Ancient Food Forest, a lesson in Permaculture

[formercia]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5ZgzwoQ-ao&feature=related

This concept, although practiced for thousands of years, goes completely against the Idea of corporate agriculture.

This is not about quick profits, but a sustainable method of supplying food and medicines, far int the future, without reliance on the consumer-centric industrial systems that supply us now.

There are several related videos that are just as informative.

[pinto]

1. Interesting video. Thanks for the post.

:thumbsup:

[tama]

2. Yes

The blessings of Mother Nature are infinite. All we need to do is stop trying to control Her and just accept her gifts. What we need to learn, She will teach us. If and when we humble ourselves enough to learn to learn.

[Igel]

22. That place was hardly natural.

It was carefully grown, plants put in for how they serve man not how they fit the ecosystem.

Instead of a large private plot for monoculture where the family knew how to grow a few different things well and cooperate with others it was a large private plot with variety to suit a family's needs without the same degree of cooperation. Much harder to pull off.

[tama]

24. Perfectly natural

Once you understand that also humans - a gardening species - are also part of the ecosystem, sharing symbiotic and coevolutionary relations with other species, animals, plants and mushrooms.

Time to get rid of the ignorant division between culture and nature. Cultures are all natural, even when they forget it.

[Speck Tater]

3. Yes! Now all we need to do is get everybody to leave the cities and move to tropical villages.

Of course the population density supported by tropical food forests is much lower so something like 75% of the population will have to agree to starve to death so the remaining 25% can have enough food. Maybe the left behind 75% can just stay in the higher latitude places like Europe, China, and North America and starve to death while the other 25% gets to move to the tropics. Perhaps a lottery to see who gets to move and who has to stay? Or, more likely, the richest 25% will get to move to the tropics and the poorest 75% will have to stay in Europe and North America.

Aside from those few problems, it sounds like a good plan.

[freshwest]

5. No doubt the reason a number of super rich have moved to such areas to glean the profits.

When it comes down to it, though, no place on the planet is safe from predatory capitalism.

Although I know young people who have joined in with immigrant communities in my state and gone home with them to experience the ex-pat lifestyle in Central and South America. They shed all their material goods and are working on networking.

Wish that I could do so. But as you say, the carrying capacity for population in those areas is not that high. Organic cultivation in this country even with the constraints placed upon us is about all we've got going for us with the social order falling apart.

[tama]

6. In fact

Food forest or multilayer garden produces many times the nourishment, medicin, fiber and energy per acre than industrial agriculture, which is just idiotic and self-destructive mechanized abuse of fertile soil.

Not just tropical food forests but everywhere. I have a friend living in northern Finland who has proven is practice that fully self-sustainable way of life requires only five ares (10*50 metres) of gardening land plus about hectare of wilderness for gathering in those climate conditions. And averadge of just four hours of work per day for satisfying all material needs.

[Speck Tater]

7. I agree. It works very well...

... for a small percent of the global population. It may well produce more per acre, but how do you get that product to the markets in the big cities without turning to economies of scale. In other words, turning it into a "factory food forest".

It only works as well as it does because the people living off the food forest live in, or at least in the immediate vicinity of the food forest. It wouldn't work in New York City for supporting the population of New York City. That's why it is only suitable for a select few groups of people, and not for the planet as a whole. It's great if you happen to be among the select few who have those couple of acres at your disposal. It's no use at all to the people of Haiti or Afghanistan or Chicago or Singapore or any arid region like the Middle East or Arizona.

[tama]

9. Oh,

it definately works for the planet as whole, adapting to organic whole instead of acting like cancer cells - but not for certain aspects of human self-importance (like identifying urban population as planet as whole ;)).

But let's begin from realizing that we are all in the same boat and that the revolution is not tomorrow but next year but going on each moment. The revolution of transition and transformation from non-sustainable ways of life to sustainable ways. Revoluton as learning process and evolutionary adaptation, consciously as consciouss and creative beings that we are.

Garden Planet, Paradise on Earth, is a beautifull dream and excellent working hypothesis as a "goal", but not the only one. It has value only as much it can help this transition period, each moment of this revolution of not fixing and fixating on a certain future but opening new possibilities of beauty and bliss.

So yes, as it now looks like, to find a better balance much of urban population need to go rural and urban centers need to learn local self-sustainable based on local resources and skills. Urban gardening first and foremost. As Cuba did and is doing. Equally important is to get rid of banks and banksters, ie. let them crash by their own impossibility without actively supporting them. New sense of community, local and global, and freedom of fear are of greatest importance, finding confidence in each other - and Mother Nature, where we all belong.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself. :)

[Speck Tater]

10. Sounds nice in theory, but it will never happen.

City dwellers will stay in the city until the food stops flowing into their grocery stores. Then they will become a starving mob scouring the nearby countryside for food until they drop in their tracks from starvation.

The only solutions that could possible work are solutions that are political suicide, so no politicians will back them. And they require complete upheaval of the life style of the vast majority of Americans, something almost nobody will do voluntarily. So if the government won't force it and the people won't do it voluntarily, it's not going to happen until well after the necessary population crash. Then, with a reduced population, solutions might be found by the lucky few survivors who will live closer to Mother Nature because they will have no other choice.

Cuba succeeded because the government had the will and the power to force the necessary changes on the people. American politicians have neither the will nor the power to make the necessary changes happen. Change is inevitable, but it will be forced by Mother Nature because the human race is already in population overshoot. Our survival is made possible only by cheap and abundant fossil fuel, and that is going away. And with the loss of cheap and abundant fossil fuel the ability of the surplus human population to survive also goes away. It's sad and tragic and horrifying and unavoidable, but the human race is facing a die-off of unprecedented proportions within the next 50 years at most, and New Age Polyanna platitudes about "Garden Planet" and "Paradise on Earth" are just another form of denial.

[arikara]

12. Actually Cuba succeeded because

when they could no longer get imports which included pesticides and fertilizers they had to relearn how to farm sustainably or starve. They started growing food everywhere they could, including within the towns and cities, and they now have a thriving organic food supply to feed their people without spreading toxic crap all over the place. There is an excellent documentary about it, unfortunately I forget the name. Cuba could certainly teach the so-called developed world healthier farming practices.

[Speck Tater]

16. Everything you say is true.

But it was NOT grass roots. It was government directed, including re-tooling the colleges to teach sustainable agriculture. It didn't "just happen". It was planned and controlled. My argument is that US politicians are too spineless or too clueless to put that kind of program into effect.

[arikara]

23. Yes no argument from here,

you are absolutely right.

[tama]

13. Don't give a fuck

1) about politicians. They just sell you fear and themselves as saviours from your fear, so that you don't have to stop being afraid. So that you keep on trusting and staying dependent from politicians and what not, everything but yourself.

2) about die-off, population crash and Best Doomer Porn one can imagine. My favo was imagining waking up in a city flat with my children to take care one morning and realizing that all the supermarkets have allready been looted empty, wife gone with a Real Man. With no real friends to rely on. So I whined and cried till I crashed, destroyed my marriage, abandoned my previous career and went to Gardening school, lived a summer in an Ecovillage. Walked barefoot in forest, drank ayahuasca, ate peyote with shamans and tribesmen, faced the miraculous beaty and magic and and love that this life really is and the greatest fear, that I'm really loved, unconditionally, by the whole fucking universe, as much love I can take. I'm that daft and thick so it took all that to get my healing process started. And it's still going on, and it feels good.

So fuck the Doomer Porn "realism", imagine your worst Doomer Porn scenario and make it personal, shit your pants, get psychotic and run into the wild and (nearly) die if that's what it takes. Face your fear with the power of imagination and get over it. Then you slowly will begin to see yourself as much else besides excess garbage and burden to your fellow men and future member of the Zombie horde. You will find your self-confidence as a source of strength and beauty for your fellow men and Mother Nature as whole.

3) about New Age Polyanna platitudes. Learn one thing, teach one other person. Keep on learning, If it ain't fun, then don't do it.

Fuck it all. It's all sexy and sex is all there is. It's not your problem, the problem don't need fixing, so stop causing it. Live and enjoy life as it happens, Shit is Holy and ain't no holier place for shit than in your pants. :)

[Speck Tater]

15. WOW! I couldn't have said it better myself.

Nicely put. :)

[tama]

17. That said

The "Garden Planet", as I see it, is nothing but a collection of simple skills and attitudes that we allready know (as collective) and have been proven to work by countless examples. It's all tested, only problem is "them others who don't get it". Fuck them others, just plant a tree... :)

[Speck Tater]

18. That;'s my plan too.

I already have 35 fruit trees, a veggie garden, five different kinds of berries, and loads and loads of grapes. I live out in the county and as for the rest of the world, I'm content to be a spectator. (Hence my moniker)

[tama]

19. I live in the suburbia

near the oldest city of the country where I live. Community of about 10 people in an old garden and few wooden houses by the s ee side (1,5 hectares), 40 apple trees and other edible trees and bushes,surrounded by rich lawn-people in cement castless. Moved here last August, it's allready a forest garden + meadow and too much for my peanut brain of a gardening student (gardening school 20 minutes school) to begin to understand. Autumn went in community work (ie. washing dishes and cleaning the house), had no time nor energy to get into gardening work, not much else besides planting couple boxes of Sembra Pine seeds for winter treatment. Loads of snow this winter... :)

Suburb is the place to be and where all the Real Fun is (besides fuck the gloomy-doomy "End of Suburbia"!), because if the wage slave zombie hords start wandering out of City, this is the front line to get beaten and eaten! :D

Nah, slow by slow we hippies and social care bums and new age fluffy bunnies take over the whole city and transform it into networks of anarchistic ecocommunities. No idea what so ever of how and no need to do anything to achieve it, so it's bound to just happen by itself... :)

[Speck Tater]

21. Good points convincingly argued. :) nt

[Ghost Dog]

26. Yes. Very Nice.

:thumbsup:

[formercia]

25. That's a good idea.

I think I'll move to Kawaii.

[freshwest]

4. Great... But not available to most of us. Best wishes to all of them.

[Ozymanithrax]

8. Corporate agriculture and population preasrue creates issues of crop yeld...

that did not exist when this form of agricultre was common.

It can not be aruged that these are sustatinable methods. But to feed seven billion people, old sustainable methods may not work.

[felix_numinous]

11. Learning permaculture is a great survival skill

for the future. What a fascinating subject, the books are so expensive though (even used ones).

[formercia]

14. Supply and demand

Buy them before others do.

An interesting one that I picked up at a Library book sale:

The complete book of edible landscaping by Rosalind Creasy, Sierra Club Books 1982

A great volume for those who live in urban areas where local ordnances would prohibit the Jungle look.

[truedelphi]

20. K & R. Will check this out later. Thank you. n/t