Permanent Agriculture:  Sustaining Future Generations

With the goal of sustaining future generations, our currently unsustainable agriculture systems will be forced to become permanent agricultural systems that build soil fertility while meeting people's real needs.  The question remains:  "Will we build healthy soil before we have to or will we as a culture continue to create unnecessary stress by ignoring our responsibilities to ourselves and future generations?"

Permanent agriculture or natural farming bypasses the health dangers and expense of chemical products and encourages resource use within the bioregion. By meeting human needs regionally, permanent agriculture also decentralizes regions into peer-supported responsible management.  

We, by active choice, are opening to healthier lives that benefit both ourselves AND nature.  This very real effort, individual by individual, is the force that will move us beyond sustaining to becoming a thriving culture.   Victory gardens mean gardening everywhere possible and not just annuals.  Using empty city lots, containers, and rooftops, victory is planting fungi, fruits, and nuts along property borders and hedges and becoming an urban guerilla gardener.  To survive peak oil and the struggles of profit-seekers to maintain global economic stronghold, we can support each other in meeting our basic needs regionally.  We do not all have to be farmers, but we all need to grow soil and ensure our food locally while bringing our economic sphere regional.

By design, permanent agriculture systems are both humane and doable.  With the ethics and principles of permaculture, we save time, space, and money by creating functional relationships as designed edges.

Through observation and experience

• Bill Mollison learned from the forests, animals, and his multi-functional gardens, hence we have permaculture.

• Masanobu Fukuoka learned from his fields, animals and orchard gardens, and thus we have natural farming.

Designing and implementing permaculture techniques and strategies in our landscapes creates win-win situations for ourselves and all inhabitants of the earth. As we are informed by observation, implementation and feedback, we steward mutually-beneficial relationships for our land, gardens and infrastructure systems. Learning from experience, we absorb other experiential wisdoms and are nourished as life-long learners.

• Adam and Sue Turtle have learned that "Growing bamboos can contribute to the desperately needed repair of vital ecological services.  As a commercial crop, bamboo has manifold agro-industrial advantages and desirable sociopolitical virtues, and all this while providing a soothing and evergreen beauty.  If bamboos had no directly harvestable aspect, they would still be worth planting extensively if only for their ecoservices.  Fortunately we get both.  If our often stated desire for healing the Earth is to be validated, if we choose to give more than mere lip service to our avowed goal of sustainability...we can no longer afford to ignore the fits and advantages offered by the bamboos.  We need every ally we can find." 

Quoting further from Adam and Sue Turtle's article, Earth Healing with Bamboo -- Ecoservices, Bioremediation, Agroforestry: 

"The essential and salient fact is that bamboos can be used in any manner that tree wood can plus a number of additional applications utilizing its unique structure.  Bamboos can do this while performing needed ecological services and with an annual yield (after establishment) on a short-rotation cycle of from one to five years depending on end use.  From fuel to food to fiber, from re-bar substitution to dimension lumbar (composite) to houses, bamboo can save forests and farms.  It can shrink our ecological footprint, ameliorate the impact of our burgeoning organic waste stream, including that from C.A.F.O's (Confined Animal Feed Operations), and raise the water table while conserving and even quantitatively building new soil.  Bamboo can do all this as it calms our spirits and improves  rural economics.  Perhaps bamboo could even improve national economies.  Certainly, its many virtues are worth considering."

As life-long learners, we are given the opportunity to be designers and implementers of sustainable patterns in our inner landscapes. Through the honoring of life as process, all mistakes become feedback.  Success and mistakes inform our journey to more life-sustaining, nourishing habits.  We are process and there is only the now.  We and nature are in the process of appropriately using raw materials in integrated relationships of flow and function to create abundance. 

Humans also provide the raw materials known as feelings and needs.  How we are received in this world, how we are accepted and honored as unique contributors to family and community, reflects how we feel about ourselves, and our lives show how we compensate for needs unmet. 

• Stuart Hill, while at McGill University, Canada, correlated the need for control of what is natural with unmet emotional needs.  Hence, the culture we have today represents how we feel about ourselves.  When nourished, we need little beyond real needs.  When undernourished, we need to prove our own value and tend to go beyond our real needs on many levels. [note from dawn:  I'll get this work scanned in, permission to use was given at the Sargeant Camp EPC for all to use freely.  Remind me if I don't get to it soon enough for your liking.  Blessings.]
  

• With the work of Marshall Rosenberg on non-violent communication (NVC), we gained the tools to go beyond unconditional support to unconditional love while releasing misperceptions and unearthing our real feelings and needs.  The fertile terrain of learning to value ourselves allows us to value others and value the earth that nourishes us in all ways.

For more about Mollison and Permaculture in addition to http://tagari.com