space often still have, and make use of, the products of the culture at large (overseas trips etc.) and how property ladders and the like may well be around for a while. I don't know what will bring about change - I don't think anyone does - change is inherently unpredictable - but I think the-foot-in-both- camps way of life is how many of us (sort of) manage. And I think we lie about it to ourselves and others too - lots of personal stuff for me that I don't won't to go into here. Thanks for this Andy, I will share it with my students.
I have a pretty small garden, a little less than 100 square meters, and I produce massive quantities of food with very little effort. I will easily have 70 kilos of potatoes on about 12 square meters, no joke. I have about 300 onions growing and 60 shallot plants. I have volunteer tomatoes that come up every year and I organize them in rows. I have volunteer giant sunflower plants that I give to everyone in the neighborhood. We get massive quantities of zucchinis off a few plants, that require almost no work. We have mature artichokes we are going to harvest today. My daughter eats strawberries and raspberries almost every day she comes home from school; it's such a great joy. I grew up with everyone in my family having a nice garden to enjoy, my aunt who makes the makes the best pickles and salsa, my mom and her huge raspberry and strawberry patch, some sweet corn fresh out of the garden.
I run a not for profit native tree nursery on Rakino Island. I have no illusions that it's going to change anything to any measurable degree. I just want Gaia to see me not giving up on her as we relentlessly murder her in broad daylight.
"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material portion of their privilege." John Kenneth Galbraith courtesy of GuyMcPherson.com
Stick with this soul work as long as you can Andy
Actually what we have been saying is that every small step matters. Growing your herbs can save you money and reduce plastic, as they are usually heavy in that. Instead of throwing out the ends put them in water and grow them on your balcony. In Australia, 24% of online shopping was gardening supplies, worm farms and vertical gardens and roof top gardens are thriving here.
This dude from MakeSoil shows you how to make a community garden starting with making a compost bin from waste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAPM5X37tu0&list=LL&index=14
This is the key, diverting food waste from landfill = methane reduction another step people who live in inner cities can do. There is an avid gardener within a stones throw of anyone now I would guess.
I am working with a permaculture/syntropic farmer teacher and he has a pilot under way where a new property development will include a Market Garden, where you take all your food waste, and there is a kickback for that down the track. Other features are included for lower income families. This is city development ideas, bringing the country in.
I do agree that living off the land seems like an arduous task if done alone but I think as we come together more about this and come up with solutions that are collective then I think there is a better way to do our small steps especially as there is a gap in the over 50's of having enough $$ to retire on. Or younger people who don't want to be part of the grind. Off grid communities etc. will always have a place because if time and effort is as good as money, a lot of people who slipped through the cracks of society can land on their feet with dignity through these ideas. Sociocracy has peaked my interest but can't discuss it in detail yet.
Last thing, I found ShareWaste, it's an app that connects gardeners to people who don't garden to take their food waste for their chickens and compost bins. I have my first donation coming and it's from someone who is road tripping up the east coast of Australia. I have two bins out the front that I check in on on the days people say they are dropping stuff by. It's cool as.
I think there are solutions coming that are going to be opportunities for both solutions; inner city gardening and to live off the land for those who have other skills to be part of a community; cook, healer, mechanic, sparky, etc. COVid has some really cool side effects around this kind of thing.
Things are changing for the better for how to do a little to make a big difference. Exciting times ahead for sure.
Funny. Grain of truth. A bit of a straw man argument (for comic and rhetorical effect) to be sure, but the broader point is a valid one.
I think that the idea that one is either 100% pure or a hypocrite doesn’t stand up, and so (as always) the devil is in the detail - or maybe more appropriately- the nuance.
In essence the system we have makes hipocrites of us all. It’s nigh on impossible to be a pure example of an alternative without it essentially being (as pointed out above) a lifeboat that excludes others.
That being said, the fight to demand (or create) meaningful options and change may well be one we lose, so “doing what you can” within the limit of your resources may well be a reasonable response after all.
So many of us are not powerful forces for ecological or systemIc good because that’s not what is incentivised or (largely) even an option.
Sometimes there aren’t any good choices. Hopefully we keep learning and striving to do better ‘despite’ not ‘because’ of the system we exist within.
Even if the battle is lost, someone needs to fight the rearguard action and prevent an even worse routing that would happen otherwise.
In doing so we might just also find an opportunity. Who knows.
I will note that Bill Mollison, the teacher of Geoff Lawton (if you commentators don't recognize either of those names I don't know why you are on this blog), agreed with you. From the beginning Bill said that if you can't make communities that can both nurture the soul and resist government jackboots there's no point. However he was, as far as I can tell, irreligious and couldn't execute on his own advice because of it. I say that last part because a religious community facing persecution is one of the most tight knit cooperative groups around, as opposed to bohemian roleplayers who are expecting pats on the head because they wear apple watches.
It was like the last 1/4th of his book and yet people have ignored it. Permaculture as a design doesn't stop at the garden, the design philosophy is supposed to continue upstream into community design.
Hi Andy,
I tried permaculture and its a nice idea which is impossible to implement without extreme hard work and multiple skills. Tools have changed though and vegetable production is on its way to being robotised at least for sowing, weeding and some pest control. The crops will need shade if recent summers are anything to go by, so rows of trees every few metres ?
Given that we are going to get warmer and wetter in the UK I think there are ways to grow a mix of fruit trees interspersed with solar panels at canopy height . The panels can produce shelter from the worst of the rain and sun and be linked by anti bird and squirrel nets. Those creatures usually destroy the fruit and nuts before they are even ripe (in my experience) .
I am going to try that in 2023 but we will not know if it has worked for a few more years.
In the silvo pastoral systems protecting the trees from debarking by the grazing animals is the big problem. There are too many idealistic folk out there pontificating about food production without any or limited experience.
Toby
This is total bollocks. Written by someone who doesn't give a shit and only wants to run things down. Go plant a garden, care for it, and then run it down. At least you will then speak from experince.
I think you have some valid points here but miss the fact that we are at a new point in history because we have access to the knowledge, information and plant species from the WHOLE world and the whole of history now. That has not happened before and offers new opportunities for the way us as a species can live. Pesonally, thats what I see these centres, communities, small farms doing - experimenting now (with the benefits and tools of an industrialised society) to see if there is a better way for humans to live in small self-sustaining communities than the way we did 200 years ago. I would argue that the diversity of plants we now have already makes that simpler. I also take issue with you perception of woman in all this - as fringe and only there when accompanying a male! I have been involved with permaculture, gardening, forestry, sustainable development and simple living for the last 20 years and know many women who are.
totally get it. thank you
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=5169590566411507&set=pb.100000818444438.-2207520000..&type=3
Wow - that's an amazing insight. Well written and compelling. But, saying that, are we all doomed?
Andy I think you are turning it into an all-or-nothing situation: if we can’t have it all then we have nothing. But those people trying to make a meaningful life on the land don’t have any illusions about the scale of the problem. They are not doing it to try and make everyone do it to save humanity. They are saying, fuck it, I am out of here: you guys can sail on aboard your doomed ship which was designed without a steering wheel. We might just hang on longer if we live a more resilient life style. It is not the grand solution that you seem to be seeking: they are doing it for themselves, not all of us! Good on them.
Hey Andy.
I am not sure to understand where you are going with this. I think that those exact people that you seems to be targeting here, are probably amongst the most informed of the fact that nothing is going to save all of us or the planet or whatever you want to call it. They are the people who are willing to disconnect from a society that managed to bring humanity to its extinction in less than 200 years. To say fuck to it. The way they do this is by going back to the most essential things humans needs : food shelter water and social interactions. Cause, yes, most of the time those people are also the ones trying to bring the less fortunate with them. You should know permaculture is about the earth the people and fair share.
They don't hope to have the good life, they don't think it's going to be great when they are old and their back is broken. They do it because it minimises every day the impact they have on the planet, even though they might need a sit on a plane sometimes. They do it because regenerative agriculture for instance could capture a third to a fourth of the world's co2 emissions. They don't think it's going to happen but they still do it. Ukrainians don't think they are going to eliminate the Russian army, but they still fight. If being human and living a full life is not living by our values and fighting for what we think is right, even though we know we won't reach those ideals, then what is it?
Also, i would like to remind you that permaculture was created using ancient and indigenous knowledge and even if it might not have been said enough, it is not created from nothing but sits on millennia of knowledge accumulation. Which is actually not the case of conventional agriculture which was built denying things we had learnt in the past. This lead us now to some of the struggling you talk about here, but only because we have been disconnected from our roots and our ancestors, not because this pre industrial system could not have been perpetuated. And yes, being a farmer is not for everyone but pre industrial societies weren't 100% farmers, and evolving past modern capitalistic societies should not be neither. So many skills and trades have been brought to near extinction so that we could supposedly replace them by machines which would give us free time and better lifes! Wanna talk about burn out rates? Bore out? Divorce? Depression ? Suicide ? Drug addictions? Unemployment? Individualism? Materialism ? How is our society so much better now? We have replaced meaningful aspects of human life with meaning less ones.
I am a victim of that and I blame the so called evolution to have disconnected myself from my roots, I do not think that I'll ever be able to reconnect with them, nor that "I'll save the world" in the process, yet I still do it because I feel it is what I am here for. Not to live my life enjoying some fake holidays once a year to walk in a forest or on a beach, but to work hard with people and nature all year long instead.
I’m curious whether two more years have shifted your thinking in this at all?
The way I see it, permaculture is a philosophy for people who agree that there are wiser ways to do almost anything we want to do, and especially the act of generating food. The intent to apply system design thinking to the act of growing food, and to pull as much applicable wisdom from any and all available sources, but especially the natural world—that’s a good impulse for people and the world.
We are creators, being the children of a Creator, and we’re better off when we think and act like creators.
However, I have also seen a lot of silliness in permaculture. One big silly idea is that any amount of gardening can change human nature. Put simply, nothing short of the divine intervention of God can do that. So the people who put Environment and Planet above or in place of religion and salvation through Christ have missed the mark.
But as the reality of captivity closes down on people, and they necessarily turn to God for relief, the ideas of permaculture have a lot of value for how to sustain life even under adverse conditions by applying wisdom and building self-supporting systems.
In other words, by itself, permaculture won’t save the world, but it is a very useful tool for the people who will, as they rebuild the world following its inevitable destruction.
Good post and I like the attack on the trust fund kids who jet around lecturing the poor. Europe is covered in the ruins of peasant holdings abandoned because relentless manual work is degrading and exhausting. Modern robotics can replace labour and provide some high status jobs. Rotational cropping systems are the only way we can sustain food production long term. Don't worry, integrated silvocultural systems with robotics will supply what is needed. But those high energy lifestyles will probably have to go.
I found this incredibly powerful and weirdly energising - you've hit some truth here I think. Not exactly sure what it is, but I'll be pondering it for a while. I don't think I've ever heard the dilemma of being human at this time - and carrying/worrying about our collective future - expressed in quite this way. What really hit a nerve for me were your comments on how people in the regenerative agriculture space often still have, and make use of, the products of the culture at large (overseas trips etc.) and how property ladders and the like may well be around for a while. I don't know what will bring about change - I don't think anyone does - change is inherently unpredictable - but I think the-foot-in-both- camps way of life is how many of us (sort of) manage. And I think we lie about it to ourselves and others too - lots of personal stuff for me that I don't won't to go into here. Thanks for this Andy, I will share it with my students.
The life glass is half full for this Author! Hes not even a realist more like a 80 year old grump in a 40 year old body.
I have a pretty small garden, a little less than 100 square meters, and I produce massive quantities of food with very little effort. I will easily have 70 kilos of potatoes on about 12 square meters, no joke. I have about 300 onions growing and 60 shallot plants. I have volunteer tomatoes that come up every year and I organize them in rows. I have volunteer giant sunflower plants that I give to everyone in the neighborhood. We get massive quantities of zucchinis off a few plants, that require almost no work. We have mature artichokes we are going to harvest today. My daughter eats strawberries and raspberries almost every day she comes home from school; it's such a great joy. I grew up with everyone in my family having a nice garden to enjoy, my aunt who makes the makes the best pickles and salsa, my mom and her huge raspberry and strawberry patch, some sweet corn fresh out of the garden.