[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 5, Issue 17

[Rhisiart Gwilym]

Dave asks:

"So, I wonder if someone could direct me to the newbie page that explains why
the obvious things don't work and maybe some of the basic techniques?"

Siwmae Dave,

There's a very long, but just marvellously inspiring answer to this 
question -- 575 A4 pages, in fact. It's called 'Permaculture', by 
BIll Molllison; the copyright-1990 edition of his work. Bill has had 
soil under his fingernails all his long life. One of the basic tenets 
of his great, global vision is that you can make good soi, pretty 
quickly, out of any substrate, no matter how miserable to start with, 
so long as the ground isn't permafrost, or as dry as the Atacama. 
Anything between these extremes can be made to bloom -- copiously.

Both he and many of his younger followers have proved this 
practically, many times over, and starting in some seemingly 
impossibly bad places. His book is just a great rolling mass of 
practical techniques, words and explanatory drawings, all drawn from 
experience rather than just theory, but with an encyclopaedic 
knowledge of the theory-and-technical-information banks as well. He 
covers all the possible growing zones of the world -- tropics, dry 
and wet; desert right up to the nearly permanently waterless ones; 
mediterranean climate zones; boreal temperate; you name it, Bill's 
worked there and designed practical permaculture plans for particular 
places, which have subsequently been worked up into dense 
productivity of food and other necessaries.

Another startling basic idea of the leaders of the permaculture 
movement is that the present human population of the world, or an 
even larger one, could be fed adequately from LESS agricultural land 
area than we use currently with such abysmal INefficiency and 
unsustainable destructiveness (sic!), and that some of the land 
currently in use needs to be re-designated as part of the remediated 
lands which permacultural thinking insists needs to go back into 
permanent wilderness, as an essential part of healing the damage that 
we've done to the planet, and keeping it well hereafter. This, 
according to permaculture thinking, would make possible a 
re-harmonised and genuinely sustainable relationship for humans with 
the rest of the lifeweb, and would enable us to bring the population 
level back down to well below its current unsustainable overshoot 
level, without a global catastrophe.

This view of things at first seems so at odds with the our 
increasingly pessimistic view of how things are going that it may 
seem difficult to take on board at first sight. But I have to say 
again that it isn't just speculation, but repeatedly-demonstrated, 
practical capability. Take a look at David Blume's work too -- 
another permaculturist with dirty hands from way back and with an 
absolutely phenomenal way with making land bloom fecundly and 
sustainably  -- at www.permaculture.com.

Should you get Bill's big book, I recommend reading it right through, 
whichever climate zone your own land is in, since 
universally-applicable techniques and ideas are densely scattered 
throughout the text. As you can with any great work, I keep going 
through it again and again, and finding new insights every time.

Cofion gorau,       Rhisiart Gwilym