Flowing toward Abundance

SUBHEAD: Build up appropriate stocks where needed, but be aware that it’s flows that generate those stocks.

By Toby Hemenway on 21 October 2015 for TobyHemenway.com -
(http://tobyhemenway.com/1234-flowing-toward-abundance/)


Image above: Grove of eucalyptus trees on the Berkley campus of the University of California. From (http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/2011/10/17/eucalyptus-fuel-for-fire/).

Over the last year or so, a neighbor has stocked up eight or ten piles of firewood in his yard, probably fifteen or twenty cords. What’s he going to do with it all? The house has a wood stove, but the family mostly uses the furnace, and burns wood only occasionally to get that cozy, fire-heated feel. It’s going to take them a decade or more to go through all that wood. Some of it is split and stacked, while much of it is strewn over a substantial chunk of their yard.

The wood comes from another neighbor’s multi-acre eucalyptus grove. Some of the trees are huge—three or more feet in diameter, a hundred feet tall. The landowner, Lyn, can pull out seven or eight properly chosen big trees each year and still replace all that biomass in the next year’s growth. It strikes me as a sustainable yield.

Several neighbors rely on her for their winter wood; the lot pumps out a good fifteen cords a year, and in our mild climate, you can heat a 2000-square-foot house using only wood by burning about a cord and a half.

The point of my little tale is this: My neighbor with the giant woodpile is thinking that the most secure source of wood is the store of it in his yard. But—to put it in systems language—that’s focusing on stocks over flows.

We tend to do that in this culture. However, the real wood storage is the woodlot in Lyn’s yard: the standing, growing trees, getting bigger each year, healthy and enlarging rather than rotting and getting punky on the ground.

Sure, it’s a good idea to keep two years of firewood on hard, which would be about three or four cords. But twenty cords? That’s a ten or fifteen year supply here. It’s a mammoth task to split and stack it all (only a fifth or so has been split in the last year, and who can blame them?); it should be covered or it will start to rot, and that’s a huge area to cover; and even with the best of care, by year five it will be breaking down and thus won’t heat as well.

Meanwhile, Lyn’s woodlot is cranking out fifteen cords of beautiful firewood every year. But we don’t tend to see flows as sources of abundance as easily as we see it in stocks—in piles of inert, stored, easily measured stuff.

One reason for this is our culture’s focus on things rather than on processes, relationships, and dynamics. Another is that it’s easy to trust that by squirreling away a fat store of something in a safe place, we will be able to use it.

But trusting that, say, some seeds freshly planted will truly feed you in a few months time, or that those trees will produce just as much wood next year as this—that takes a leap of faith. Especially in our culture, inculcated with scarcity and fear, we have more faith what we can see in front of us right now than in some gradual process that could, in our doubt-ridden imaginations, go awry at any moment.

Those of you who have seen my pieces on humanity’s transition from foraging to agriculture know that I believe that hunter-gatherers were secure in the knowledge that the wild world would always provide sustenance of some kind—that nature could be trusted—while agricultural people have lost that, and are taught that only our own hard work and piling up a storable surplus can guarantee survival.

Fortunately, with the emergence in the last few decades of whole-systems studies and related fields such as permaculture and holistic management, we’re seeing that flows are the real key to abundance. It’s flow, dynamic and well-channeled, that keeps any system running.

Yes, stocks and storages are an important part of any system, but any dynamic system, whether a garden, an ecosystem, a business, or a community, is kept healthy—is kept in existence at all—by the flows cycling within it, into it, and out of it. Lyn’s living woodlot—its increasing kilocalories of stored sunlight on the hoof—is the real source of abundance, not my neighbor’s slowly deteriorating pile.

I’ve seen what happens when people make the transition from a fear-based need to hoard to an abundance model of flow.

Through the lens I so often look through, of horticulture versus agriculture (a culture of gardeners tending the wild’s diversity rather than farmers sweating in domesticated monocultures), early humanity’s two million years of trusting nature is a more powerful legacy than a mere ten-thousand years of control-freaks breaking nature to the plow, and I’m hoping we are returning to that.

An encouraging example of this is the evolution of the prepper movement, a subset of the survivalists who have made full readiness for socio-economic collapse a major part of their lives.

The term “prepper” arose in the 1990s and the steady drumbeat of accumulating acute and chronic crises of 9/11; climate change; energy descent; Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and other natural disasters; the financial collapse of 2008, and the feeble official responses to most of these, have driven prepper numbers to new highs.

But many preppers are moving away from the “build a bunker and fill it with freeze-dried food and ammo” mentality. I’ve had some rollicking conversations about this with the lively Jack Spirko, moderator of The Survival Podcast, probably the most popular prepper website. Jack began his journey in classic survivalist mode—bunker, ammo, and all. Then he was introduced to permaculture, and a series of lightbulbs turned on.

The constant flow from an exuberant garden, he realized, was better long-term insurance than barrels in a basement, and less likely to attract or be understood by those potential “apocalypse zombie” raiders.

A community of like-minded men and women working together on food- and resource-yielding projects could produce much more than one man’s garden, and a large, cohesive group of tool-using (and, yes, given Jack’s world, some of them gun-toting) people would be a far less tempting target than a lone guy in a bunker full of food. And lots more fun.

The preppers are moving from a mindset of stocks to one of flows.

We need both stocks and flows. But our culture has focused largely on stocks, and when we do focus on flows we often go too far the other way, creating non-resilient systems that have been stripped of their buffers in the interest of economics, such as just-in-time production and so-called “lean businesses.” Stocks do have their role, especially as buffers, but it’s the flows that keep a system running.

So, sure, build up appropriate stocks where needed. But be aware that it’s flows that generate those stocks, and where flows are healthy, your piles of squirreled-away stuff can be a lot smaller. Nourish those flows. That way, we can move away from fear-based hoarding to a flow-based abundance model—the one that nature uses.

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Horticultural Traditions

SUBHEAD: Societies grow great when old men plant trees  whose shade they  know they will never sit in.

By Andy Russell 28 November 2013 for Autonomy Acres -
(http://autonomyacres.wordpress.com/2013/11/28/horticultural-traditions/)


Image above: An example of genetic diversity within the indiginous crop of potatoes in the Andes mountains  From original article.

Long before the rise of annual grain based industrial agriculture, and the dismantling of our food and cultural traditions, humans lived in ways much closer to the earth. In some places hunting and gathering remained a viable option (even up to the present day), and in other places this relationship with the earth manifested itself through horticulture and various forms of animal husbandry. In many places it was a mix of these two ways of procuring food that shaped and defined a culture and/or a region.

For untold millennia (until relatively recently), humans had been able to provide for their basic needs through a combination of these two actions: Hunting/Fishing/Shepherding/Husbanding and the cultivation/gathering of plants for all of their dietary needs. These ways of life are not mutually exclusive, but rather a complementary set of skills and traditions that have formed the long and diverse history of humans, the food we eat, and how we inhabit, impact, and transform our landscapes.

The transition from hunter/gatherers to industrial agricultural farmers did not happen overnight. It has been a long drawn out story that has seen countless empires and kingdoms rise and fall, climate and weather patterns change, landscapes transformed, and cultural practices (some good, and some bad) that have led up to the present day. The part of this story that really interests me, and what this essay is going to explore, are some of the horticultural practices that came between the gulf of the hunting and gathering lifestyle and the transition to the industrial agricultural paradigm, and how the ultimate survival of the human species rests in reconnecting with these horticultural traditions.

For the last ten thousand years humans have undergone a transformation that has slowly eroded our abilities to be self reliant as communities. Year by year, and season by season unseen and unnoticed by most of those living through these changes, we have become more dependent on others to grow, raise, and process our food for us. But even as this has occurred, and continues to happen to this day, there are examples of resistance to the transition of mass produced food that is based on annual grain agriculture.

The kitchen garden, which in many regards is the original resistor to monocrop agriculture, is the heart of any homestead. They provide us with an abundance of fruits and vegetables, culinary and medicinal herbs, flowers, forage, liquid gold from honey bees, fodder for livestock and pollinators, beauty, a sense of well being, and a bit of self reliance. The kitchen garden, whether it is covering thousands of square feet as part of a rural homestead, or is an intensively managed set of raised beds in an urban neighborhood, has traditionally provided us with a majority of our essential vitamins, nutrients, and minerals that we need each day to remain healthy.

The kitchen garden has been the difference of merely surviving on a subsistence diet of staple grains or other forms of cheap industrial grown carbs, and thriving because of a diet consisting of healthy leafy greens, fruits, berries, legumes, stems, nuts, tubers, roots, and different forms of animal protein. It is the kitchen gardens, allotments, community gardens, urban farms, and small scale polycultural farms found throughout the world and its history that have helped to feed the civilian population in times of war and peace, economic prosperity and downturns, and periods of climate change and stability.

As far back as ancient Rome, before it was an empire dominated by politicians and imperial armies, citizen farmers worked the land as families. Their farms were small, diverse operations worked by hand that provided all the food a family needed to survive. David R. Montgomery, the author of Dirt – The Erosion of Civilisations, sums up early Roman horticultural practices in this passage -

“Early Roman farms were intensively worked operations where diversified fields were hoed and weeded manually and carefully manured. The earliest Roman farmers planted a multistory canopy of olives, grapes, cereals, and fodder crops referred to as cultura promiscua. Interplanting of understory and overstory crops smothered weeds, saved labor, and prevented erosion by shielding the ground all year. Roots of each crop reached to different depths and did not compete with each other. Instead, the multicrop system raised soil temperatures and extended the growing season. In the early republic, a Roman family could feed itself working the typical plot of land by hand. (And such labor – intensive farming is best practiced on a small scale.) Using an ox and plow saved labor but required twice as much land to feed a family. As plowing became standard practice, the demand for land increased faster than the population.”

This passage highlights a few points that are well worth looking at in more detail. First, the description of the crops grown illustrates the importance of genetic diversity. While the Romans did not have the word Permaculture, the fact that their horticultural choices included tree crops, vines, ground covers and annuals shows that they understood the importance of genetic variation within their farmsteads. Genetic diversity within a particular crop selection almost always insures a harvest of some kind, and by designing this resilient feature into our farms, we can avoid complete famine in a bad year.

Second, these early Roman farmers knew the importance of a healthy, living soil even if the finer details of microorganisms and soil life were not fully understood. By returning manure and organic matter back to the fields, and growing a diverse selection of perennial food crops (along with some annuals), the soil health was maintained and continually improved upon. But gradually throughout the empire the Roman family farm began to be replaced with annual grain production that depended on the tilling and plowing of the fields to support an elite urban empire. Once this occurred the resilience of these small horticultural farms was lost to the history books.

At this point in Roman history, absentee land ownership took over, soil was lost to water and wind erosion, and farm labor moved in the direction of slavery. These are all signs, still seen today to some extent, of what happens when our horticultural traditions are replaced with annual monocrop grain production to feed the cities. This transition does not happen overnight, and is almost invisible to those living through it. Only in hindsight and with an accurate historical narrative can we see the effects of what annual mono-crop based agriculture does to a once thriving, self reliant culture.

Moving on to another example of a multi species, horticultural society, we find ourselves in pre-industrial China. While China has suffered many famines, environmental degradations, and massive amounts of soil loss due to poor farming practices and land stewardship, not everything in this ancient culture’s history is doom and gloom. Focusing solely on southern China, there is a roughly 10,000 year old agricultural tradition of growing rice along with fish and ducks.

This polyculture of rice, fish, and ducks provided a substantial part of southern China’s diet on land that was marginal at best. Through intensive land management of irrigation ditches and rice paddies, and the continual addition of human and animal manures to these areas, the pre-industrial Chinese farmers were able to work these same lands for millennia without degrading the soil. This technique of multi-species farming was so successful that the population would balloon in times of prosperity and occasionally overshoot the carrying capacity of the landbase, leading to isolated periods of collapse, famine, and death.

In addition to the rice, fish, and ducks, Chinese farmers also raised chickens and pigs, and cultivated amaranth, asian beans, barley, brassicas, leeks, melons, millet, turnips, and many other old world annual vegetables that added richness to their cuisine and health. Fungi and herbs that have traditionally been used in Chinese medicine have now gained notoriety throughout the world, and as far as perennial contributions from their horticultural traditions, apricots, apples, bamboo shoots, citrus, lotus roots, and peaches also played large roles in feeding the pre-industrial farmers of China.

Like the example of the Romans, as ancient China grew and added more and more urban areas, the population increased and demanded more from the land. As this happens, shortcuts are taken and eventually people start to change the way they grow their food. Demand dictates efficiencies, so rather than keeping age old methods of growing and raising food for small communities using proven sustainable methods, new ways are invented to grow and export more food to the ever growing urban areas. As this happens land stewardship ceases to matter, and as a consequence soil is lost, and civilizations fail.

An example of genetic diversity within the indiginous crop of the Andes mountains – potatoes!

Moving along to one last pre-industrial horticultural society, we find ourselves across the two great oceans in pre-European North, Central, and South America. While this land mass is huge and contained many diverse cultures, there was a shared, underlying similarity displayed by many of these first nations of the Americas. While it is true that the Americas’ had its own agricultural revolutions with crops like maize and potatoes (and flourishing kingdoms and urban centers that were supported by these crops), the pre European Americas were highly managed landscapes overflowing with an abundance of useful plants and animals despite what the first Europeans thought was an untouched, virgin wilderness.

One major difference that set the Americas apart from Europe and Asia is that there were no domesticated animals aside from the dog that were a part of their horticultural systems. While it could be argued that the guinea pig and possibly the turkey were partially domesticated, there were no beasts of burden prior to the arrival of the Europeans (and the animals they brought with them) that aided in the transformation of the landscape, thus giving it its wild appearance.

This fact alone sets the stage for the reasons that the original inhabitants of the Americas managed the land the way they did. With no domesticated animals to keep track of or feed, there were no fences or pastures in the landscape. Therefore all meat and animal products were procured from undomesticated sources. The work of clearing fields was done first with semi controlled fires, and then using wood and bone hand tools to finish removing charred stumps and other debris, fields were then planted in any number of indigenous crops. The same way manure adds nutrients and minerals to the soil, so too does fire from the (semi)annual burnings.

Fire not only cleared out fields where they grew the Three Sisters (maize, beans, and squash – Roughly Mexico north through Minnesota ), potatoes in the central and southern American highlands, and manioc root in the tropics, but fire was also used to keep undergrowth in the forests (continents wide) from getting out of control. The great savannas in the Eastern and Central United States, described by Lewis and Clark in their journals that contained American Chestnuts, oaks, maples, and many other trees were not wild tracts of land, but highly managed food forests that provided a variety of nuts, fruits, greens, medicinal herbs, and meat protein from the animals that also called these forests home.

Variations on this theme of the food forest could be found throughout the Americas. From the northern climes all the way down to the tropics and beyond; each region had its own diverse set of species that flourished with the help of the native populations and the fire they used to shape the land. Even the tropics and the great Amazonian rainforests are now thought to have been food forests and gardens that were managed by the local populations whose numbers are now believed to have been much larger than first thought. The evidence of terra preta, a mixture of charcoal, fired clay, manure, and other organic matter that is highly fertile that is found throughout huge swaths of Amazonian soil, is now thought to be evidence of a very hands on approach to the management of land that was once considered to be virgin wilderness.

With the arrival of the Europeans to the Americas, the world changed forever. Disease spread like wildfire and decimated native and imperial populations alike (this included non human species as well). Plants and animals from all corners of the globe began their international migrations. Maize, potatoes, and tomatoes from the Americas, wheat and barley from Europe and the Middle East, and apples, citrus, melons, and rice from Asia all became global crops. Honey bees, horses, cows, chickens, and pigs all became global animals and farming practices around the globe began to radically change, which in turn affected how communities prospered or failed, and how landscapes were altered. So while it can be said that monocrop grain agriculture started well over 10,000 years ago, it was with the advent of the Columbian exchange that it took on a new global approach that has altered our planet radically.

Today our kitchen gardens and small scale farms are made up of global plant immigrants. Whether you are in Africa, America, or Australia, the joy of a garden fresh cucumber, tomato, or onion is now a shared experience. And while the globalization of plants and animals has had downsides such as the spread of pests, disease, and “invasive” species, it has also provided us with many new opportunities to help feed ourselves and heal the land after so much abuse and mismanagement at the hands of modern civilization and the agriculture that has made it possible.

Having this plethora of plants (and animals) at hand to work with can now be considered an asset and another tool for us to use as we adapt to our new living arrangements. As Bill Mckibben has so eloquently wrote about (see his book Eaarth), we no longer live on the planet that we grew up on. The realities of climate change are real, and when combined with peak oil, habitat loss, and nuclear contamination humans have been backed into a corner that will be hard to get out of alive.

The horticultural traditions from the global past may now be our best shot for the survival of the human race along with all the good parts of our collective culture – i.e. – music, art, poetry, community, family, etc. When we can all become producers again, rather than just blindly consuming, we begin to occupy one of our historical roles as land stewards. Since so few of us have any connection with the Earth anymore, we no longer know what it needs or how to care for it. When we no longer live with the Earth, we no longer know its rhythms and fall out of balance with our evolutionary roles as caretakers. Every year more soil is lost to erosion, aquifers are drained and contaminated, wild habitat is plowed under for field crops and development, and human culture moves further away from our evolutionary roots. This has been our fate, but now is the time to free ourselves from the shackles of civilization and move onto the next stage of evolution.

Our shared horticultural traditions, whether that be from the terraced slopes of China to the food forests of pre-Columbian America are examples of what is possible. While we may never be able to recreate some of these systems as they once were, the lessons they have to teach us are timeless and offer real solutions for our journey into the future. The ecological design science of Permaculture gives us an opportunity to take all of these diverse traditions and blend them into a new, adaptable way for us to inhabit the Earth. As we begin this journey, we will see that modern, industrial grain based agriculture is incompatible will our ultimate survival on this planet. Only when we begin to think long term and include future generations into our plans will we be able to affect real, positive change.

So while planting biodiverse gardens with fruit and nut trees in and of itself is not the answer to all of the problems we face, it is a big part of the solution. The challenges we are up against are compounded by so many factors, but food is one of the underlying commonalities that ties everything together. When we begin to rethink how we grow our food and look to the past for examples, that is when we can truly move forward and begin the healing process of ourselves and our one planet. I leave you with one final thought, a favorite quote of mine that sums up our journey thus far. “Societies grow great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” It is not too late for us, lets do something epic and grow old together as one human culture! Peace and Cheers.
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Yes to Horticulture!

SUBHEAD: A conversation on our food security future comparing industrialized agriculture to horticulture.

By Juan Wilson on 19 July 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/07/yes-to-horticulture.html)


Image above: Community cooperative urban food garden. From (http://blogs.dctc.edu/dctc-news/2013/01/31/jeff-kleinboehl-recertified-as-mnla-cp/).

Comments on "No to Agriculture"(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/07/no-to-agriculture.html)

8:48 PM, July 18, 2013

If you notice, the Haber-Bosch process requires hydrogen, not methane. Methane, or natural gas, is currently used as a hydrogen source and as an energy source for compresson and heating. But any hydrogen source and energy source would do, solar, for instance for cracking water for its hydrogen and the for the energy for heating and compression. In fact, Haber initially used electrolysis for hydrogen production.

So, indeed, nitrogen fertilizers can be made without geologic hydrocarbons.

Question: If you do forsake any synthetic nitrogen fixing, where will your permaculture systems get their nitrogen from? With each harvest you'll remove nitrogen from your system where it will then become part of people and part waste (there is always food waste). 

Mitch

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9:19 AM, July 19, 2013

In response to "Hello Again"...

Aloha Mitch,

Glad we can have a thoughtful dialog without retreating into our own dogma.

One thing seems to be continually overlooked by techno=optimists, and that is we should not be burning so much stuff just to make life easier for ourselves.

In many ways we as human are one-trick-ponies. We burn stuff to get things done. Most animals have the good sense to be afraid of fire. We don't.

From a lighting bundle sticks, through burning a gallon of gas, to setting of a nuclear chain reaction - that's our solution to the problem at hand.

The idea of solving our problems by cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen so we can burn water to make fertilizer is about as bad an idea as desalinating the ocean to get water in order to grow wheat in Saudi Arabia.

It's inappropriate and unnecessary.

As far as where to get nitrogen from - how about the nitrogen fixing plants. Here in hanapepe Valley, on Kauai there are two trees in particular that are impossible to exterminate and are fast growing nitrogen fixers - haole koa (Leucaena leucocephala)and opiuma (Pithecellobium dulce).

We push back the opiuma (too weak with too many thorns) but encourage the older haole koa. We use them for climbing vegetables like chayote and yams.

We also use the haole koa as a 50% shade tree for understory plants that need protection from our bright sun, e.g cacao.

When we first moved here to our half acre in paradise our soil had few if any worms. It consisted of a lot of red clay and chunks of lava rock. I put about a ton of organic fertilizer over much of the yard and let whatever could get through occasional mowing survive.

Twelve years later I have soil and worms where ever I dig. I do not replenish the fertilizer.

When we grow from seed we do buy potting soil.  Otherwise to supplement the soil we have dried chicken poop from our flock of 14 free range chickens that we apply to plant starts with kitchen scrap compost. We also started a small worm farm and have a healthy bee box going as well.

We are trying to mix permaculture and food forest techniques that require little attention. We realize this is low on input as well as output.

So our fruit trees, and plants like cassava, ginger, taro, have no outside inputs but sun and water (in summer mostly from solar pump in shallow well).

For high output we have a 16' x 30' raised bed (16" deep) garden. The soil comes from a local nursery that calls the soil "50-50" and its $50 a cubic yard. They mix their own compost with equal amounts of shredded organic material from our local transfer station "slash pile".

The slash pile is made up of yard cuttings that are put through a chopper grinder (fueled by gas).  We bring all our cuttings that are too fibrous to quickly decompose into compost to the slash pile.

Our raised bed is quite productive. With our eggs (an occasional chicken), vegetable garden, food forest and fruit trees we hope to achieve 50% self sufficiency. That's the magic number in permaculture.

With gardening to reach 50% self sufficiency means that you either have too many avocados or none; too many mangos or none. As a result we are participating in a gift economy with some things that are very plentiful like papaya or bartering with things of greater wealth, like eggs.

Yes, there is always food waste. with too much fruit can either be turned to compost or gifted  away or given to the chickens.

We hope to reach a point of balance of inputs and outputs within our little Eden.

Juan Wilson
IB Publisher

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9:06 PM, July 18, 2013

Hello yet again;

Points 3 and 4) The barbed wire was only used as a literary device to show that the 4 farms acted independently before joining forces. It could have been stone walls (and very many times they are) or simply landmarkers in real life. But, nonetheless, you eschew efficiency for self sufficiency.

First, you do need a certain bare bottom efficiency just to be self sufficient, which, i take, means feeding themselves. But, then, the farms must feed others. So your efficiency must be great enough so that you feed X + yourselves, and animals, given the land area and the people used to grow that food.

In the criticism of the Green Revolution, it was admitted that said revolution did allow the population to triple. The corollary of that is hungry people got enough food to live their lives and procreate. So, what happens to those extra 4-5 billion people if we undo the Green Agriculture? A, closely related to the former question, implication of that admission in the context of, "The Not So Green Revolution", is that we shouldn't produce more food for hungry people lest they have children. And, that, is simply inhumane.

- Mitch

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In response to "Hello Yet Again"...

10:40 AM, July 19, 2013

Aloha Mitch,

As to barbed wire or stone walls… The boundaries of private property was a powerful invention of western industrialism. Draw a map of a place - then draw a boundary on the map that relates to stakes in the ground - then write a title to the land - then kick off the indigenous people, claiming they are trespassing.

It's worked pretty much everywhere it's been tried.  But this disregards the life of the land itself and the commons of human interest. How the man, the family, the tribe, the community live on the land is the real issue. What and how we keep and/or share what we harvest will have to be defined in a new economy.

Unfortunately, either by design or accident, we are facing an upcoming bottleneck through which I feel the majority of humans will not pass through.

By that I mean our numbers will go down.  What is sustainable? Many think it is  less than two billion. A world more like 19th century America than 20th century.

We have known of the problem of overpopulation for decades and have done little or nothing to ease the situation. Needless to say, the longer we delay the more people will suffer through ever more calamitous times.

Our delay is largely due to the "growth is good" model of economics that pervades industrial societies. The Chinese made a serious stab at the issue of population control but only in conjunction with moving people out of rural living arrangements to new big cities to work on assembly lines. As consumerism has pervaded the country they have eased back on the contols.

In short,  growth without end is not good… it is cancerous. Humanity either retreats in numbers or continues on its way with the pedal to the metal. The best we can hope for is that we take our foot odd the accelerator and coast to a stop.

Our fuel on the journey has been reduced to Soylent Yellow (the GMO corn/soybean diet based on a fossil fuel empire). Virtually are the commercial meat we eat is made of GMO cornmeal (pork, beef, poultry). Even our pet dogs and cats are made out of GMO cornmeal (just check ingredients on the kibble bag for yourself).

A large percentage of the average take-out meal comes from gmo high-fructose-corn-syrup. There is HFCS in the hotdog, the bun as well as the ketchup and soda.

The future of Soylent Yellow is loss of topsoil, immunity to pesticides, crop failure and increased global warming. A recipe for population collapse as soon as it is no longer profitable to big ag.

I don't want to decide who lives and who dies, but I want to live in a place that is alive itself. That does not need industrial input to survive. I realize that will be a place where I will have to work directly to feed myself; a place It will be hard and I will have to protect and defend land.

I encourage all to join that effort.

Juan Wilson
IB Publisher

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See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: No to Agriculture 7/15/13
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When agriculture stops working #2

SUBHEAD: Ten recommendations as well as what has been lost, what has been given, and what has been saved.

By Dan Allen on 13 March 2013 for Resilience.org -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-13/when-agriculture-stops-working-ten-recommendations-for-growing-food-in-the-anthropocene)


Image above: Feeding yourself from a happy garden, not a field. From (http://www.farmlove.org/bullocks-permaculture-homestead/bullocks-permaculture-homestead-317/).

This is the concluding part of a 2 Part essay.

VI. Ten Recommendations for Growing Food in the Anthropocene
Now, despite my best efforts to look into the crystal ball here, I fully expect there will be a lot about the future of human food acquisition that will surprise me…and perhaps even in a good way!  But in light of all the known troubles bearing down on us, I think it’s just plain suicidal to muddle on as-per-usual and hope it’ll all be OK.

…So we need to act.  …Now.  And I think there’s an awful lot we can do now – that we must do now – to give ourselves and the planet the best shot of coming out of this in one piece.  And I think that most of these things (aside from hastening the collapse of the industrial earth-destroying machine), involve the manner in which we get our food.

And please don’t wait around for BigAg Inc. (and its subsidiary, the US government) to start doing anything useful.  Because they won’t.  They have very clearly cast their policy vote for the mass murder-suicide of the industrial model of agruculture.  It’s up to us – you and me.  We need to do this ourselves.

…So towards the goal of fashioning a livable future in which we can enjoy both bodily and spiritual sustenance, here are my humble recommendations:

1. Plant perennials!
Perennials have several key advantages over annuals in our climate-challenged, soil-depleted, fossil-fuel-deprived, socially-upheaved future.  Perennials have more robust structural integrity, improved soil-holding/building ability, superior nutrient and water gathering efficiency, decreased annual labor input requirements, more efficient gathering of sunlight, longer annual period of active photosynthesis, and less reliance on precise rainfall and temperature patterns.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s coming, but it’s not gonna be pretty -- and I’m putting my money on perennials.

And there is a large selection of perennial food-producing perennials to choose from in just about any region of the US.  In central NJ, I’ve planted a large-and-growing selection of (1) nuts (Chinese chestnut, hybrid hazelnut, black walnut, pecan, heartnut, butternut, Carpathian walnut, shagbark hickory), (2) fruits (pear, apple, peach, pie cherry, persimmon, plum, blueberry, pawpaw, fig, elderberry, raspberry, blackberry, gooseberry, kiwi, grape), (3) perennial vegetables (asparagus, sunchoke, rhubarb, scorzonera, Chinese yam, skirret, nettle, horseradish), and (4) grasses (sheep & cows)

My first plantings are a good 13 years old at this point and I’m starting to have a feel for what works and what doesn’t in my soils and the current climate.  I don’t coddle them because I won’t be able to coddle them in the future.  I want to see what species/varieties can produce with minimal inputs in ‘tough times.’  For example I don’t spray, I add only compost amendments, and I do only minimal maintenance to ensure survival (plastic vole collars at base, deer-browse protection tubes when young).  I’ve found sweet cherries don’t work for me.  Non-hybrid plums don’t look good (although the jury’s still out on the hybrid plums).  Figs die back most winters (…so far).  But everything else looks good – and some of it looks great.  …Again, my money’s on the perennials.
But you need to plant them now – this Spring.  And next Spring.  …And every Spring after that until you can no longer lift a spade.  We’ve got an awful lot of roots to put down. 
And for those who poo-poo perennials because they don’t feel the yields can match annuals, I suggest they try a few years of growing annuals in the manner we will be growing them shortly – only manure fertilizers, no sprays, no tractors for annual soil preparation or cultivating, open pollinated seeds, minimal watering.  …Because, as they say, you gotta compare apples to apples.  …And so how do the yields look now?  Not quite as much, huh?  Especially with all that wacky weather.  Hmmm…
And as Mark Shepard discusses in his unbelievably-excellent new book, Restoration Agriculture (2013), both the nutrient profiles and yields of perennials show that perennials can provide both the calories and nutrition we currently get from annuals.
…And it’s not like we have a choice anyway.  As the kids say, annuals are so…so Holocene.    

2. Plant a polyculture of perennials!
The weather in any given growing season can be perfect for one plant species and a disaster for another.  So to hedge our bets against increasingly wacky weather – as well as the increasingly-severe pest outbreaks, economic convulsions, and social upheavals that we can expect – we need to plant a rich selection of perennial food crops on our farms and homesteads.

But more than just planting a diversity of perennials, we’ll need to plant them together, in a ‘polyculture.’  Why?  Several reasons: (1) First, a polyculture decreases the severity of pest outbreaks due to lower density of each plant species and richer ecosystem to foster predators to those pests. (2) Secondly, it increases nutrient and water uptake efficiency since different plant species utilize a different suite of nutrients and occupy different regions of the soil profile. (3) And thirdly, it provides a richer, more complexly-structured ecosystem to nurture all the unappreciated heroes of our world – the fungi, the soil organisms, the insects, the birds, the amphibians and reptiles, the mammals.

As a general rule, mimic the structure of a diverse natural ecosystem with your food crops and all the former ecosystem functions of the forest return. Like magic. And, exactly opposite to the industrial orthodoxy, we don’t thrive unless everything else thrives. So we need to quit trying to exterminate everything else and create conditions where they and we thrive. Period. Everything else is a recipe for suicide.

And I should note here that these benefits of perennial polyculture won’t just be ‘nice things to have’ in the very challenging years ahead, they will be damn near essential. To put it bluntly, we’ll have a hell of a time growing anything unless our future food systems are structured around the resilient framework of fully-functioning ecosystems. It’s literally the only shot we have.

OK, so perennial polyculture is essential. But what will such a modern agricultural heresy look like? Well, just pick up a copy of Mark Shepard’s Restoration Ecology and look at all the pretty pictures! Shepard has created a working 100+ acre farm in Wisconsin based on a polyculture of perennial crops, combined with a slew of cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys – all set in the middle of a sea of soon-to-be-defunct corn-&-bean industrial monocultures on surrounding farms.

One of the versions of perennial polyculture Shepard describes features one row of hybrid chestnuts with a shade-tolerant gooseberry understory, and then a neighboring row of apple trees with a hybrid hazelnut and raspberry understory. This double row pattern then repeats. Oh yea… grape vines are trellised on each tree. And oh yea… cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys are grazed in a controlled manner on the grasses, herbs, and clovers between the rows. This configuration (one of countless possibilities) not only gives a bountiful yield of carbohydrates, oils, proteins, and nutrients, but it does so in a way that can persist (climate-destabilization-willing) essentially forever. It builds soil, not wastes it. It fosters a diversity and abundance of ecosystem-sustaining life, not destroys it. It provides bodily and spiritual fulfillment to farmers, not degradation. It is the healing of the world, not its destruction.

Of course, such a perennial polyculture agriculture goes by another name as well: permaculture. Shepard is a trained permaculture designer (see Mollison, 1988) and devoted follower of the permaculture ethics and principles (see Holmgren, 2002), which are demonstrated on many other enlightened farms as well. See, for example, these two videos: http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1470432-7-food-forests-in-7-minutes and http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1527704-kramerterhof-a-tour-of-sepp-holzer-s.
3. Breed your own perennial varieties!
OK, let’s say you have a fantastic permaculture farm set up -- the diversity is humming, the land is healing, the plants are producing, you’re spreading the word and teaching others how to do it…and then disaster after disaster hits.  Wacky weather on top of wacky weather.  A blight sweeps through your peach trees, killing them all.  Several species of nuts wilt and die mid-season from…well, who knows?!  …Now what?

A key feature of perennial polyculture is the creation of a self-sustaining, food-producing ecosystem that works for your soils and your climate.  …But what if the climate changes?  Well, we better have not only a wide diversity of perennial crops species (in case some blink out), but a good bit of genetic diversity within each species.  With this genetic diversity, some extreme shift in the local climate or pest/disease outbreak is unlikely to kill all of any one crop – giving you an opportunity to expand with the genetics of the varieties that made it through.

And to get this genetic diversity we’re all going to need to become seat-of-the-pants, Johnny-Appleseed-type breeders and start planting a lot of seedling fruits and nuts – in addition to the standard grafted varieties that produce well under current conditions.

I currently have between two and a dozen grafted varieties of each of my fruit/nut species.  And as I said previously, most of them are starting to produce on the spectrum between good and great.  But I don’t think my current genetic diversity is resilient enough to handle what’s coming.  So I’m going to be planting a lot of seedling fruit and nuts this Spring from seed I saved from last fall and seed that I’ve purchased.  And I’ll plant more the following year, and more the…etc.

I’ve already started this strategy with Chinese chestnut, of which I have hundreds of seedling trees -- hundreds of different genetic talents -- in various stages of growth.  I’m about to become a latter-day Danny Appleseed by doing the same thing with apples, pears, peaches, persimmon, pie cherries, and more this Spring.

I even sent away to the NY State Agricultural Experiment Station (Geneva, NY) for a bunch of apple seeds from their Kazakhstan wild apple orchard (Malus sieversii -- See Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire, as well as http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/breaking-ground-the-call-of-the-wild-apple/.)  I realize that a lot of these seedling trees won’t be too useful from the start.  …But they very well may become useful as the climate changes and things get weird.  Hey, it’s not that hard to do, and it just might be the difference between apples or no apples a few decades from now. 

So exactly how do we become plant breeders?  Do we need to shuffle back to the universities and get masters degrees in botany and genetics?  Umm…No.  As Mark Shepard passionately advises in Restoration Agriculture:

“Plant way too many food-producing trees and shrubs in the early years.  …Continue to remove the ones that are susceptible to diseases and that are attacked by pests and continue to plant new seedlings and varieties year after year after year.  Let the dynamics of population ecology kick in and let pest and disease populations stabilize.  A deeply diverse system will provide habitat for predatory insects, birds, reptiles and amphibians.  If a plant wants to die, let it!  We’re not interested in the ones that get diseases.  We are not interested in the ones that are unproductive.  We are not interested in the ones that require tons of specialty fertilizers manufactured in gleaming factories thousands of miles away.  We’re interested in the ones that live.  …We want the ones that are pest- and disease-resistant and need very little care.  If a plant wants to live and thrive and reproduce, we will harvest its seeds, its fruit, its leaves or other edible, medicinal or otherwise marketable products.  This is the essence of the permaculture principle of working with nature instead of fighting against it.  Figure out what is working effortlessly well in perennial polyculture systems and run with it.” (Restoration Agriculture, p. 249)
That excellent advice and some dirt under your fingernails (i.e. practice and experience) are all you need to become a plant breeder.  So let’s do it.

I would just add that we might not want to be too picky about selecting for great production from these new perennial varieties.  There’s just so much trouble coming down the pike and some of the lesser-producing varieties might be the only ones to make it through.  …And I’d also add that due to the velocity of the changes we’ll be facing, this breeding will necessarily be an ongoing process, done year after year after year – like evolution on steroids, so to speak.  …Which we’ll certainly need to match a climate on steroids.

4. Include animals!
One of the first things you learn in ecology is that plants capture energy from the sun, and that only about 10% of that energy is available to the herbivores (say, cows & sheep).  But also only about 10% of the energy embodied in the herbivores is available to those who eat them (say, humans).  So it follows that by eating animals who eat plants (and getting just 1% of the initial sunlight energy), we’re wasting an awful lot of energy/resources that would otherwise be available for humans and other species if just ate the plants directly.  So, the thinking goes, to conserve ever-scarcer resources and leave room for other species, we should just eat plants.

But in light of approaching climate/collapse troubles, I think there are two main arguments for keeping (and eating) animals.  One of the arguments is that it just doesn’t seem possible to grow plants in a low-input, sustainable manner without animals.  There’s just something about animal manure that facilitates nutrient cycling.  Nature farms with animal manure, and, so it seems, should we.  Time after time you hear farmers say this: “Well, I don’t use animals on my farm – except for manure that I get from a nearby cow/horse/sheep/goat/pig/chicken/turkey farm.”  And if it’s not manure from one of those species, its human manure.  Witness pre-industrial Japan and China described in F.H. King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries.

The other argument is that farm animals, especially the ones who eat food wastes and grasses that we can’t, can not only fit snugly into our little perennial polyculture ecosystems, but also represent a hedge against disaster.  Because what do you do with your prize chestnut trees if fighting breaks out locally and you’re forced to relocate for a few months or years?  You leave them and their life-sustaining nutrition behind.  But what do you do with your sheep?  You bring them…and eat them.  And what do you do if your perennial polyculture suffers from the disaster of disasters -- a near complete crop failure?  Well, you eat your animals and you forage for wild foods.  (More on honing our foraging skills coming up!) 

So basically, (1) we need animal manure to grow our perennial polycultures, and (2) animals, when managed with ecological sensitivity, can be a security blanket against famine under certain disastrous situations.  We certainly need to start putting our human manure back on the land (See Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook), but I think that, for resilience sake, we also need to incorporate animals into our perennial polyculture farms.

I currently graze sheep in my young food-forest-to-be, but there many more-developed examples of ecologically-sound animal husbandry out there.  One is (surprise!) at Mark Shepard’s Wisconsin farm.  In Restoration Agriculture, he describes using pigs to clean up both the early fruit drop and the damaged fruit in the fields at harvest time.  He just lets the pigs out in the food forests/savannahs at appropriate times and they do the rest – which has the added benefit of breaking many of the pest cycles that bother the fruit trees.  He also uses cows to mow the grass between the woody-crop rows, dropping piles of soil-enriching manure as they go.

 And here’s an excellent video from Sepp Holzer’s farm in Switzerland showing a similarly mutualistic relationship of cows and food trees: http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1527704-kramerterhof-a-tour-of-sepp-holzer-s.

5. Manage the rain water!
The climate disruption I fear the most is the armada of crippling droughts that are on the way as summer temperatures rise and high pressure systems get ‘stuck’ over us for months at a time with the ever-more-sluggish jet stream.  (See my essay, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-12-10/extirpation-nation-how-much-of-the-us-will-be-habitable-in-50-years and the references therein.)  And to compound this, the rain that we do get is expected to come in ever-more-intense bursts, most of which will merely sheet right off the land and into the streams and rivers.

So what’s required of us agriculturally is this: to keep as much of this precious rainwater on our farms as possible.  Planting multi-storied, perennial polyculture ecosystems will certainly help, as the increased soil organic matter and rain-drop-slowing leaf structures will allow more rain to sink into the soil.  But we’ll also need to employ other clever strategies to get the water into the soil and to spread it out around the farm.

Mark Shepard (in Restoration Agriculture) gives an enthusiastic plug to P.A. Yoemans’ ideas from Water for Every Farm: namely, (1) using ‘collector swales’ to direct runoff water to numerous ‘pocket ponds’ around the farm, and (2) using mini-berms and ‘spreader swales’ to redirect water from higher-elevation valleys to lower-elevation ridges.

Shepard swears by these hydrology practices, and says they not only keep water on the farm, but serve to build soil as well.  There is some soil movement and tractor work required (subsoiler or ‘keyline plow’, and earth-mover for pond construction), but the benefits may indeed be worth it while we still have access to fossil fuels.  In absence of tractors, we’ll need a lot of able-bodied people with shovels to do the same work.  …But hey, what else are we gonna do when there’s no more TV and computers – stare at the wall?

…No, we’ll throw a ‘pocket pond’ party!

A substantial side-benefit to keeping a lot more water on the farms is some relief from the devastating floods that are already increasing and likely to skyrocket with increased climate destabilization.  In addition, we’ll have tons of food-producing ponds, a lot more sustained flow in streams and rivers, and a plethora of springs popping up in places only our great, great, great grandparent’s generation knew about.  …Sounds like a good deal.

6. Process, preserve, add value, & store on-site!
In addition to the epic challenges of just growing our food within an evil-funhouse climate and collapsing civilization, we’re going to need to drastically change the way we handle this food on our farms.  Namely, we’ll need to become skilled at processing, preserving, adding value, and storing multi-year quantities of this food on our increasingly-stressed and buffeted farms and homesteads.

The great majority of food produced by today’s industrial farms leaves the fields directly in fossil-fuel powered 18-wheelers, headed many miles away to fossil-fueled processing plants, and is then distributed by more fossil-fueled trucks to fossil-fueled box stores and supermarkets, to eventually be consumed in fossil-fueled homes or feed lots.  …This is an arrangement that obviously has no future.
Absent of fossil fuel and its dependent infrastructures, we’ll need to transform a majority of the food we grow into more stable forms right here on our farms and homesteads.

This will not be too challenging for a number of perennial polyculture nut crops (chestnuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, etc.) which store well with minimal processing, but a lot of our other crops will require more effort.  Our farms will thus need to be skilled at drying, fermenting, smoking, canning, salting, root-cellaring and any other preservation strategies we can dream up.  (See Katz and Bubel references above, among many others.)

There is, of course, a tremendous up-side to all this: turning our ecologically-rich farms into bustling compounds populated by variously-skilled artisans, all adding value and shelf-life to a wide diversity of nutritious foods.

Contrast that with today’s ‘farms’, populated sparsely by lonely humans roving immense, ecologically-devastated, bare-dirt landscapes in hulking metallic shells, transforming fossil fuels and soil into a handful of nutrient-deprived industrial-food raw materials.  (Gaia shudders)
And don’t forget that all this wonderful processing and preserving will be occurring within the context of a destabilizing climate and collapsing civilization.

With the resulting food insecurity, we’ll need to discipline ourselves into storing at least several year’s worth of our community’s food at any given time.  Maintaining this discipline will obviously be challenging while our communities are buffeted left and right, up and down -- but I suspect that if we don’t take this storage imperative seriously, we simply won’t be communities very long.  …Just sayin’.  Moving forward, we need to keep reminding ourselves that these will not be ‘normal’ times.

7. Don’t forget annuals!  
Given all the heartbreaking, 10,000-year ravages of annuals-based agriculture, it’s tempting to try to sweep these annual crops into the erosion gullies of history as fast as possible.  And maybe we should.  …But maybe we can’t.  Because now and then I get this gnawing fear in my gut that all my perennial plantings may be for naught.

For one thing, I fear that these vicious droughts just over the climate-destabilization horizon may come too often and too severe to support trees.  Biomes historically wracked by periodic crippling droughts (and the associated fires) are typically largely treeless – the grassy steppes, prairies, and tree-sparse savannahs where the large migratory ruminants roam.  I fear this may be one of the futures for my central-NJ community and many other places around the US.  (See the projected drought maps in http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-12-10/extirpation-nation-how-much-of-the-us-will-be-habitable-in-50-years.)

If such a dire scenario comes to pass, we may need to hedge our bets as much as possible with a wide diversity of annual crops.  Obviously no food crops will thrive in such a difficult and changeable climate, but some of the hardier or quick-growing annuals may at least give us something.  Because, of course, that’s what annuals are adapted to – areas of disturbance where the plants get just a quick shot at glory.  And perhaps these little windows of ‘glory’ may help some of us sneak through the coming bottlenecks.  …So that’s why I suppose I’m not giving up my little 30+-species annual veggie/grain garden until they pry it from my hot, desiccated fingers.  (See http://www.misty-acres-farm.com/)

A second possibly-crucial attribute of annuals is their ability to travel with us if we get uprooted by the coming climate/collapse/nuclear craziness – much like our potentially-mobile farm
animals.  A pocketful of seeds on a long hard refugee’s journey may just be the difference between life and death in a new, potentially-habitable land.  Which, of course, suggests we keep a robust supply of annual seeds (along with and even more robust supply of perennial ones!) in an accessible place.  Just in case.

Of course, part of me cringes shamefully for my advocacy of even small-scale annuals, in light of the devastation annual agriculture has wreaked on this planet.  …But if it’s a choice between my family’s life and a future generations’ environmental depredations, I suppose I’ll choose as humans have always chosen: I’ll try to keep us alive.  …You can take the caveman out of the cave, but you can’t…  Sigh.

In any case, check out the books by Carol Deppe and Janisse Ray in the references.  …But remember, we really should be concentrating most of our efforts on ways to get perennials into a nature-mimicking, resilient polyculture.  So (ominous voice)…be forewarned.  Annuals are quite seductive, as 500 generations of your ecosystem-destroying ancestors can attest.

8. Become a wild-plant gatherer!
As Samuel Thayer writes in his wonderful book, The Forager’s Harvest, “Foraging is the oldest occupation of humankind.  For most of our history we knew no other way of living.  We are built, both mentally and physically, to be hunters and gatherers.  Somewhere inside of us we are all foragers, no matter how much we have lost touch with that aspect of our nature.”

…Can’t argue with that.  You also can’t argue with his next statement, which is this: “Today, if cut off from purchased supplies, most of us would starve in the midst of plenty.”  Which brings us back to my main theme here: that if agriculture may well abandon us in the coming decades, we should probably hedge our bets and consider some other ways to feed ourselves – at least as much as that’ll be possible.

And thus recovering the lost arts of foraging/gathering wild plants becomes one of our current tasks at hand.  This is, of course, a scary proposition for most Americans, weaned on plastic-wrapped food-type-substances and little acquainted not only with edible wild plants, but with any plants.  Most of my high-school ‘AP Chemistry’ students (super-bright, 17 & 18 year-old suburbanites -- biological adults!) cannot even identify the most common local trees and birds, much less the scoffed-at ‘weeds’ – most of which, ironically, are perfectly edible and may very well be needed to keep their children alive.

So how do we go about re-learning the ways of our hunter-gatherer ancestors?  Well, I suggest first some basic ecological and botanical knowledge.  In days gone by, this was obtained through osmosis by lives immersed in nature from birth.  In this disconnected era where children have been increasingly raised within electromagnetic prisons, such knowledge will need to come from books or mentors.  So find one...or two…or twenty.  Soon.  Good mentors are better and faster than good books – but books are available 24/7.  Use both.

Secondly, we need to get out in the yards, fields, woods, and ‘waste areas’ that surround our everyday lives and start looking at what’s there – preferably accompanied by someone who already knows, and maybe a few good books (ex: Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide, The Sibley’s Guide to Trees, Weeds of the Northeast, etc.)

Thirdly, (and only after thoroughly mastering the first two!) we need to start identifying and experimenting with the edible, nutritious plants that surround us.  This can, of course, be dangerous if done incautiously – for example, there’s a huge stand of poison hemlock (sometimes confused for the edible wild carrot) lining the stream out behind my high-school.

Be careful.  Get some good, knowledgeable mentors.  And get some good books – I very highly recommend Samuel Thayer’s wild edibles books (see references).  Euell Gibbon’s books from the 1960’s are good as well.  (Thayer warns that apparently many wild-edibles books are written by wild-food ‘semi-posers’ at the behest of market-savvy publishers.  He suggests we avoid those.)

Gathering the plants we’ll need for post-industrial medicines will also be a valuable skill – one which also requires reams of largely forgotten ecological knowledge.  Again, find some mentors.  Find some good books.

9. Become a tracker/hunter!
I think it’s safe to say that most Americans at this point are utterly dumbstruck once they step off the sidewalk onto anything other than a lawn, a street, or a store.  Plop the majority of Americans into the middle of even a modestly-sized woodlot and I think you’d get a range of emotions from utter boredom to sheer terror.  This is, of course, a rather odd situation for a species completely at home in such an environment only very recently.

…And it’s also, of course, a rather deadly situation moving forward.  Because, deciphering the biophysical tea leaves here, it’s becoming more and more likely that we’ll need to both read and interact with our fellow critters if we want to eat in the challenging times to come.  And since most Americans -- even an awful lot of the remaining industrial ‘hunters’/target-shooters -- don’t know all that much about tracking and hunting, it means we’ll need to learn.

Now, I certainly wouldn’t call myself a skilled tracker or hunter, but I was deeply affected by the tracking and bird-language books of Tom Brown, Jon Young, and Paul Rezendes.  Since reading them, I’ve tried to think and act ‘like a scout’ as much as possible, wherever I am – slowing down, paying attention, listening, looking, being conscious of how I am being perceived by the surrounding organisms, trying to interpret their messages.

This practice, of course, is diametrically opposed to the industrial directive of staying snugly inside your own mind (or more preferably, the mind of your chosen electronic device) and barreling hurriedly through a sea of inanimate objects to your next appointment.  As such, it takes some practice – a lot of practice if you’ve been industrially indoctrinated since birth.

So we need to practice.  I recommend the tracking books above.  And also track down (ha ha) the authors’ thousands of former students scattered across the US for mentors in your area.  There are other resources for low-tech hunting and trapping strategies, as well as methods to process and preserve game.  I’m even less skilled at those than tracking itself, so you’re on your own there.  But nonetheless, these are skill we’ll need.  …So let’s learn them.

10. Start now!
I’m under no delusions that we’re going to make it out of this unholy hole (ha ha) we’ve dug ourselves into.  So much depends on whether industrial civilization has the good manners to collapse soon and rapidly – thus sparing us the killing blow of unendurable climate destabilization.

…But since it’s shown nothing but really bad manners so far, I’m not holding my breath.
But what I am doing is the only thing I can do: start making preparations that make sense, on the off chance that we get lucky.  These preparations (all the recommendations I’ve described above) are likely much easier started now than when the economic wheels really come off -- which may be (hopefully, for the climate’s sake and our children’s sake) any day now.

So I’m doing what I can, while I can.  And when circumstances change, I’ll keep doing what I can, while I can.  And then at some point I’ll die, and maybe the world will be a better place for my efforts – a happier, more diverse, greener, funnier, prettier, kinder, more song-filled place.  …That’s what I’m hoping for.  That’s what I’m working for.

…Well, that was a long essay.  But it’s warming up here, and I think it’s time for me to go plant some trees.

So take care.
And good luck.
No guarantees, but all we can do is our best.
So let’s do it.

VII. Three Lists: What Has Been Lost, What Has Been Given, and What Has Been Saved

“Once I spoke the language of the flowers… / How did it go? / How did it go?” – Shel Silverstein

I. 
There is a list.
A dreadful list.
A list that will break your damn heart in half if you have the courage to look at it.
A list that will sap your strength.
It is a list so numbingly large
That nobody knows more than a tiny fraction of it.
A list that just keeps on growing.
Faster and faster and faster and faster.
So fast that nobody could ever keep up.
-- It is a list of things that have been lost.
Of things that have been broken, burnt, wasted, ruined, disappeared.
Of things abused, eroded, corrupted, forgotten, sacrificed, discarded.
Of things disfigured, suffocated, poisoned, fucked up, shattered, and killed.
Things lost,
Lost by a culture that would not acknowledge limits,
That would not acknowledge debts, dependencies, or connections.
A thankless culture.
A culture that arrogantly and violently refused to see, hear, feel, touch, or taste
The world that gave birth to it just yesterday.
-- It is a list that will sap your strength.
-- It is a list that will break your damn heart.

II.
But there is also a second list.
A breathtakingly beautiful list.
A list that will heal your heart if you have the sense to look at it.
It is a list that has been getting smaller, smaller, smaller every year.
But a list still so gloriously large
That nobody knows more than a tiny fraction of it.
-- It is a list of things that have been given.
Of things that grow, run, swim, eat, blow, wiggle, rustle, clack, flow, slide, and laugh.
Of things that fly, cuddle, fight, howl, slither, hunt, hide, drift, ooze, sleep, and love.
Of things that are strong, deep, soft, tiny, smooth, hot, playful, slow, and hungry.
Of things that are green, brown, blue, thorny, large, dry, cold, fragile, wet, and fast.
Things given,
Given now to us, free
By a world that only asks us to see, hear, feel, touch, and taste them.
By a world that only asks us to take membership among that list.
A world that gave birth to us all, before time began.
-- It is a list that will heal your heart.

III.
And there is a third list.
A much smaller list,
But a list that will give you strength if you have the wisdom
To look for it, to find it, to learn it, to live it.
It is a list dangerously small
Because so much has been forgotten.
And because nobody anymore knows more than a tiny fraction of it.
And it is a list that is still shrinking.
Faster and faster and faster.
Until it is almost gone.
But it is not gone.
-- It is a list of things that have been saved.
Of things that have been mended, nurtured, passed down, remembered
Of things taken care of, tended, loved, watched over
Of ways of talking, ways of knowing, ways of seeing, ways of feeling, and ways of loving
Of customs, rituals, practices, seeds, breeds, tools, skills, and prayers.
Things saved.
It is a list that teaches us how to belong to this world.
A list that teaches us how to live in this world without destroying it.
A list that teaches us how to live with each other without destroying ourselves.
Passed down from cultures that celebrated limits, that worshipped them.
Thankful cultures.
Cultures that awoke each morning to see, hear, feel, touch, or taste
The world that gave birth to them.
A world that is now slipping away from us.
A world that will slip away from us if we don’t hold onto it
With all the strength we can summon
In our hearts, in our minds, and in our bodies.
It is a list that will give you this strength.

IV.
So in this time of catastrophe,
Perhaps we should turn to these lists.
And teach our children from them.
So that we may live.

References
Here are some key resources to both back up the stuff I’m going to talk about and help people move ahead with the good work we need to do.
A. Climate

• Joe Romm:  http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/14/1009121/science-of-global-warming-impacts-guide/
• http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/21/1278861/climate-story-of-the-year-extreme-weather-from-superstorms-to-drought-emerges-as-political-scientific-gamechanger/
• http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/26/1219981/new-scientist-7-reasons-climate-change-is-even-worse-than-we-thought/
• James Hansen:  http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/, and http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/
• Guy McPherson: http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/; http://guymcpherson.com/2012/11/speaking-in-louisville-and-a-couple-essays/   

B. Collapse

• Richard Heinberg:  The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (2011); plus the three-part 2012 update, http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-06-11/end-growth-update-neither-borrower-nor-lender-be
• Chris Martenson:  The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment (2011); http://www.peakprosperity.com/
• David Korowicz:  http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Trade-Off1.pdf (2012), http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-05-27/world-limits-growth (2011), http://www.theoildrum.com/files/Tipping%20Point.pdf (2010), and http://www.feasta.org/2009/06/11/david-korowicz-complexity-economy-civilisation-collapse/ (2009 video).

C. Agriculture

• Mark Shepard:  Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers (2013)  …VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
• Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmeier: Edible Forest Gardens (2005)
• Bill Mollison: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (1988)
• David Holmgren: Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002)
• Permaculture videos: http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1470432-7-food-forests-in-7-minutes and http://www.resilience.org/resource-detail/1527704-kramerterhof-a-tour-of-sepp-holzer-s
• Eric Toensmeier: Perennial Vegetables (2007)
• Joseph Jenkins:  The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure (2005)
• P.A. Yeomans:  Water For Every Farm: Yeoman’s Keyline Plan (2008)
• Janisse Ray:  The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (2012)
• Carol Deppe:  The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times (2010)
• Sandor Katz: The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World (2012)
• Mike & Nancy Bubel:  Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables (1991)

D. Hunting and Gathering

• Samuel Thayer:  Natures Garden: A guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Wild Plants (2010); The Forager’s Harvest: A guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Wild Plants (2006)
• Richo Cech:  Making Plant Medicine (2000)
• Jon Young:  Animal Tracking Basics (2007); What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World (2012)
• Paul Rezendes: Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign (1999)
• Tom Brown: Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival (1987); Grandfather: A Native American’s Lifelong Search for Truth and Harmony with Nature (2001)

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: When agriculture stops working #1 3/13/12.

No Gaurantees

SUBHEAD: Being a forager or horticulturalist is not a promise we humans won't drive our environment into extinction - but it better than what we're doing.

By Vera Bravado on 22 February 2013 for Leaving Babylon -
(http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/no-guarantees/)


Image above: Koru rocks in Maori landscape in the Hamilton Gardens, Hamilton, New Zealand.From (http://www.flickriver.com/photos/jayveeare/5332053003/).

Our human forebears everywhere did not just passively gather food and basketry materials but actively tended the plant and animal populations on which they relied. There was no clear-cut distinctions between hunter-gatherers and the more “advanced” agricultural peoples of the ancient world. Moreover, California Indians had likely completed the initial steps in the long process of domesticating wild species…
– Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild

In Agriculture: villain or boon companion, I argued that we sapiens have been cultivators since time immemorial, that a combination of foraging and cultivation is a sensible, durable way of life that has served us well, and that the “origin of agriculture” really is the intensification of cultivation that becomes visible in the archeological record.

I have since been stymied in my quest for clearer understanding by the ongoing insistence of some folks to paint agricultural cultivation into a corner as a disastrous turn for humans and the root of our present troubles. They point to foraging and horticulture as modes of food production that avoid the damage agriculture has brought about. I wanted to test this claim.

It became quickly apparent to me that one does not need agriculture to intensify and produce an increasing surplus. For example, the rich salmon-and-candlefish-based economy of the Kwakiutl provided plenty of surplus to support elites and even to motivate slavery. Foragers are said to live in harmony with their environment, to keep their populations low and their hierarchies flat (if any). Unfortunately, it ain’t necessarily so.

There are compelling data showing that the Australian aborigines wreaked continent-wide devastation with their use of fire on a highly vulnerable landscape, degrading the vegetation, causing massive runoff and loss of soil during monsoons, and eventually precipitating a change in climate for the worse.

While in North America the native tribes may have had but little to do with megafauna extinction, not so in Australia. The human-precipitated change of vegetation deprived the largest and most specialized browsers of adequate food, and they began to disappear not long after the arrival of humans, some 45,000 years ago, along with their marsupial predators. That should hardly be surprising, as the same story repeated many millennia later with the colonization of Far Oceania.

For example, in New Zealand. the South Island Maori, former horticulturists who returned to foraging as more suited to that environment, slaughtered the moas and other vulnerable creatures in an orgy of gluttony, only to turn on each other when protein ran low. The populations of both aborigines and Maori fluctuated according to food availability. Some of the tribes lived in hierarchical societies.

It has also been claimed that horticulturists for the most part remain egalitarian and lack despots, armies, and centralized control hierarchies, and have built-in constraints against large populations and the hoarding of surplus. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been, indeed, some horticulturists who remained egalitarian, chose to limit their population when it was getting out of hand, and whose gardens and edible forests leave the soil and ecosystem in a good shape. The small island of Tikopia comes to mind.

But they seem no more common than those horticulturists (such as Easter Islanders and many others) who pillaged their new island home, wiping out much of the native flora and fauna, permanently degrading the living environment. The horticulturists who settled Far Oceania were generally rigidly ranked peoples whose chiefs extracted a goodly portion of the harvest, waged wars on neighbors, built fancy tombs and megaliths, and occasionally came close to a state formation. The puzzle of intensification cannot be sidestepped by a reference to a golden age of horticulture.

Still, it bears stressing that many — perhaps most? — ancient forager/cultivator societies coexisted very well with their landbase.

For example, the Moriori, cousins of the Maori, also switched to settled foraging on Chatham Islands, and were such careful stewards of their environment that seal colonies flourished within a stone’s throw from their villages. They lived notably egalitarian lives and carefully controlled their population. Until they were wiped out by the Maori, they were an impressive example of cool temperate region people living in close symbiosis with their ecosystem.

The illuminating and well-researched book Tending the Wild documents various Indian tribes who were also, by and large, careful stewards of their coastal California homelands. “They were able to harvest the foods and basketry and construction materials they needed each year while conserving — and sometimes increasing — the plant populations from which these came. The rich knowledge of how nature works and how to judiciously harvest and steward its plants and animals without destroying them was hard-earned; it was the product of keen observation, patience, experimentation, and long-term relationships with plants and animals.”

Living among a similarly abundant natural environment as the Kwakiutl further north, they did not succumb to ongoing intensification, and continued to share any accumulated seasonal surpluses. Why did Kwakiutl intensify, while their close neighbors to the south, the Coastal Yurok, did not?

I conclude that neither the foraging nor horticultural modes of food production are by themselves a guarantee against ongoing intensification and the eventual damage it brings.

There is a streak of persistent idealization of the forager and simple horticulturist among primitivists and other uncivilization-minded people. Slavery might be reframed as “captivity,” environmental damage rationalized, potlatches celebrated as evidence for gift-economies rather than economic warfare, and discussion shut off. Surely it’s not necessary to ostracize people who point out the facts on the ground, and a need for a rethink?

After all, egalitarian forager/cultivators do show us that this particular mode of existence — so successful and durable during most of our species’ history — functioned mostly within the ‘Law of limits’ that allows ecosystems to thrive.



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