Introduction to Permaculture

Rating :: 5
Completed :: 2024-10-26

I read the first two articles, and that was enough for me. I'll come back when I need something practical for farm projects (ie tropics, temperate, etc).

I would #recommend this to anyone who needs a reality check on Biodiversity crisis.

Highlights

Terrible time of day

Written in 1981.

Takeaways

The forests also provide a very large amount of our precipita- tion. When you cut the forest from ridges, you can observe the rainfall itself fall between 10% and 30%, which you could prob- ably tolerate. What you dont see happen is that precipitation may fall over 86%, the rainfall being only a small fraction of the total precipitation. It is quite possible on quiet, clear nights with no cloud, no rainfall recorded anywhere on any gauges, to have a major precipitation in forest systems. It is particularly true of maritime climates. But it is also true of all climates. Therefore
it is possible to very rapidly produce semi-desert conditions sim- ply by clearing trees from ridge top. This is being done at a great rate.

We have long been lulled into a very false sense of security by reassurances that the logging companies are planting eight trees for a tree cut. What we are really interested in is bio- mass. When you take something out of the forest in excess of 150 tons and put something back which doesn't weigh much more than 10 ounces, you are not in any way preserving bio- mass.

Waste products from forests are killing large areas of the sea. The main reason why the Baltic and Mediterranean and the coast off New York have become oxygen-consuming is that we are car- peting the sea bottom with forest products. There are, broadly speaking, about 12,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide being re- leased annually by the death of forests. We are dependant on the forests to lock up the carbon dioxide. In destroying forests, we are destroying the system which should be helping us. We are working on a remnant of the system. It is the last remnant which is being eroded.

The Phasmid conspiracy is the idea that phasmids, bugs and other diseases are killing trees every year. It's some unpreventable, naturally occurring, specific disease that kills the next tree. But Bill thinks that these killers can only fall a forest because we have weakened them so much by reducing precipitation, adding pollutants, etc. Bumping them with a bulldozer or hitting them once with an axe is enough to kill the tree, because it is so weak that its one open wound calls all the phasmids etc to feast upon it.

The Phasmid Conspiracy
Now we come to a thing called the phasmid conspiracy.
Each forest varies in each country in that its elms, its chest- nuts, its poplars, its firs, are subject to attack by specific patho- gens. Insects are taking some sort of cauterizing measures. The American reaction would be to spray; the British reaction would be to fell and burn; and in Australia, the reaction is to say: "Aah, what the Hell! It's going to be gone next year; let it go!"
Really, is it these diseases? What are the diseases? Phas- mids are responsible for the death of eucalypts. There is the cinnamon fungus. In elms, it's the Dutch elm disease. In the poplars, it's the rust. And in the firs, it's also rust. Do you think that any of these diseases are killing the forest?
What I think we are looking at is a carcass. The forest is a dying system on which the decomposers are beginning to feed. If you know forests very well, you know that you can go out this morning and strike a tree with an axe. That's it. Or touch it with the edge of a bulldozer, or bump it with your car. Then, if you sit patiently by that tree, within three days you will see that maybe twenty insects and other decomposers and "pests" have visited the injury. The tree is already doomed. What attracts them is the smell from the dying tree. We have noticed that in Austra- lia. Just injure trees to see what happens. The phasmids come. The phasmid detects the smell of this. The tree has become its food tree, and it comes to feed.
So insects are not the cause of the death of forests. The cause of the death of forests is multiple insult. We point to some bug and say: "That bug did it." It is much better if you can blame somebody else. You all know that. So we blame the bug. It is a conspiracy, really, to blame the bugs. But the real reason the trees are failing is that there have been profound changes in the amount of light penetrating the forest, in pollutants, and in acid rain fallout. People, not bugs, are killing the forests.

Now all of this, including the energy problem, is what we have to tackle at once. It can be done. It is possible. It is possible to make restitution. We might as well be trying to do something about it as not. We will never get anywhere if we don't do any- thing. The great temptation, and one in which the academic takes total refuge, is to gather more evidence. I mean, do we need any more evidence? Or is it time to cease taking evidence and to start remedial action on the evidence already in? In 1950, it was time to stop taking evidence and start remedial action. But the temptation is always to gather more evidence. Too many people waste their lives gathering evidence. Moreo- ver, as we get more evidence, we see that things are worse than they had appeared to be.

Design for remedial action

The amount of complexity we can build into that flow, the amount that we can direct to useable storages in order to hold back energy until we start to use it, that's where the skill of the designer lies. Furthermore, a lot of energies unusable in a mechanical sense are usable in the biological sense. So we need biological as well as mechanical storages.
That is the choice we have with water, with rainfall. We can store it or we can let it leave; and if we let it leave, it becomes unavailable to us.
If we would recover it, there is a lot of work to making it available again. Engineers go down to the valley, because everybody can see there is water down in the valley. So they put a block in the valley and the water backs up behind it and you have water, a big lake down in the valley where it is least useful. Where it came from was up on the hills. Had the engineers stored the water where it came from, then they could have run it through all sorts of systems before they let it escape into the valley. The closer to the source that we can intervene, the greater use is the network that we can set up. So we edge up close to the source to start to intervene in the flow. It's not the amount of rainfall that counts, it is the number of duties we induce that water to perform that counts.

#important We are culturally blocked. It is because it is a scientific culture; we try to measure everything. There are different ways of coming at things. I can't handle symbols; some people cannot handle numbers; some cannot handle dimension. This is why it is beneficial to associate in small groups, just to try to bring different lights on the same truths, trying to comprehend the different shadows of reality. This dynamic is lacking in education.

Now if we knew enough, if we had enough information, then a lot of these things could be listed for each element in the system, each entity. And then we could make a tremendous amount of design use of it. But they are not the things that are being listed as knowledge about the entities. You can obtain knowledge of almost anything about a tree except these things. Bad luck! Very little is known about the properties of a tree. As to the yield, it may be almost unknowable.