The practice and principles of Permaculture are one of the most important tools for not only creating a sustainable socialism, but also for repairing the damage done to the global ecosystem by capitalism, and lessening your individual reliance on the current capitalist system.Permacultural practice and socialism are two very powerful allies, and learning about permaculture should be necessity for modern socialists and communists.
From an article I found, gives a bit of an overview.
>Roberto Perez reviewed in Part I of this two part interview how Cuba’s import/export economy collapsed along with the Soviet Union and socialist block. With the disappearance of their largest trading partners, Cuba could no longer export sugar or other commodities in exchange for food, petro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides for the island. By 1993 food scarcity mounted into a crisis of widespread hunger that Cuba calls their “Special Period.” A new emphasis on self sufficiency in food production emerged, accelerated by the tightening of the US embargo during those years.>In Part II, permaculture expert Roberto Perez discusses his activities, as a director of the Antonio Nuñez Jimenez Foundation for Nature and Humanity, to counter the food crisis that occurred in Cuba. Antonio Nuñez was a revolutionary guerrilla fighter under Che Guevara, and then the Minister of Agrarian Reform. He succeeded Guevara as president of the Cuban National Bank and later served as president of the Academy of Sciences and ambassador to Peru. The Nuñez Jimenez Foundation was founded in 1993 as an NGO upon Nuñez’s retirement from government service. >Roberto Perez joined the team and with his colleagues began introducing permaculture ideas and techniques to produce food sustainably without pesticides or petro-chemical fertilizers in the cities and countryside. Australian experts initiated training and soon Cubans were training each other and the ideas spread. Today Cuba leads the world in sustainable agriculture. Sixteen Cuban cities keep themselves supplied in leaf vegetables. Small livestock and poultry are raised on roof gardens, balconies and vacant lots. Rural farms are restoring the traditional ways of using oxen, eliminating mechanization and its environmental polluting outcomes. Compost is now widely generated to fertilize the earth.
For those interested, I compiled a small archive of, IMO, some of the best books relating to permaculture. I highly recommend starting with Gaia's Garden, or possibly One Straw Revolution.<a href="
https://mega.nz/#!hdsADSaS!tyckxrh128rAh6lSXF3pMmnk2qUufiF_F0lzk9LWRY4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://mega.nz/#!hdsADSaS!tyckxrh128rAh6lSXF3pMmnk2qUufiF_F0lzk9LWRY4</a><a onclick="highlightReply('7176', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7176">>>7176</a><br/><span class="quote">>Maize is pretty easy to grow and harvest due to it's large seed size.</span><br/>Maize/corn can also be planted alongside other plants. You can grow beans, corn, squash, and sunflowers or bee balm in the same patch. They all fit a niche, actively assist eachother in growth, and all of them are edible. Provides a far denser food production than monocropping.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>What about wheat or rice? Rice in particular is a pain requiring flooded fields, delicate cultivation before planting. The Chinese have some pretty nice ancient wisdom with regards to rice cultivation, they raise fish in the flooded paddy so the fish shit fertilizes the soil and also controls mosquito population. When harvest time comes, you have rice and fish to eat.</span><br/>I believe One Straw Revolution goes a bit into this, it may be a good book for you to check out. Otherwise I know little about rice.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7173', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7173">>>7173</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7174', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7174">>>7174</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7175', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7175">>>7175</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7177', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7177">>>7177</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7180', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7180">>>7180</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7181', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7181">>>7181</a><br/>I see a big problem with permaculture if it means that you need lots of manual labour for harvesting, that will create a under-class of low-wage harvest-workers, that are going to be transported from field to field to harvest the different foot plants.<br/>While i emphasize with idyllic small local farming where people are self-sufficient and independent, that' not how it's going to turn out.<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7179', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7179">>>7179</a><br/><span class="quote">>Automatic robotic permaculture </span><br/><span class="quote">>Communities set up intelligent designs so as to simplify the care/extraction while being effective,aesthetical… </span><br/><span class="quote">>thats right i believe tech can self sustain plant life</span><br/>This is interesting, any sources for further reading ?
<a onclick="highlightReply('7183', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7183">>>7183</a><br/><span class="quote">>So make this job a civic duty that people share.</span><br/>Oh great I can see the moist struggle sessions already to get all those snobbish people to touch dirt with their hands.<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7185', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7185">>>7185</a><br/><span class="quote">>I think that would just happen naturally even, in America people pay money to go pick their own apples. People enjoy harvesting food, picking fruit blurs the line between labor and leisure, especially in a forest with many different types of trees, shrubs, ground plants, animals, etc.. Making labor leisure-like should be a core goal of any modern leftist movement.</span><br/>Yeah this is delusional Americans import Mexicans to pick their fruit.<br/>—-<br/>I'm not saying this is a lost cause, but the proposals so far are crap
<a onclick="highlightReply('7188', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7188">>>7188</a><br/><span class="quote">>americans import Mexicans to pick fruit</span><br/><br/>because its grown in a giant boring ugly monoculture and the efficiency of picking the fruit matters<br/><br/>What if you werent alienated from the production of your food? If your community is buildings surrounded by permaculture forest, you would take pride in that. People now often takes bags to pick up litter on a hike, it's not a stretch to imagine people going about their business taking time to stop to prune an unwanted branch, take a stray chicken back to the coop, etc. <br/><br/>Efficiency doesnt matter once an industry becomes something people do for themselves. We failed to pick all the carrots and many of them have begun to rot in the ground? Doesnt matter, it improves the soil. To view this as a loss is capitalist mindset. All the commune needs to produce is food, clothing, and shelter. All coming from plants and animals in the permaculture. Nobody in the commune NEEDS to do anything other than maintain the permaculture. Of course many will want to pursue occupations but this will be because they find it rewarding, not because they need to be a cog in the big industrial communist machine. The future of socialism is agrarian communes where each individual need only do an hour 2 of "work" per day that blurs the lines between labor and leisure, and scattered industrial guilds that individuals who decide they want more from life than agrarian leisure
<a onclick="highlightReply('7201', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7201">>>7201</a><br/><span class="quote">>You are just repeating this falsehood, it's incredibly dishonest to attempt to use repetition rather than actual arguments.</span><br/>How is it a falsehood? It's not even an absolute fucking statement. What is wrong with looking at low tech solutions to problems, exactly?<br/><span class="quote">>The use of technology for reducing labour requirements is not in question</span><br/>I never called it into question you're the one taking every word I've said and intentionally misinterpreting it. I'm not saying we SHOULDN'T use technology to solve problems, I'm saying we DON'T ALWAYS NEED A HIGH TECH SOLUTION.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>we are certainly not going to force people to do manual farming, that would be hardcore reactionary emiseration.</span><br/>But you can certainly provide people the knowledge and resources to decentralize food production. You don't need to force anything, simply provide the knowledge and resources. For example, a state sponsored permaculture drive to provide teaching, learning resources, seeds, and other basic resources.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>I see perma-culture as production technique that scores much higher in the sustainability category and land-use efficiency than monocrop farming, not as an alternative life-style.</span><br/>Permaculture design is compatible with socialism in every way. It is the most realistic way to deal with the climate crisis and all the horrors that come with it.<br/><span class="quote">>To me it looks like you are arguing for gentrifying people back into past.</span><br/>Progress doesn't have to mean perpetually more, sometimes progress can mean just a simplification. I don't want to go back to subsistence farming, nor do I see the industrial agriculture of modern day sustainable even under socialism. I want to totally rethink how we approach agriculture and food, and permaculture is the design that checks literally every single box. Will some people have to do more agricultural maintenance labor? Yes, but a huge bulk of modern jobs under capitalism are already fucking worthless. It will be a net gain to leisure time, as well as safeguarding food sources against climate induced scarcity, and a means by which to repair our critically damaged planet and its ecosystems.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry</a><br/>Agroforestry is a land use management system in which trees or shrubs are grown around or among crops or pastureland. This intentional combination of agriculture and forestry has varied benefits, including increased biodiversity and reduced erosion.[1] Agroforestry practices have been successful in sub-Saharan Africa[2] and in parts of the United States.[3][4]<br/><br/>Agroforestry shares principles with intercropping. Both may place two or more plant species (such as nitrogen-fixing plants) in proximity.<br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silviculture" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silviculture</a><br/>Silviculture is the practice of controlling the growth, composition/structure, and quality of forests to meet values and needs, specifically timber production.<br/><br/>The name comes from the Latin silvi- ("forest") and culture ("growing"). The study of forests and woods is termed silvology. Silviculture also focuses on making sure that the treatment(s) of forest stands are used to conserve and improve their productivity.[1]<br/><br/>Generally, silviculture is the science and art of growing and cultivating forest crops, based on a knowledge of silvics (The study of the life-history and general characteristics of Forest trees and stands, with particular reference to local/regional factors).[2] In specific, silviculture is the practice of controlling the establishment and management of forest stands.<br/><br/>The distinction between forestry and silviculture is that silviculture is applied at the stand-level, while forestry is a broader concept. Adaptive management is common in silviculture, while forestry can include natural/conserved land without stand-level management and treatments being applied.<br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture</a><br/>Permaculture is a set of design principles centered on whole systems thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience.<br/><br/>The term permaculture was coined by David Holmgren, then a graduate student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education's Department of Environmental Design, and Bill Mollison, senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology at University of Tasmania, in 1978.[1] It originally meant "permanent agriculture",[2][3] but was expanded to stand also for "permanent culture", since social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming philosophy.<br/><br/>It has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. Permaculture also includes integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modelled from natural ecosystems.[4][5]<br/><br/>Mollison has said: "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system."[6]<br/><br/>The twelve principles of permaculture most commonly referred to were first described by David Holmgren in his book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002). They include Observe and Interact, Catch and Store Energy, Obtain a Yield, Apply Self Regulation and Accept Feedback, Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services, Produce No Waste, Design From Patterns to Details, Integrate Rather Than Segregate, Use Small and Slow Solutions, Use and Value Diversity, Use Edges and Value the Marginal, and Creatively Use and Respond to Change. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka</a><br/>Masanobu Fukuoka (Japanese: 福岡 正信, Hepburn: Fukuoka Masanobu, 2 February 1913 – 16 August 2008) was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, no-herbicide grain cultivation farming methods traditional to many indigenous cultures,[1] from which he created a particular method of farming, commonly referred to as "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming".[2][3][4]<br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Lawton" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Lawton</a><br/>Geoff Lawton (born 10 December 1954) is a British-born Australian permaculture consultant, designer, teacher and speaker.[1][2] Since 1995 he has specialised in permaculture education, design, implementation, system establishment, administration and community development.[3]<br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Lancaster" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Lancaster</a><br/>Brad Stewart Lancaster (born 1967) is an expert in the field of rainwater harvesting and water management. He is also a permaculture teacher, designer, consultant and co-founder of Desert Harvesters, a non-profit organization.<br/><br/>Lancaster lives on an eighth of an acre in downtown Tucson, Arizona, where rainfall is less than 12 inches (300 mm) per annum. In such arid conditions, Lancaster consistently models that catching over 100,000 US gallons (380,000 l; 83,000 imp gal) of rainwater to feed food-bearing shade trees, abundant gardens, and a thriving landscape is a much more viable option than the municipal system of directing it into storm drains and sewer systems.[1]<br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Holzer" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Holzer</a><br/>Josef "Sepp" Holzer (born July 24, 1942 in Ramingstein, State of Salzburg, Austria) is a farmer, an author, and an international consultant for natural agriculture. After an upbringing in a traditional Catholic rural family, he took over his parents' mountain farm business in 1962 and pioneered the use of ecological farming, or permaculture, techniques at high altitudes (1,100 to 1,500 meters (3,600 to 4,900 ft)[1] after being unsuccessful with regular farming methods.<br/><br/>Holzer was called the "rebel farmer"[according to whom?] because he persisted, despite being fined and even threatened with prison[2] for practices such as not pruning his fruit trees.<br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mollison" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mollison</a><br/>Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison (4 May 1928 – 24 September 2016) was an Australian researcher, author, scientist, teacher and biologist. In 1981, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture".<br/><br/>He has been called the founder[2][n 1] and "father"[3] of permaculture. Permaculture (a portmanteau of "permanent agriculture")[4] is an integrated system of ecological and environmental design which Mollison co-developed with David Holmgren, and which they together envisioned as a perennial and sustainable form of agriculture. In 1974, Mollison began his collaboration with Holmgren, and in 1978 they published their book Permaculture One, which introduced this design system to the general public.<br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Holmgren" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Holmgren</a><br/>David Holmgren (born 1955) is an Australian environmental designer, ecological educator and writer. He is best known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison. <a href="https://internationalistcommune.com/rojavas-economics-and-the-future-of-the-revolution/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://internationalistcommune.com/rojavas-economics-and-the-future-of-the-revolution/</a><br/><br/>&ltEconomic philosophy of the revolution<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Öcalan is overquoted, but I will do it one more time. He compares society to a field. If you grow a monoculture you will need fertilizer, pesticides, a fence, industrial equipment and so forth or the crops will die. In society this is the state. A monocultural, or nationalist, society cannot exist without a state because it is weak like the crops on an industrial plantation. If you plant different crops together however, according to the principles of permaculture and agroforestry, the field will become an ecosystem which regulates itself and is in no need of meddling, much like a healthy, diverse society has no need for authoritarian institutions.</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Today humans try to regulate and “domesticate” ecosystems in various ways, just like they try to fix social problems with clever policies, sophisticated legislation, war or other external methods that disregard society, its origins, dynamics and complexity and reduce billions of people to passive subjects of the schemes of a disconnected class of “managers”. In both cases it is the same process of splitting the world into a passive, inanimate mass to be subjugated (nature, women, humankind, “the people”) and an active dominator (man, god, government). Emancipatory theory rejects this positivist, patriarchal and materialist ideology. But to break the power of the external regulator, the group in question must of course become active, self-organize and shape its own ecosystem in order to make the constructs of power redundant.</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Economic autonomy is therefore crucial in achieving any substantial change of the status quo. The moral, ethical concept of solidarity must be developed and internalized before any group can satisfy its material needs in a truly egalitarian way.</span> <a onclick="highlightReply('7274', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7274">>>7274</a><br/><span class="quote">>I want to buy some land somewhere decently chilly and a decent bit above sea-level and become a self sustainable farmer. Then I can finally get out of this fucking mess.</span><br/>desire for individual escape, is prominent theme among the down trodden in capitalism.<br/>Jut keep in mind that in capitalist development during the enclosures capitalists actively worked to sabotage subsistence farming, to drive workers into wage work.<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7275', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7275">>>7275</a><br/>these videos seem decent but their anti-technology stance is idealist nonsense.<br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7276', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7276">>>7276</a><br/><span class="quote">>Communists and industrial socialists disappoint me greatly when they struggle against nature.</span><br/>The only reason you think this is because, there's other people struggling against nature for you, and you have fallen pray to a delusion, brought about by you getting the benefit from said struggle against nature, without you personally having to struggle.<br/><span class="quote">>No amount of planetary expeditions will make any statist revolution worth it.</span><br/>You can't know this in advance.<br/><span class="quote">>The proletariat will fight beside you sure, but they will struggle against you as soon as their beautiful mountain side is devastated for the sake of building a new factory.</span><br/>So the problem with industry is just optics ?
if any of you gets into this, make sure to try to licence stuff as creative commons<br/><br/><a href="
https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/licence" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/licence</a><a onclick="highlightReply('7278', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7278">>>7278</a><br/><span class="quote">>The only reason you think this is because, there's other people struggling against nature for you, and you have fallen pray to a delusion, brought about by you getting the benefit from said struggle against nature, without you personally having to struggle.</span><br/><br/>Is this some state of nature idealism? <br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_nature" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_nature</a><br/><br/>Nature provides, in abundance, private property is theft. Think of the amount of energy alone privatized in the Hoover damn, whos river is fed by snow melt from an entire mountain range, and what could be accomplished distributing it according to need rather than wasting it on the highest bidder. And this waste can be multiplied by every industry. <br/><br/>Capitalism falsely teaches us to assume the state of nature is one of scarcity, when in fact artificial scarcity enforced by a monopoly on violence is necessary for its existence. <a onclick="highlightReply('7282', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7282">>>7282</a><br/><span class="quote">>I mean literally fighting against the order of nature.</span><br/>What do you mean with this, ecocidal species do occur in nature.<br/>Also by the way <a onclick="highlightReply('7283', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7283">>>7283</a> is correct, if you try to sacrifice humanity you'll become blob of hostile matter.<br/>The reason for trying to preserve nature is because it's the bootloader and the fallback habitat system for the human species. <br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7291', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7291">>>7291</a><br/><span class="quote">>Nature provides</span><br/>Yeah not for the current size of the population, while i agree that property is a scarcity mechanism, it's also not really relevant for this context. You have to realise that this is about refuting the idea that humans ever lived or will live in harmony with nature. This is an idealist fantasy, that originates from the misconception the once lived as part of an "ecological organic whole without contradiction". <br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7290', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7290">>>7290</a><br/>I think OSSI gave up on licensing, they now just offer a pledge:<br/><br/>&ltIn February of 2014, OSSI made the hard but considered decision to abandon efforts to develop a legally defensible license and to shift to a pledge. This moves OSSI’s discourse and action from the legal field to the terrain of norms and ethics.<br/><a href="https://opensource.com/law/14/5/legal-issues-open-source-seed-initiative" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://opensource.com/law/14/5/legal-issues-open-source-seed-initiative</a><br/><br/>I don't know what this pledge means, but i would go with <a onclick="highlightReply('7279', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7279">>>7279</a><br/><a href="https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/licence" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/licence</a> WHOS PLANTING CROPS IN THEIR LAWN <br/><br/>LETS GOOOO<br/><br/><a href="
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM</a><a onclick="highlightReply('7353', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7353">>>7353</a><br/>I think you can do amaranth(which can be harvested as a grain), quinoa, jerusalem artichoke, barley, breadroot, nettles, rhubarb, Wu Wei Zi, asparagus, garlic, serviceberries.<br/>I don't actually know if any of these can be planted now or if they'll grow where you are, but I THINK they'll be hardy where you are. Just kinda go over them.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7345', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7345">>>7345</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7346', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7346">>>7346</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7344', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7344">>>7344</a><br/>I'm about to start companion planting in a pot with:<br/><span class="quote">>Tomato</span><br/><span class="quote">>tomato cage for support</span><br/><span class="quote">>pole beans, supported by cage</span><br/><span class="quote">>mint</span><br/><span class="quote">>basil</span><br/><span class="quote">>garlic</span><br/>All of these will fit in a big enough pot. The tomato and beans will grow to fill the upper space. The herbs will stay low and improve the tomato's flavor and help keep pests away (esp garlic). This i a relatively simple combination that gives you good nutrients and some protein. It's also not that needy for space. I don't think it's exactly ideal, but I'm doing this for my boomer parents because they want tomatoes in a pot.<br/><br/>There are other combinations you can come up with. Look into companion planting. This post has a bunch of information on combinations you can try. <a onclick="highlightReply('7331', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7331">>>7331</a><br/>The key aspects are to make them compatible with each other and use the space to its full potential. If possible you can also try to balance the food production (protein, vitamins, etc) but that's harder with less space and less necessary if you can trade or buy food as well.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7353', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7353">>>7353</a><br/>IDK about Scandinavian standards, but the US has hardiness zones based on the climate, so look into how cold it gets where you are so you can see what will survive.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7360', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7360">>>7360</a><br/><span class="quote">>You forgot to mention hydroponics is very compact, able to do the work of an entire farm within a single building of relatively low height.</span><br/>The same applies to food forests/gardens except they're also polycultures that more directly and completely meet the needs of the people using them.<br/><span class="quote">>What the fuck is this supposed to mean.</span><br/>Yeah I phrased that awkwardly. I meant it's using simplistic designs to water your plants, which you can just do with a hose and rain anyway. This point is more of a joke, but it's pretty silly how hydroponics is hyped as high tech when it's basically automatic sprinklers.<br/><span class="quote">>Due to restrictions in space and the lack of development. The same can be said for a lot of fruit farms, growing the same plant and nothing else.</span><br/>We're not comparing to industrial farms. We're comparing to permaculture, which can take fuller advantage of small space with a wider variety of crops. See <a onclick="highlightReply('7166', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7166">>>7166</a><br/><span class="quote">>In urban environments they are a lot safer considering the current fumes and dirtiness of the environment compared to rural areas.</span><br/>Plants help filter the air, soil, and water and recapture pollutants. See <a onclick="highlightReply('7255', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7255">>>7255</a><br/>You don't only have food plants in a proper permaculture food garden/forest. You're creating a holistic ecosystem ideally, which includes functions like maintaining the quality of the environment. Whereas hydroponics simply ignores the pollution, permaculture can help ameliorate the problem.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7366', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7366">>>7366</a><br/><span class="quote">>So perma-culture as a service ?</span><br/>As opposed to a commodity, as proposed here <a onclick="highlightReply('7363', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7363">>>7363</a> and not permaculture as a whole, just the initial setup and any expansions. The whole point is that once it's set up you have bare minimum labor inputs.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Either too expensive, or an unpalatable economic relation of renting out gardens, too much like feudal relations, the permaculture service-worker literally has to give you a part of the produce they produce because you own land.</span><br/>You <em>could</em> negotiate a contract that way <em>or</em> you could add the "clients" to the co-op network and allow them to exchange their surplus (that they don't eat) at a centralized farmers' market for easier distribution. They could get paid the full value of the crops minus the logistical expenses of transporting them to market. You could even have the vendor(s) rotate so that each farmer gets a chance to act as vendor and get paid for that role. There's no need for a hierarchy here except what you're reading into it. Any debt incurred by planting could be paid off out of the surplus if that's how you want to do it. The loans don't have to be interest-bearing, and if you end up losing money this way maybe you could get a tax write-off for the company.<br/><br/>Don't come in here and suggest using capitalism to our advantage and then when someone fleshes out that thought start criticizing the methods for being capitalistic.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>I get a serious crypto feudalism vibe from the perma-culture crowd already…</span><br/>This is just shit sprinkling. If you have a criticism, make it. Don't just cast aspersions when you are the one coming into the thread telling people to commodify the practice.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Perma-culture as commodity is better, you can probably make a box with dirt and seeds so cheap that it works for low income proles too</span><br/>Maybe you should try to understand what permaculture is, because then you'd see that (like commodification usually is), this plan misses the actual point.<br/><span class="quote">>Try compensating for this, make a number of easy patterns that make it simple to get seed-bricks that have a good enough configuration for the space it's being used. Or "Hard-mode" make image recognition software that can detect the conditions and automatically create a bespoke composition for the seed-bricks.</span><br/>There is some utility for predetermined sets of companion plants, but permaculture is also about how and where you plant. If you <em>really</em> want to make it accessible to poor people, the bigger obstacle than pricing is space for planting. You'd be better off trying to sell food gardens to a community as a whole so they could pool their space and money. To do that you would need communities to be organized, though. In place of that, maybe selling the idea to municipalities would be a decent half-measure. The people most able to practice permaculture are of course suburbanites, given the space and disposable income, so they might be the most viable early adopters.
I think you misunderstand the purpose here, the reason to look at this as just another production method is to be able get an objective view on whether it's worth doing.<br/>Also get off you high horse, what i suggest is way more accessible, and it does not preclude people forming communities, <br/>it might even be more in line with socialism because it doesn't depend on bourgeois legal contracts, and probably is less vulnerable to subversion that way.<br/>And you can get off you high horse, you proposed this to be a hobby for yuppies, which is life-stylism.<br/>If you don't do mass-production then you can't realistically have broad adoption of this, You'll get a few coops doing a niche gardening service for wealthy people that are part of the permaculture club. If you do it as a service it's going to be expensive because it's difficult to automate and that excludes proles from being the benefactor of this.<br/>I'm not opposed to having this done by a cooperative, you could potentially have a coop producing the seed-bricks.<br/>Consider who captures the value add, it it's not the workers it's not really interesting project.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7371', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7371">>>7371</a><br/>Your attitude is still capitalist, maybe subconsciously or something. This isn't just about permaculture, but the general ethos of building support networks and organizing people vs selling them shit.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>the reason to look at this as just another production method is to be able get an objective view on whether it's worth doing.</span><br/>Given that it's a less labor intensive alternative and makes use of space that's largely being wasted, yes it is. Technology isn't just about building machines. It's also about finding better methods of doing things. Porky likes to treat technology as if it's just machines because machines are easy to commodify (but you also have intellectual property for methods). You eliminate almost all of the transportation labor (since most food is eaten very close in time and space to where it's harvested) and most of the labor involved in farming (effectively re-creating the field every harvest). That alone would make it worth it as an alternative sector. Then you also have to consider the ecological impact of large scale agriculture, which is immense and severely damaging. The problem with framing it in terms of "just another production method" is that you're failing to question your assumptions about what criteria matter for production methods. And within the capitalist framework, concerns like ecology and the nature of technology get ignored. It's probably not enough to cover all food needs, and certainly isn't initially. But it can significantly improve the way food is produced while also organizing and empowering workers along the way.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Also get off you high horse, what i suggest is way more accessible,</span><br/>Having a community-operated garden that you can just walk up and grab food from is much more accessible than having proles buy seed bricks individually. "Accessibility" is a neoliberal buzzword at this point. Having a commodity on demand is inferior to building the infrastructure for a more robust and permanent system that can meet your needs without you having to buy anything. It's the same song and dance with "accessible" health insurance.<br/><span class="quote">>and it does not preclude people forming communities,</span><br/>No, but it reinforces the capitalist mode of production rather than undermining it, while also doing nothing to build communities. "it doesn't preclude it" isn't good enough. It does nothing to encourage it either, which in this context (comparison to permaculture) is a downside.<br/><span class="quote">>it might even be more in line with socialism</span><br/>Selling a commodity is not more in line with socialism than organizing people to meet their own needs independent of capitalist production.<br/><span class="quote">>because it doesn't depend on bourgeois legal contracts,</span><br/>There doesn't need to be any on-paper contracting to organize a community permaculture project, and you have this completely backward. Contracts far predate the bourgeoisie and are an important tool in codifying a relationship so that the parties involved can negotiate acceptable terms and avoid exploitation. When you <em>don't</em> have a contract the terms are vague and it's difficult to judge whether they've been upheld and someone is getting a raw deal. It's also easier to exercise power to influence the outcome because it's harder for the aggrieved to even articulate the offense.<br/><span class="quote">>and probably is less vulnerable to subversion that way.</span><br/>Have you never done any contract based work? If you don't have a contract it's much easier to exploit vulnerable people, because there's no set terms to adhere to. Contract work is rife with abuse <em>because</em> of a <em>lack</em> of official contracts. Spend two minutes looking for work as some kind of freelancer and you'll find people trying to trick you into accepting a job without a contract so they can stiff you.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>And you can get off you high horse, you proposed this to be a hobby for yuppies, which is life-stylism.</span><br/>Where did I do that? It's a simple matter of fact that it's materially <em>easier</em> for wealthier people, as is almost anything. That doesn't mean it's "for them." If anything, your proposed commodity would be more likely to cater to people with disposable income than a community-managed project.<br/><span class="quote">>If you don't do mass-production then you can't realistically have broad adoption of this,</span><br/>What are you basing this on? It sounds like you can only imagine a trend taking off in the form of a commodity. The activity of planning and planting doesn't require special equipment or resources, only some knowledge of how to optimize agriculture. See the point in the first paragraph about technology.<br/><span class="quote">>You'll get a few coops doing a niche gardening service for wealthy people that are part of the permaculture club.</span><br/>This would certainly be easier to implement in capitalism, which is why it would be beneficial to build a model around organizing poor communities to do this for themselves.<br/><span class="quote">>If you do it as a service it's going to be expensive because it's difficult to automate and that excludes proles from being the benefactor of this.</span><br/>You could also teach how to do it (as people do with capital P Permaculture) for free and provide assistance in the form of delivering the necessary materials and advising on the practice. In the long term, however, it would be better to set up sustained networks of production as:<br/>&lta way to help the poor communities get money (by helping them sell their surplus produce)<br/>&lta way of organizing the workers along socialist lines (collectively managing production)<br/>&lta form of dual power, reducing dependency on capitalist food production<br/>This is a synergistic set of benefits that a commodity won't match, ever. Part of the problem with capitalism is that commodity production gives you commodity fetishism, i.e. turning the planning of production into an exercise in optimizing for "the market," which is the opposite of what a socialist should be trying to do.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>I'm not opposed to having this done by a cooperative, you could potentially have a coop producing the seed-bricks.</span><br/>Why are you fixated on commodifying the product? Organizing people is vastly preferable to reducing them to a consumer. If you create a business based on selling seed bricks, your incentive is to make seed bricks that have to be replaced as often as possible. That's the reason planned obsolescence exists. Selling seed bricks as a commodity is directly antagonistic to the goal of fostering independence from capitalism. If you organize cooperatively where you coordinate with the growers, this issue is bypassed because there's no longer a conflict between the buyer and seller. Their success and your success are related. You foster interdependence based on collaboration instead of competition. I'm not even explaining permaculture at this point. This is the difference between capitalism and socialism.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Consider who captures the value add, it it's not the workers it's not really interesting project.</span><br/>It would be the workers. The community grows the food. They keep what they use. The rest they can send to be sold at a fresh market, and they get back whatever revenue that generates. They could rotate and have a different volunteer sell every week. They could organize it through a co-op network and deduct any expenses (gas, fees, etc) before getting the income. Whatever they decide. The part about paying off a loan to finance the initial setup phase isn't even uncommon for co-ops. Lots of them have an initial buy-in of some kind, either actually paying money or working long enough to pay off the cost of entry. This is not ideal, but it's often necessary to make the numbers work. The best thing would be to have existing members of the community voluntarily contribute a portion of the value to an """investment""" fund that would be used to waive entry costs for poor communities, since it would be in everybody's interests to grow the organization. Bonus points if you can exploit the tax system to give people a write-off for it, to encourage wealthier people to actually help poor people get a leg up for once. The capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with and so on.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7372', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7372">>>7372</a><br/>Well the seed bricks can be mass-produced, and hence will drastically reduce the amount of labour power you need. For some reason you insist on ways that would use far more time & work. That is what makes the difference whether proles can have it, or not.<br/>I get that you want to have some sort of culture based around this, but for most people it's just food production, including most socialists, my way is easier.<br/><br/>Your defence of services and contracts is pure liberalism. Consider the seed-brick coop production plant can effortlessly be converted from commodity production to a cybernetic socialist system. You also seem to have a distorted view, the service sector isn't somehow less capitalist than commodity production.<br/> <br/>My motivation here derives from trying to imagine how you convince people to do this, and i cannot picture large amounts of people getting really interested in how plants work, i don't see many people doing anything more complicated than putting seed-bricks into balcony-plant-pots and watering it. It's also rather quick in terms of setting this up which would make it optimal for guerrilla gardening.<br/><br/>You're schemes requires setting up a network of small gardening service coops, and it's never going to happen, there are thousands of similar schemes that have been tried and they never scale, and remain niche stuff for hobby enthusiasts. You have to overcome your aversion to systematic and mechanistic thinking because it's preventing you from considering the upsides of my proposal.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7375', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7375">>>7375</a><br/><span class="quote">>Well the seed bricks can be mass-produced, and hence will drastically reduce the amount of labour power you need.</span><br/>for what? Having a couple flowers which die after a year because the soil is shit?<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>For some reason you insist on ways that would use far more time & work. That is what makes the difference whether proles can have it, or not.</span><br/>Permaculture requires the least amount of labor input compared to all agricultural techniques. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>I get that you want to have some sort of culture based around this, but for most people it's just food production, including most socialists, my way is easier.</span><br/>All culture sits atop the economic system, food production is a fucking major part of the economic system. Of course there's going to be a different culture. The point is to convince others to be cultural hippys but create an alternative economic system that is not only sustainable but is without exploitation and alienation. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>my way is easier.</span><br/>The absolute arrogance<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Your defence of services and contracts is pure liberalism.</span><br/>You're actually a dumbass, anon has laid out quite clearly why written contracts are useful. If you want to rid the world of contracts and services you need a world where economies are located entirely in the community, something which your seed brick start up would have to use. Urban farming is also building towards a world where contracts would no longer be necessary.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>i cannot picture large amounts of people getting really interested in how plants work</span><br/>With the Corona virus there has been a huge surge in people reading up on how to grow their own food. Every place near me has sold out of seedlings and seeds. Online plant dealerships have sold out of fruit trees. Crises will propel people to build the alternative economic system. It's laughable that you throw around marxist jargon and yet you're arguing that social change comes from making good arguments and not societal forces. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>It's also rather quick in terms of setting this up which would make it optimal for guerrilla gardening.</span><br/>Seed bombs already exist and they're not the most effective tool for guerilla gardening. Useful yes, but they're a minor component in food foresting suburbia. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>You're schemes requires setting up a network of small gardening service coops, and it's never going to happen</span><br/>Except in Rojava, Cuba and with the Zapatistas…<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>You have to overcome your aversion to systematic and mechanistic thinking</span><br/><span class="quote">>You have to overcome thinking logically</span><br/><span class="quote">>you have to be a dumbass like me so any proposal, no matter how dumb, appears like a good idea</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>it's preventing you from considering the upsides of my proposal.</span><br/>The upsides are incredibly minor and the work and equity that would have to be invested into your project is huge.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7384', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7384">>>7384</a><br/><span class="quote">>The only thing i see in this is a assembly of matter that will generate food-stuff.</span><br/>Your bricks would do fuck all for food production.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>A production method that can be applied by a socialist society.</span><br/>That would be permaculture. Decentralized, worker owned, non exploitative, moneyless, etc. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>> it's a more realistic approach</span><br/>The lack of sustainability alone shows that this is not the case<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>it reduces labour inputs in production</span><br/>No it wouldn't. This asinine system would need constant attention. The bricks would need replacing, that would require transport of bricks, the bricks would need to be made in a factory which would require workers, the components of the bricks would also need to be made and shipped, accountants and managers would be required, etc. etc. etc. You're better off just sticking with industrial agriculture because you're effectively shipping out a brick of farmland to everyone to grow their own food.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>they don't need to understand all the complex plant knowledge</span><br/>No they wouldn't. Think about how in real life you have people who study specific fields of knowledge? Well that still applies here. Permaculturalists exist everywhere and they've been studying what works most effectively in their areas for decades. They could very easily draw up plans to food forest suburbia and all that would be required is a relatively small number of people to put the plan into action and manage it for a couple years until the system is self sustaining. <br/>Fucking Cuba proves that everyone can become urban farmers if crises forces it. <br/><br/>The lack of microbes in these fucking bricks alone undermines the whole plan. The amount of hot air you're pumping is ridiculous.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7378', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7378">>>7378</a><br/>you don't explain why you believe this would die off after a year, most of the top soil on earth is about 10cm thick<br/>Permaculture the way you explain it require more labour inputs, this has been empirically tested in field studies with subsistence farmers in 3rd world countries. Food-production in industrialised societies use 3% or less of overall labour-power, What you are proposing would use more than that. You are correct that seed-brick production requires some amount of set-up, but compared to what you are proposing which requires owning land, it's minimal.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7385', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7385">>>7385</a><br/>Well seed-brick production would include using a bio-reactor to grow microorganism to enrich soil composition of seed bricks among other things like adding bio-charcoal. The point here is to have good quality soil included with the seed-brick. This would reduce the enormous amounts of effort for soil-conditioning that traditional permaculture set up requires.<br/>You do admit that you need to have local experts for this work, you don't understand that you are demanding too much dedication from society, it's just a method for food production, you are confusing means with goals.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7382', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7382">>>7382</a><br/>I have neighbors with chickens and can get eggs from them sometimes. They are the best eggs you can eat. I've heard that it's better to have ducks than chickens though because chickens are more likely to fuck up your crops. There's a shit load of songbirds though, so they are probably eating some pests and definitely fertilizing all over the place.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7377', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7377">>>7377</a><br/><span class="quote">>Is not the wide spread and use of this polyculture a neccesary precondition to developing a mass culture eg. mass knowledge and infrastructure around it comrade?</span><br/>No, and if anything you would see the most effective development if the two emerged together. That way, the systems would adapt to the real needs of the situation and support help support each other. You are using a "stages of development" mentality, which is a reductive abstraction.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7387', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7387">>>7387</a><br/><span class="quote">>most of the top soil on earth is about 10cm thick</span><br/>And it took a very long time to form. It's not the thickness that matters. It's the way it's connected to everything else. You need time for the plant and fungal rhizomes to spread out and form a network. Soil is not like a substance. It's more like a culture.<br/><span class="quote">>this has been empirically tested in field studies with subsistence farmers in 3rd world countries.</span><br/>Source?<br/><span class="quote">>Food-production in industrialised societies use 3% or less of overall labour-power,</span><br/>This is flat out wrong. Maybe for the farming part, but you also have to account for transporting the food (and resources required for farming), constructing the machinery, and storing/selling the inventory of food at market. With permaculture many more people would be involved <em>as farmers</em> but most of the middle processes would be eliminated because the food is so much closer to its destination.<br/><span class="quote">>You are correct that seed-brick production requires some amount of set-up,</span><br/>Not only would it fail to build a sustainable ecosystem (unless thoroughly designed to do so), the economic incentive for someone selling seed bricks is to keep selling new ones, therefore to <em>not</em> build sustainable agriculture.<br/><span class="quote">>but compared to what you are proposing which requires owning land, it's minimal.</span><br/>Permaculture only requires access to land, which almost everybody has to some degree. For instance, New Yorkers could colonize Central Park by planting food crops surreptitiously until it becomes a widespread practice and the populace doesn't want to get rid of it after poor people come to depend on it.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Well seed-brick production would include using a bio-reactor to grow microorganism to enrich soil composition of seed bricks among other things like adding bio-charcoal. The point here is to have good quality soil included with the seed-brick. This would reduce the enormous amounts of effort for soil-conditioning that traditional permaculture set up requires.</span><br/>Most of the soil conditioning in permaculture is just letting nature do its thing. You have plants that drop leaves that create mulch that turns into soil. You have worms that process that stuff. You dump some waste into compost that you can add to the soil. This is not particularly labor intensive if you compare it to what we do with the already-existing waste products. Instead of raking up leaves and trashing them, you use them to build soil. Instead of taking food scraps to the dump, you compost it. I think part of the problem is you're not recognizing the way that human life activities are already incorporated into the current economy but could be reincorporated into permaculture in a more efficient way. That's a major part of the whole concept - making use of things by integrating them into a sustainable ecosystem.<br/><span class="quote">>You do admit that you need to have local experts for this work,</span><br/>That's how farming works now, lol.<br/><span class="quote">>you don't understand that you are demanding too much dedication from society,</span><br/>It doesn't take much dedication for the average person to stroll through a food garden, pick some fruit off a plant, and eat it.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7392', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7392">>>7392</a><br/><span class="quote">>Alchemy</span><br/>I don't know what to say to you, alchemists were ignorant about matter and hence failed to grasp that what they tried to do would have required nuclear reactions, hence they can't be put into proximity of chemistry, other wise you would be basing your categorisations on ignorance.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>isolating variables</span><br/>this step is not optional, it would break experimental science.<br/>Before you are strawmaning me with 19 century attempts for studying animal behaviour, please consider that this has been refuted, environmental factors are not ignored any-more. <br/><br/>&ltneither does it lack the ability to make models that can take complex system interaction in to account.<br/><span class="quote">>No, it's just less conducive to that. It's going around the world to cross the street in some cases.</span><br/>That's the point, there are no shortcuts.<br/>Don't you get it, this is intentional.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7387', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7387">>>7387</a><br/><span class="quote">>most of the top soil on earth is about 10cm thick</span><br/>and that topsoil is constantly being replenished by natural processes. From leaf litter, to microbes to fungi. <br/>A brick would have neither the complicated soil structure or the naturally occurring inputs that helps sustain it.<br/>Go get a bag of potting mix, add whatever chemicals you like to it and grow food in it, come back and tell us how long that soil will last because I assure you it wont last more than a few meager 'harvests'. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Permaculture the way you explain it require more labour inputs, this has been empirically tested in field studies with subsistence farmers in 3rd world countries.</span><br/>If you just compare traditional agriculture to permaculture then yes, permaculture requires more labor input. There is however a fuckton you fail to consider. Firstly the labour input of a well designed and established permaculture farm is hardly labour at all, it involves very basic maintenance. Secondly Permaculture enables the dissolution of many industries which also require labour inputs, this includes, pesticide and fertilizer producers, truck drivers, cargo ship crew, shelf stackers, tractor engineers, etc. etc. etc. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>compared to what you are proposing it's minimal.</span><br/>no it isn't. It's very fucking significant. You're proposing creating a whole new industry that would be perpetually maintained. That's not minimal.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>requires owning land</span><br/>no it doesn't. Public parks, verges, perpetually empty lots, alleys, etc. etc. you've mentioned guerilla gardening before, why have you forgotten it now? <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Well seed-brick production would include using a bio-reactor to grow microorganism to enrich soil composition of seed bricks among other things like adding bio-charcoal.</span><br/>How about we use natural processes that would mean we wouldn't have to do all the work? Y'know, like permaculture? You see how you're having to add more and more complexity to this plan to make it barely workable? The natural processes exist, we don't have to do the work. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>> This would reduce the enormous amounts of effort for soil-conditioning that traditional permaculture set up requires.</span><br/>You're kidding right? Add compost, mulch, wood chips, whatever and let fungi and other organisms do the work for you. Past the very initial setup very little effort is required. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>You do admit that you need to have local experts for this work</span><br/>Yes, like with every other technology in the world it requires experts. The difference is that you wouldn't need a team containing an engineer, a soil scientist, a micro-biologist and an organic chemist to make the 'bio-reactor to grow microorganism to enrich soil composition' ALONE. I'm asking very fucking little compared to what you're proposing. Besides, Cuba's primary agricultural technique is permaculture, its very clearly not much to ask if faced with a crises (as we all will be) they did it. <br/><span class="quote"><br/>>it's just a method for food production, you are confusing means with goals.</span><br/><span class="quote">>ending exploitation is nothing</span><br/><span class="quote">>sustainability is nothing</span><br/>How is a decentralized, worker owned, non exploitative, moneyless system of agriculture not a component for a post-capitalist society? <br/>ANY society that wishes to have a socialist/communist agricultural economic sector would have to implement permaculture. <br/><br/><br/>I keep losing brain cells reading your replies, please stop.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7393', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7393">>>7393</a><br/>No seriously, read philosophy and history of science. Maybe read some computational science too and learn about how you can optimize different aspects of your process like precision vs timeliness.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>I don't know what to say to you, alchemists were ignorant about matter and hence failed to grasp that what they tried to do would have required nuclear reactions, hence they can't be put into proximity of chemistry, other wise you would be basing your categorisations on ignorance.</span><br/>The categorization is based on the history of how the scientific discipline developed. Understanding how elements actually worked is not received wisdom. It came as a result of many experiments.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>isolating variables</span><br/><span class="quote">>this step is not optional, it would break experimental science.</span><br/>You absolutely can do experimental science without isolating variables. It just changes the nature of the information you gather. Indeed, it's difficult to impossible to do experimental science on complex systems if you're required to isolate variables. Many natural systems have numerous feedback loops and redundancies built in that would offset the effects of a single variable.<br/><span class="quote">>Before you are strawmaning me with 19 century attempts for studying animal behaviour,</span><br/>That's an illustration of where your logic leads - directly from science history - and it was alive into the 20th century lol.<br/><span class="quote">>please consider that this has been refuted, environmental factors are not ignored any-more.</span><br/>It took a lot of struggle within the politics of science institutions to change this. Not based on the weight of evidence, but based on institutional inertia. And in the broader sense this is still an ongoing struggle. Many fields of science are plagued by a fixation on individual parts rather than understanding things as a larger system.<br/><span class="quote"><br/>>neither does it lack the ability to make models that can take complex system interaction in to account.</span><br/>&ltNo, it's just less conducive to that. It's going around the world to cross the street in some cases.<br/><span class="quote">>That's the point, there are no shortcuts.</span><br/>Autism. You can gather useful information by isolating variables, and that doesn't mean there's no utility to a less "controlled" examination. You seem to confuse the inductive reasoning of science with deductive reasoning. Science relies on induction, so it can never be logically valid or sound. It can at best approximate the kind of truth you achieve through deductive reasoning. Some approaches will more closely approximate sound results. Other approaches will more readily yield results.<br/><span class="quote">>Don't you get it, this is intentional.</span><br/>Only partially intentional. Ideology shapes everything, especially when you think it doesn't. For example, you think that it's necessary to isolate variables even though you are of course aware that observational science can yield important information. Observational science alone can produce a great deal of knowledge, but adding experimental science is an improvement. So too is employing flexibility in experimental methods instead of only practicing one type of experiment. You just have to be aware of the limitations of the methods you use. I'm aware of the limitations of both, but you are denying the limitations of the sole method you approve.
What do you think about this Water Vortex system?<br/><br/><a href="
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY3p2e1-kN4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY3p2e1-kN4</a><br/><br/><a href="
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation_water_vortex_power_plant" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation_water_vortex_power_plant</a><br/><br/>I can see some advantages over other power sources like Solar or Nuclear<br/><br/>1. Doesn't need any exotic materials like Graphite or Lithium that need to be mined or synthesized<br/>2. Doesn't need external batteries<br/>3. Extremely simplistic as it has very few moving parts meaning it's easily maintainable, I mean like compare this to the complexity of an nuclear power plant holy fuck<br/>4. Can be active all day & night unlike solar<br/>5. Unlike a Hydroelectric dam theres no need to divert huge channels of water & fucking up the flow of the water<br/><br/>A big problem with any centralised power power grid such as a solar plant in a desert or a nuclear plant is that you actually have to transport the electricity over power lines for it be used which sucks as a part of the electricity transported will be lost as heat. To fix this problem you would have to bring in power lines made out of superconductive materials which would add onto the existing infrastructure maintenance.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Also speaking of Mushrooms & Chernobyl…<br/><br/><a href="
https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070521/full/news070521-5.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070521/full/news070521-5.html</a><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Since the 1986 meltdown, at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, the numbers of 'black fungi', rich in melanin, have risen steeply. Casadevall speculated that the fungi could be feeding on the radiation that contaminates the ruin of the nuclear reactor.</span><br/><br/>Dadachova, Casadevall and their colleagues tested how three different species of fungus respond to gamma radiation from rhenium-188 and tungsten-188. They found that all three, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, Cryptococcus neoformans and Wangiella dermatitidis, grow faster in the radiation's presence.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7461', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7461">>>7461</a><br/>Unless you're doing a massive plot it's all very little work actually, depending on what your soil is and what your plans are.<br/>Some things I recommend<br/><span class="quote">>1. Don't step on your soil, keep designated footpaths or steps and use them. </span><br/><span class="quote">>2. don't use pine, pine is antimicrobial and will fuck with your soil microbiome</span><br/><span class="quote">>3. Wood chips, manure, and used coffee grounds are all great for encouraging mushroom growth, which will suppress disease</span><br/><span class="quote">>4. If you have access to lots of non-pine wood and have either black soil or clay, look into doing Hugelkultures</span><br/><span class="quote">>5. Combat weeds and grass by introducing heavy ground cover crops(Cowpeas, clover, sweet potato) and planting aggressively reseeding plants with actual use value. Give the weeds competition in the form of aggressive plants that you can actually use.</span>
Joe Rogan Experience #1478 - Joel Salatin<br/>Over a million views, and they're talking about alternative agriculture including permaculture.<br/><a href="
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo</a><br/><br/>Seems like the corona crisis is inspiring people to consider different ways of doing things. Anecdotally I have friends and neighbors who are taking up gardening as well.
<a onclick="highlightReply('7485', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7485">>>7485</a><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7484', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7484">>>7484</a><br/>There was a tour of the place streamed on periscope and the guy in charge of the garden is a professional farmer. You're talking out of your ass.<br/><br/><a onclick="highlightReply('7482', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#7482">>>7482</a><br/><span class="quote">>First off, they laid down brown gardening paper and just put potting soil ontop, the ground is still living turf and since it's a park its likely compacted. </span><br/><span class="quote">>This means that roots will have a very hard time penetrating the turf layer, and they will likely have a garden full of weeds within a week as the weeds push through their paper and soil.</span><br/>This is a commonly used method (one I have used myself) to kill the turf and weeds below the garden without disturbing the soil structure. The cardboard will decompose and the plant roots will be able to penetrate below. Soil compaction is a potential issue but with the right plants you can de-compact soil. IDK exactly what is planted in the garden but a bigger issue is potential pesticides/herbicides or chemical runoff that exists in the soil. Soil compaction is a potential issue, but the typical method being employed here is to focus on building the soil thicker and allowing the microbes, roots, fungi, and animals build better soil the way they do naturally.<br/><span class="quote">>Don't be lazy, either kill the turf with paper and plant in it or do a proper lasagna garden with multiple soil layers</span><br/>IDK what he thinks they are doing with the cardboard. It would be better if they put down more soil I agree, but they are clearly working with what resources they have available.<br/><span class="quote">>they planted marigolds, how sweet, but you cant live off those. lets see what else they planted</span><br/>Marigolds are good companion plants. They attract pollinators, repel certain pests like nematodes, attract pest predators, possibly attract pests away from more valuable crops, and you can in fact eat them.<br/><span class="quote">>lmao, a couple scrawny romain lettuce plants and potted herbs and vegis from a gardening store. They didn't grown any of this from seed, meaning if these plants die they are fucked and cant plant more. Also garden store plants are GMO so they can't seed save either.</span><br/>It's not necessarily true that these plants are GMO. I have purchased heirloom plants exactly like this. And if the plants die they can just get more where they got these. And since the man running the garden is a farmer, he probably was already growing these (from seed) to transplant into a garden (as you often do), so these are all just assumptions on the part of the twitter critic.<br/><span class="quote">>Also the calore-calorie ratio is horrible here! let me explain. they spend around 100-200 calories to plant all that lettuce, they get 5 calories back per plant. so thats a return of -95 calories. This garden is making them hungrier and giving them almost nothing. consider butternut squash from seed, after all is said and done you can plant 5-6 plants for 100-200 calories and get 63 cal per lb from each squash with the plant, with each plant producing 5-25 lbs of squash. so an average return of 630 cal for 100-200 cal spent.</span><br/>Lettuce is not the only thing they planted. The man listed off some of the plants. I don't recall all of them, but since I watched it after reading this thread it was very noticeable when he mentioned that they are growing squash. Also, calories are not the only concern. Nutrition matters too if you don't want to be malnourished, and lettuce is highly nutritious.<br/><span class="quote">>tldr they are using meme plants that spend more calories than they produce, and this garden is completely unsustainable and unable to last longer than a season, and cannot feed even one person.</span><br/>This is based on a lot of wrong assumptions. For one thing anything that wasn't transplanted but planted from seed is still invisible because it takes any plant several days to germinate and produce a seedling. What's more, if this person is a farmer they would be well aware of that but are ignoring it for the sake of making a viral tweet thread to roast the commies epic style. All of this is based on a handful of pictures and an obvious political agenda.
I don’t know is that a good idea to post this on that board, but I will try…<br/><br/>For some time I thought about the rightness to renounce certain forms of consumption as part of the fight against capitalism. I am able to understand that there are things that cannot be done without buying as new products, generating profit for private entrepreneurs, and they are needed in today's world. However, in my opinion, a consistent socialist should not feed this monster more than necessary. There is no NEED to buy an iPhone, coffee at Starbucks or a burger at McDonalds. It is worth mentioning some tips on how to survive in this mess. Every socialist should, in some sense be an ascetic. I've been getting more interested in gardening, and I was very disappointed to learn that most of the garden hoses have lead in them or other toxic chemicals that leach into the water, making it unsafe to drink. While searching for a perfectly safe garden hose, (which are nearly impossible to find), I discovered a non-profit website that has a lot of warnings on toxic chemicals in common consumer products. Do inform yourself so you can better protect yourself from hidden sources of pollution.<br/><br/><a href="
https://www.ecocenter.org/healthy-stuff/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://www.ecocenter.org/healthy-stuff/</a><br/><br/>- You don't need a top-of-the-line smartphone if you have a laptop. A regular cell phone should be enough, today they have an internet browser installed to check basic things. And running applications from android or Ios is possible through PC emulators. Android applications can be downloaded without a Google account here:<br/><br/>-You don't need new clothes. Today's second hand shops have good quality textiles. It is worth mentioning that today's clothes are made of low quality fabrics and fibers that tend to be easily damaged. And the dyes used in them are often harmful to the skin and are poorly primed, which causes the color to wash quickly. It is worth mentioning here that it is good not to wear clothes with visible manufacturer logos. Why should you be an ad as a socialist? It is worth decontaminating them after buying clothes. They can be boiled in a suitable powder or treated with an ozone generator (highly recommended during a pandemic).<br/><br/>- Do you furnish the house? Take a look around the local flea market for old furniture. Often, such furniture is made of pure wood (not woodlike materials), and their presence and condition proves their strength. Be careful only on furniture that may have a bark beetle. Removing it with special chemistry is an additional expense.<br/><br/>- Food. Look for small food stores, these are usually run by the family, or if you live in the countryside you can get along with local farmers running small farms. It is worth having your own garden. The best idea if you live in a city is to grow your own perennial herbs in pots.<br/><br/>- You don't need a car. Today's public transport will take you anywhere you want, cheaper than if you bought fuel every time. However, this issue is very subjective and depends on many other factors.<br/><br/>- Many electronics today are worth buying as used, often these antiques work for a very long time. For example, I'm currently using a 20-year-old microwave. The only devices that are not worth investing in are old computers and all Smart electronics due to their collection of quite sensitive data. Many people think that to get rid of the virus from a used computer, it is enough to replace the hard disk. This is a mistake - there are also viruses in the bios.<br/><br/>- Use open source software. Many of them are doing great as an alternative to commercial software.<br/><br/>- Cook dishes instead of ordering takeout. Use a Toaster Oven instead of a Microwave.<br/><br/>- It is worth thinking about the production of cleaning products, it is not difficult. However, if you can't, then you should think about using ordinary bar soap for a bath or shower. And if you need something to clean your windows, a vinegar and water mixture is all you need. For washing the bathroom - baking soda. For washing clothes - a laundry ball, often as effective as powder and less wasteful<br/><br/>Do you have any other recommendations, comrades? <br/><br/>Link <a href="
https://apps.evozi.com/apk-downloader/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://apps.evozi.com/apk-downloader/</a>“Dear Joseph Vissarionovich!<br/><br/>The Soviet system has transformed the small undertaking which I started on a mean garden plot 60 years ago for breeding new fruit varieties and creating new plant organisms into a vast Union-wide centre of industrial fruit breeding and scientific plant breeding, with thousands of hectares of orchards, magnificent laboratories and facilities and dozens of highly skilled researchers.<br/><br/>And myself, a lone experimenter, unrecognised and ridiculed by the official savants and bureaucrats of the tsarist Department of Agriculture, the Soviet system and the Party which you lead have made me the director and organiser of experiments with hundreds of thousands of plants.<br/><br/>The Communist Party and the working class have given me everything I need – everything an experimenter can desire for his work. The dream of my whole life is coming true: the valuable new fruit-plant varieties which I have bred have gone from the experimental plots, not into the possession of a few kulak money-bags, but into the far-flung orchards of the collective and state farms, displacing old inferior varieties of low yield. The Soviet Government has conferred upon me the highest reward a citizen of our country can receive, by naming the town of Kozlov the town of Michurinsk, awarding me the Order of Lenin and publishing my works on an impressive scale.<br/><br/>For all this, as a token of my gratitude, devotion and love, all of my 60 years’ work is dedicated to you, the beloved leader of the working masses who are building a new world, a world of joyous labour.<br/><br/>Dear Joseph Vassarionovich! I am 80 years of age, but the creative energy surging among the millions of workers and peasants of the Soviet Union fills me too, old man that I am, with eagerness to live and work under your leadership for the good of the socialist development of our proletarian state. <br/><br/><a href="
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Мичурин,_Иван_Владимирович" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Мичурин,_Иван_Владимирович</a> <br/><br/><a href="
https://humus.livejournal.com/4744494.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://humus.livejournal.com/4744494.html</a>Wrote an article on one of the Soviet Environmental projects and upon mentioning Permaculture I realized the article has not yet been created. Hope you guys can get started making one. <br/>(click create page)<br/><a href="
https://leftypedia.org/wiki/Permaculture" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">
https://leftypedia.org/wiki/Permaculture</a><span class="quote">>>19342</span><br/>Some more <br/>Read: <a href="http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/lysenko.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/lysenko.html</a><br/>Also: <a href="https://webs.ucm.es/info/nomadas/trip/lysenko.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://webs.ucm.es/info/nomadas/trip/lysenko.html</a> (was deleted), so use this link <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190111001548/https://webs.ucm.es/info/nomadas/trip/lysenko.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20190111001548/https://webs.ucm.es/info/nomadas/trip/lysenko.html</a><br/><br/>A short summary: <a href="http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/ly-tl-cv.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/ly-tl-cv.html</a><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>IN SHORT: The Three Main Bones of Contention regarding the things TD Lysenko REALLY said (these are given in greater detail elsewhere):</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>One technical point: back when Lysenko talked about (what we NOW call) cytoplasm - he literally did not use that word and neither did the geneticists. The word they used to refer to ANYTHING that was not the nucleus of the cell was "living protoplasm." They could see little granules fleeting by in the microscope, or corpuscles floating by. They used THESE words. Of course, when I read this, I realize they are all talking about the cytoplasm; so some of those granules Lysenko mentioned DID INDEED carry important factors involved in heredity. Geneticists did claim it was all in the nucleus, not outside the nucleus at all. Also, it was chemists that discovered nucleic acids, NOT the geneticists. Geneticists talked of factors or elements of heredity: genes. Mitochondria also has genes, but they are not human genes, they are bacterial DNA!, yet they drive ALL OUR metabolism. These mitochondria are NOT in the nucleus of the cell! This is a technicality over which some might quibble.</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>1. Geneticists insisted that heredity was carried forth exclusively by what is inside the nucleus of a cell (chromosomes) and that the rest of what is in the cytoplasm of the cell was just junk. This was called the "Chromosome Theory of Heredity." Lysenko did deny the THEORY, but he never denied the importance of chromosomes. DNA was not known of in the 1930's. Lysenko did NOT dispute that heredity was carried forth by chromosomes, but he insisted that the WHOLE of the cell, CYTOPLASM and all, was involved in the heredity process. Lysenko did NOT reject the importance of CHROMOSOMES, he even counted doubling of chromosomes in plants (as did geneticists). What he objected to was the dogma that "heredity was SOLELY contained in the chromosome." He turned out to be right: a lot of factors of heredity are in the cytoplasm of cells, not located in the nucleus! Geneticists claimed it was ALL contained in the chromosomes which are IN the nucleus. Lysenko disagreed, he was right. Ergo, the geneticists were excessively dogmatic in insisting they were right and declaring this that and the other. The discovery of DNA doesn't change this: Mitochondrial DNA, having the DNA of a bacterium, is in the CYTOPLASM of cells, not in nucleus. Without that, the rest wouldn't even work! For Mitochondria and how the discovery of how this evolved and works, see Lynn Margulis's works.</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>2. Geneticists insisted on pure bred lines and claimed these were the best. Lysenko insisted on occasionally mixing the pure lines with wild varieties or else the pure lines would degenerate. Lysenko was 100% right about this. The head geneticist, Vavilov, admitted he was right, but the real battle over this carried on outside of plant breeding, in the realm of racist politics. Prior to this claim, backed by actions with plants, the geneticists had not yet reached the phase where they went "nuts" over what Lysenko said. This claim made them go nuts. </span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>3. Geneticists insisted that there is strict competition in the survival of the fittest, between species and within one species. Lysenko disagreed with this whole idea of "within one species" (intraspecific) competition and showed that this idea justifies Western Imperialism and exploitation of others by a ruling class (the fittest in the game of survival). He turned out to be right with Margulis topping the cake: she's a Nobel Prize winner. It even turns out that there is far less competition between species than had been theorized before. This phase got the geneticists to claim Lysenko was anti-Darwin and the battle raged on anew.</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>Lysenko NEVER said that variations occur, changes in heredity occur, due to "use" and "disuse" of various organs. He NEVER said that. He was not a Lamarckian, knew what Lamarckism was, explained it and explained why it was wrong! He said changes were due to assimilation and dissimilation and focused on the metabolism and natural selection. Today, "assimilation" is known about and called GENETIC assimilation. Yet one doesn't have to know what a gene is to understand the assimilation. This last thing is part of the dung-heap of nonsense put into Lysenko's mouth by his enemies. They un-explain what he said, they MAKE IT into something stupid and then call it Lamarckian.</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>The rest of the nonsense they claim Lysenko said is either pure lies or they take puns and jokes he made and pretend he was serious. Another dung-heap of slanders they throw at Lysenko have to do with the NKVD.</span><br/><span class="quote"><br/>>What Lysenko was actually saying is very complex. What the geneticists wanted was something very simple-minded and Mendelian. Well, things are not simple and MOST things do not abide by the Mendelian 3:1 at all. What Lysenko discovered about vernalization was not known before and has turned out to be VERY important, it was not simple at all. Cold slows growth of a plant, but it makes the plant vernalize which then sets off a new DEVELOPMENT in the plant; ergo vernalization can't be growth: it's development which is something different. He used a very high reasoning on this. His phasic theory of development was also very heavy, not simple at all. Those who mock it out or try to ridicule him did NOT understand it at all, they are simple-minded and stupid. And they are liars that have only the desire to ridicule this man BECAUSE he was strongly Marxist and Stalinist. </span><br/><br/><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Mechanisms_resembling_Lamarckism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Mechanisms_resembling_Lamarckism</a> <a onclick="highlightReply('12989', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#12989">>>12989</a><br/>I know a bean farmer from Haiti, skilled man. THe way he did it was to clear a plot of land, plow it and plant the beans. He removed all bushes and trees inside, but kept a thick set of trees and bushes around it, trapping soil and moisture and helping negte winds. He topped it off by having the beas grow close together and having their roots hold the soil together, only pulling them out when planting new ones after Winter. <br/><br/>Also crop rotation is important; using 4 fields (or dividing them in-4) wheat in the first field, turnips in the second, barley in the third and clover in the fourth. Then rotate clockwise so that what grows in field/section 4 and clover grows in section 1 etc. The clover returns nutrients to the soil and turnips help brek it up for wheat and barley (or whatever you want to plant). <br/> <br/><a onclick="highlightReply('12991', event);" href="/hobby/res/7136.html#12991">>>12991</a><br/>Based on centuries of people doing this successfully?<br/><span class="quote">>You can direct sow basically anything</span><br/>It's harder and less efficient unless you're directly planting already grown plants. <br/><span class="quote">>machines that do that</span><br/>they also till the soil somewhat as well m8, this isn't grass.
>>8098>ermaculture sounds like returning to a feudal, domestic patriarchal mode of productionYeah, no read the thread effort posts and the pdf books on it.
>every suburban homeowner where i live is starting to get obsessed with this “naturescaping” bsIt's not BS, even if they're fucking around it's at least a step to having a small self-sustaining producer of foods. In the USSR a lot of people had these at their dachas, making pickles and pickled tomatoes and fruit jams and more using their little gardens to supplement groceries in the stores.
>>8135They are pear trees and a few years old, still young but probably older than anything in that video. That said, you spurred me on to do some reading and I think Im going to be fine . pear trees like a central structure apparently so I guess I can just shave a few feet off the top and focus on thinning out the branches and trying to get them to go more horizontal rather then the straight up and down it wants to do now
Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.
>>8131>gardens are cool and fun.Many people are saying it
>>8143I like it :)
Add in Open Source Lab and other texts and it could be parcelled together as a package to just give people to help them start (or re-start).
>>8143this is a good project and it should be supported for what it is, the beginning of opensource industrial machines that are accessible to all. The gnu/tractor.
I really like the idea that they have interchangeable power-generator blocks, although they will have to switch from hydraulics to electricity (or a combination of both) if they really want to follow through with the modularity.
Their self sufficiency advertisement is a little deceptive, they are not creating a self sufficient tech Eco-system, it is not possible to mine iron ore and turn it into a carbon-steal beam at a small scale. The reason that people are working so much is because capitalists steal the surplus, it is not technological sophistication that is causing this. There is merit in having simple machines that everybody can run and maintain, but that has more to do with social goals of making the people's-tech. They do have a point that there is a maximum of industrial capital that a given population can support, but it is not as simple as they are making it out. Capitalist corporations are intentionally making technology that breaks and cause unnecessary maintenance/replacement work because they are following a rent seeking business model. That is not an inherent property of technology. To be fair, even capitalism used to be better than this.
>>8143It's a misconception that permaculture is strictly about agriculture. The concept is to intelligently design human habitats. Locally integrated food production is just the most obvious element of that. Integrating production
generally into the human habitat is closer to a real distillation of the point. This kind of thing would be very well in line with building permaculture settlements. Particularly the part where they are talking about growing their own hydraulic fluid locally from canola oil.
Even if it wasn't directly compatible with permaculture it's still very good. This kind of innovation - making important machining technology more widely available at a small scale - is probably the beginning of a paradigm shift that is going to become critical the more capitalism deteriorates. The point about the manufacturing base being too big is key, and is again very much in line with the design principles of permaculture, reducing dependence on large supply chains and allowing sustainable production to happen at the local level.
>>8152You make fair criticisms but the video is only 6 minutes long, so not much time to get into the larger economic factors (and even if they were radicals talking in those terms might run counter to their goals of advertising the project to the intended audience). Still, the best solution is probably recognizing both the factors they mention and the ones you do, so that we can integrate these kinds of systems into the larger production chain and undermine monopoly capitalism and ultimately surpass capitalism entirely. The question really should not be whether centralization is good or bad, but
for what purposes is it useful or detrimental, and how to optimize the level of centralization according to what fits the production needs best.
>>8166Here's a pretty long list of possibilities.
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/20-ways-control-slugs-permaculture-garden-or-allotmentGenerally you want to avoid pesticides as much as possible, and for slugs it's probably not necessary. Figure out what species of slug it is if you can, and probably the simplest options are to bring in or attract something that eats or kills them and/or plant some decoy plant that they would prefer to eat over your crops.
>>8166Are you allowed to keep any animals? I've heard ducks love slugs. Emphasis on "are you allowed" because it's against the law in my area, amazingly
I just want some chickens bros
>>8189Mulching is good and can be necessary to get some initial biomass, but yes chop and drop should be fine. You are returning the nutrients from those plants back to the soil. Some carbon is lost to decomposition, but it's less than what was absorbed from the air to make the plant grow. Allowing weeds to grow for a bit and then turning them into mulch is sill using mulch, it's just free now.
You should try to identify the species and do a little research on them, though, because some "weeds" are actually beneficial. One major example of this is dandelions, which fix calcium in the soil (rare quality) and have pretty deep roots that help with aeration and water absorption.
>>8205>Assuming permaculture can't replace mechanized agriculture in terms of output and efficiency,Whether this is even true is a complicated question. We already have machines that can pick fruits and such. Designing a permaculture site with mechanized planting/harvesting in mind is possible, especially with more recent advances in robotics and AI. Hell, AI may actually be very useful for planning a permaculture site since it might process the inputs faster than a human designer could in order to optimize things like placement and irrigation.
>what can be done to [mechanized agriculture] to make it more environmentally friendly?A lot actually. Here's just a few.
<replace monocultures with polyculturesThis isn't automatically permaculture, but growing multiple things in the same general area can be a lot more useful. For example, having plants to attract native pollinators can be more effective than current pollination methods that require trucks full of bees to be brought in to pollinate fields. You can also attract wildlife that will assist production, for example growing food for grazing animals who will shit fertilizer everywhere during the off seasons to help build up the soil for the next harvest.
<replace tilling with non-till sowingTilling (running a plough through the soil to break it up for planting) breaks up the soil's structure (mycelium, roots, etc) and contributes massively to soil degradation. There are already machines available that can sow seed at an industrial scale without tilling, by directly inserting the seeds into the ground instead. This also has the potential benefit of more efficiently using the seeds, compared to methods where you till ruts and broadcast seeds over them.
<replace synthetic fertilizers and pesticides with non-damaging alternativesOne of the most effective ways to fight pests is to introduce a predator species, such as ladybugs to eat aphids. This is an all-around superior choice because it reduces the health and environmental impact of farming, while also increasing the biomass (predators convert the pests into poop i.e. fertilizer). The more locally pest control and fertilizer production happens, the less dependent on the larger supply chain it is and the less energy the process uses. Synthetic pesticides and fertilizers also have issues with runoff and affecting local riverine/marine wildlife. Fertilizers in particular are often poorly absorbed by the crops because they are highly concentrated, as opposed to the droppings of animals which are packaged in a significant quantity of other organic matter that helps to hold the nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen.
>>8208That bit about no-till on an industrial scale is interesting. Reading into it, the catch is that using it conventionally requires even more pesticides than usual to account for the lack of weed control that the plowing provides, but as you mention in the next paragraph, there are organic methods of weeding so this seems like a no-brainer.
>Assuming permaculture can't replace mechanized agriculture in terms of output and efficiency>>Whether this is even true is a complicated question. We already have machines that can pick fruits and suchBut even if we had fully mechanized permaculture, does it compare to the output of mechanized agriculture? Putting aside that the latter is awful for the environment, of course.
It would be a shame if, in order to maintain or grow current population levels while switching to permaculture, even more land had to be devoted to food production
>>8212Well it's important to consider that contemporary agriculture being efficient is largely propaganda. There is an immense amount of waste, both in the sense of how much produce is lost or discarded and in the sense of how much of a resource hog it all is. When people think about how labor intensive an industry is, they normally are thinking in terms of how labor intensive the direct production of that resource is (relative to the inputs of capital) but often ignore that the capital being used (tractors etc) were also produced by labor. Mechanized monoculture production
appears much more efficient than it actually is because most of the labor that goes into it is done in secondary support industries. In order to "reform" the system to be more efficient, that would be the most important place to look, to reduce the need to consume specialized products (that require a whole industry to make plus shipping, logistics, and marketing to distribute) rather than more direct, local solutions. The problem with agriculture and anything else under capitalism is that the drive is toward making more products to sell, increasing the exchange value purely so you can drive up prices. If you start looking into how these systems function at the macro level it quickly becomes obvious that they are actually extremely wasteful in any sense other than for maximizing profit.
>>8220This.
Reminder that a lot of the Amazon rainforest was silviculture managed by indigenous people for food before they got got by disease and genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest#Human_activityAlso reminder that the bees used for pollination and honey are an invasive species displacing native pollinator bees who sustain native plants in ways that invasive bees do not.
>>8241That whole channel is full of educational content.
Beavers are extremely important. The fur trade during early colonization absolutely wrecked their population and probably drove thousands of unique species extinct that depended on beaver ponds.
Working my way through this book and found this
>Penny’s graywater system is a set of four shimmering ponds, complete with water plants, fish, and ducks. Graywater from bath and laundry first flows through a small marsh that brims with bog plants and ornamental grasses. This artificial wetland, just a few feet across, removes most of the graywater’s contaminants and converts them into vegetation. The mostly clean water then trickles over rocks through three small ponds, where it is joined by rainwater from the roof of Penny’s backyard office, home of the Permaculture Institute of Northern California. The final destination is the duck pond, a deep ten-by- ten-foot affair that glimmers with golden koi and ripples with the splashes of mallards. The ducks serve as water-quality monitors. In the system’s early days, before the marsh was installed, the ducks wouldn’t swim in the not-clean-enough water. That was because the residual soap in the ponds washed the oil from their feathers resulting in sinking ducks. Now, the marsh-cleaned water suits them perfectly. Ducks bob happily in clean, treated graywater that has been purified by a backyard wetland
I just love this idea, should be a part of building codes
>>7870>1) all the industries you just described as being involved in industrial agriculture are the exact opposite of labour intensive - they're all incredibly mechanised and automated - their labour is insanely productive. To the point that we've had multiple economic crises about how productive those exact industries are.nah dude. you confuse automation for lack of labor. First of all, not every edible crop has its growing and picking automated. We still get strawberries picked by hand, for example. But even if growing, water, picking were automated you still have at least 5 layers of labor between farm and table. You have sorting, washing, packing, shipping, unpacking, displaying, between the farm and the table. The point of permaculture is to undo this entire process by decreasing the distance between farm and table. The real criticism of permaculture is not the criticisms you're making, but the fact that most people are not property owners and cannot do this even if they wanted to.
>>8295From the article it sounds like he has proof in the form of agroforests.
>Process-based, not input-based: Rather than seeking to add nutrients from outside sources, syntropic agriculture mimics and accelerates natural succession processes to capture carbon, water, nutrients (via wildlife) and diversity in degraded and undeveloped land.>Heavy pruning: To add biomass to the soil, retain soil moisture, open up canopy, increase carbon capture and transpiration.>'Water is planted (‘Água se planta!’)' By introducing plants that store water, and increase transpiration.>'Turn our enemies into our friends.' Farmers should look for plants that are green all year (even in severe drought, especially weeds) and plant many of these. These should include tree such as eucalypts that if managed correctly can help protect and foster less robust species, and produce much organic matter quickly to cover and rebuild the soil.All of this makes sense. Would be interesting to compare point 3 with this >>>/siberia/287079
>>8291vidrel
More geared toward conservation than permaculture but there's a lot of overlap.
>>8335This guy is a reactionary, he complains that industrial agriculture has "very low employment"
If you think about it, he complains that labor productivity was improved through technology. He is opposed to one of the most fundamental prerequisites for progress: improving the means of production. When most people had to work in agriculture, the social system was feudalism and most people were serfs.
The entire premise that industrial food production can't be used to produce nutritious food in environmentally harmonious ways is wrong. Capitalism produces food for sale and it tries to externalize environmental costs, that's why the food in capitalism has low nutritional value and why there is so much environmental damage. What should have been a criticism of capitalism becomes a baseless slander of industrial technology.
It's a damn shame, by going against industrial technology, he basically neutralizes him self, as somebody wanting to turn back time. We should change food production so that all food is highly nutritious, and we should improve agricultural praxis so that it doesn't fuck up the environment, but we should also keep going forward in time and continue using industrial technology to improve labor productivity.
Also GMO technology doesn't have to be bad, the fact that capitalists are abusing this technology, doesn't mean the technology is inherently bad.
Are there no progressive people interested in this ? Like going into the direction of doing something like industrial permaculture with libre opensource GMO.
>>8343>He is opposed to one of the most fundamental prerequisites for progress: improving the means of production. When most people had to work in agriculture, the social system was feudalism and most people were serfs.There is more than one way to improve technology. There is more than one kind of "progress" and more than one way of improving productivity. Capitalism favors whatever shifts the balance toward capital intensive production the quickest, and will sacrifice other sorts of improvements to that end, because that's the kind of improvement that maximizes profits.
>Capitalism produces food for sale and it tries to externalize environmental costs, that's why the food in capitalism has low nutritional value and why there is so much environmental damage.This is only one of the reasons. It's worth noting that the primary way that capitalism externalizes environmental costs is by ignoring that they even exist. Socialism doesn't automatically start recognizing these costs. There's more wrong with the current agricultural model than capitalism. Other modes of production devastated environments too. Even without capitalism a lot of our agricultural methods were causing deforestation, erosion, biodiversity collapse, etc. Capitalism made it even worse, but it's not the only problem or even the fundamental problem with the current agricultural methods, which are unsustainable under any economic system and have been causing slow desertification for all of history.
>It's a damn shame, by going against industrial technology, he basically neutralizes him self, as somebody wanting to turn back time.Reality isn't a dial that you turn either forwards or backwards. There are other methods of agriculture besides tilling and planting monocultures that have been and are currently practiced in various parts of the world. They are less industrialized currently because they are less easy to industrialize, so agribusiness has favored the crops and farming methods that are more easily industrialized (because again their MO is to make the process more capital intensive at the expense of everything else). Adopting other methods and making them more automated is not "turning back time." It's recognizing that the method is harmful and should be replaced with something else, like was done when people realized making food cans and water pipes out of lead was a bad idea.
>Like going into the direction of doing something like industrial permaculture with libre opensource GMO.The issue is that current technology is designed for a completely different method of production than what permaculture is. The kinds of machines in use on most farms are by and large incompaptible since they are designed for mass harvests of monocultures, while permaculture involves inter-planting various species that are harvested at different times. Lawton also points out in the video that a lot of the "efficiency" involved in industrial agriculture involves steps of production that are made mostly obsolete by permaculture. If you can grow the food closer to its destination and with fertilization, irrigation, and pest control integrated into the same system, then the functions of most of the industrial machinery has been fulfilled without the need to build machines. Just because something wasn't assembled in a factory doesn't mean it's not technology. If you can design agricultural land in a way that fulfills these functions (after the way nature works), you have automated the process, just by ingenious use of gardening rather than by creating machines that require their own special industrial production processes to build and maintain.
>>8343it depends there are really two types of permaculture the og type and the grifter pyramid scheme type that focuses on selling courses
in its original form it is completely compatible with communism but not explicit about it and i don't think many people have really thought it through to the end. they have a lot of great ideas but they would need to be adapted
that video kinda sucks cause its "just change the way people think" kinda pure idealism but he is very good in his specific field. i think he has a certain idea about "industrial agriculture" in mind that he is critiquing that means tilling, monocrops, and water soluble fertilizer and he is advocating for compost mulch and living soil. hes definitely not an anprim and advocates using industrial machinery to reshape landscapes for water retention
>>8347No there is no rehabilitating that guy from the video, he unmistakably implied that improving labor productivity was bad. Using more labor to get shit done is turning back time.
I also take note that you also seem to be trying to shift criticism away from capitalism. That makes you a reactionary as well. Today we know about the problems in food production but the capitalists are refusing to fix it. That means they are the problem.
You also attacked socialism, by implying it wouldn't be structurally inclined to fix these problems, that is again making the case that you are a reactionary. A socialist economy that uses advanced cybernetic planning for it's economy, will be able to include nutritional value and ecological costs in it's economic decision making because socialist planning is not limited to a single economic unit of measurement like money. By changing the mode of production from capitalism to socialism we can include as many measurement variables into the economic system until all factors are taken into account. Socialist economics will not have economic externalities, and even complex relations like increasing nutrient density in the food to reduce health costs, will become easy to optimize in economic terms.
I don't care about the specifics of the techniques of production. If you replace a tractor for tilling, sowing and harvesting mono-crops with a different machine that is suited for automating most of the labor inputs needed for permaculture, that is nothing but technical questions to be decided by the people that produce food. Both of these methods are industrial agriculture.
The opposite of industrial agriculture is manual agriculture.
I don't believe you that we can have highly productive food production without mechanization. If traditional non industrial permaculture could indeed do away with the need for expensive machines, without loosing yields or increasing the need for labor, it would have taken over the planet already. I think that you are trying to cheat as far as labor-costs are concerned.
>>8351>it depends there are really two types of permaculture the og type and the grifter pyramid scheme type that focuses on selling coursesthanks, good to know
>i think he has a certain idea about "industrial agriculture" hes definitely not an anprim and advocates using industrial machinery to reshape landscapes for water retentionOh i see, he doesn't understand industrialization in general, and conflates it with specific instances. Yeah that's going to create a lot of confusion.
>>8355 🤡
>I also take note that you also seem to be trying to shift criticism away from capitalism. That makes you a reactionary as well. Today we know about the problems in food production but the capitalists are refusing to fix it. That means they are the problem. You are literally just a contrarian.
>You also attacked socialism, by implying it wouldn't be structurally inclined to fix these problemsNo, I said it doesn't automatically fix problems that predate capitalism and have existed across multiple modes of production.
>A socialist economy that uses advanced cybernetic planning for it's economy, will be able to include nutritional value and ecological costs in it's economic decision making because socialist planning is not limited to a single economic unit of measurement like money.This is a wildly wrong and even dangerous take. Cybernetic planning can help to optimize at a marginal level, but economic planning algorithms are not going to invent or innovate the production methods in a qualitative way, only a quantitative one by optimizing inputs and outputs. There's still a need for intelligently evaluating and engineering things. Cybercommunism isn't a magic bullet. Don't be a technofetishist for fuck's sake.
>I don't care about the specifics of the techniques of production.>that is nothing but technical questions to be decided by the people that produce food."Nothing but technical questions" describes the material conditions on which the economy depends.
>I don't believe you that we can have highly productive food production without mechanization.Nobody said we should completely abandon mechanization. It's just not the only possible way to improve productivity.
>If traditional non industrial permaculture could indeed do away with the need for expensive machines, without loosing yields or increasing the need for labor, it would have taken over the planet alreadyThis is like saying "If public transport by light rail could indeed do away with the need for expensive personal automobiles without losing transit efficiency or increasing the need for labor, it would have taken over the cities already." This isn't even remotely the way that capitalism works.
>>8378Okay it snot actually that flat, according the the maps theres a 2 foot drop over 18 meters but ive dug a bunch of swales this summer and they never fill with water, but maybe that's a good thing? I basically only put them in to satisfy my childlike fascination with water management but I guess it wasnt meant to be.
While Im here Id like to ask if anyone knows of good permaculture authors who focus on cold climates if not Canada specifically. Im following a lot of local peepz but a proper book would be nice. Ive scoured the internet and the one that gets recommended the most is pdfrel but I still think it applies too much to places like the US and UK which sure, theyre temperate but they dont freeze over for half the year like Canada, Scandinavia Russia etc does. I know of Richard Perkins in Sweden but he's more of a farmer/rancher than a gardener
>>8389imagine flushing your feces into the fucking ocean when you could reclaim its composting benefits
We should definitely put it through waste treatment first, though, because we have a lot of heavy metals in there that we don't want accumulating. Scientists even found that you can extract precious metals from feces in a way that makes you money lol.
>>8384>but ive dug a bunch of swales this summer and they never fill with waterMight not be getting enough rain. The good news is they are probably preventing water runoff. However you might be seeing evaporation take a lot of water rather than the soil absorbing it. Depends on the conditions you have.
>cold climate / Canada materialIDK but be advised climate change will alter your conditions in the future. I have already seen my warmer area change its climate classification for what it can grow.
Should we make a separate thread more geared towards gardening? Im shitting this one up with my blog posts
>>8394Thanks for all of your informative responses friend.
We would definitely want to treat the water, and Im sure you know theres organic ways of doing so, vidrel.
Apparently even in a humble rainwater harvesting tank, the sludge that builds up in the lower levels is a huge heavy metal sink
>>8410IDK if this is what youre talking about, Im not the resident expert but Ive heard that water and even rocks, windbreaks etc help to create microclimates because of, among other things, the heat exchange, which can be pretty important in colder climates like where im at. Using these methods would allow you to grow things you normally couldnt in your hardiness zone.
Guy in vidrel is the one I heard this from.
Trying to wrap my head around composting and it seems like every guide assumes you can get unlimited amounts of free stuff, whether its woodchips from arborists, coffee grinds from cafes, animal manure from farms, the list goes on. Ive tried all of these places with no luck. I was able to get free woodchips one time in my 7 years of gardening and that was because a neighbor brought a tree down and hooked me up cuz he knows I would use them. Otherwise the biomass industry is bustling, compost will run you a few bucks per gallon bucket even from community gardens
You can only go so far with grass clippings and the limbs you can steal from your neighbors trees that hang into your yard. I will even go out at night after a big storm and round up all the stray limbs, and in the fall I will steal peoples yard waste bags from in front of their house kek
i need moar
anyways I just planted so many fucking perennials im giddy with excitement.
black cherries, elderberries, chokeberries, raspberries, strawberries, and more. All of it is native so I hope the birds appreciate because I sure as shit dont get to harvest anything
>>8436>Keep a haystack (doesnt matter if it gets wet over time) next to the compost and everytime you bring kitchen waste etc. put a layer hay on topThis is definitely where im screwing up, I put in plenty of nitrogen in grass and food scraps but I often struggle to get carbon outside of the fall. Its my fault for not planning better though, usually I just mow the leaves like a dunce. If in the fall I was to collect them into a pile to rot along with the woody debris I get instead of wasting it on the grass or pollinator gardens at best, I can probably make it last throughout the rest of the year
>>8442damn thats a good idea. Ill be doing this unintentionally when I take out a few apple trees that didnt pan out, they still served a role in helping other get established and improving my soil. Maybe Ill replace one with maple or something.
Thanks chiefs
The Natives versus Exotics Debate
>First, a word on terminology. The term invasive is emotionally loaded with negative connotations. The term implies that a species by itself can invade, yet the ability to invade is not held by any one species. Whether an organism can invade a new landscape depends on the interaction between it and its environment, both living and inanimate. Dropped into one new home, a species may thrive; in another it may fail utterly. Calling a species “invasive” is not good science. Following David Jacke in his book, Edible Forest Gardens, I will use the word opportunistic, which more accurately gives the sense that a species needs particular conditions to behave as it does. Many unruly exotic species are insipidly tame in their home habitat. Even the words native and exotic have their difficulties, although I continue to use them. Does exotic mean a species wasn’t here before you got here, or before the first botanist did, before Columbus, the first human, or what? Species are constantly in motion. We need to rethink these words and why we use them.
>Gardening with native plants has become not merely popular in recent years, it’s become a cause célèbre. Supporters of natural gardening can become quite exercised when someone recommends nonnative plants. Governments, agribusinesses, and conservation groups have spent millions of dollars trying to eradicate “exotic” species. Parks departments across the nation have enacted native-only policies for trails, playgrounds, and other public places. The arguments for natives have merit: of course we want to preserve our native species and their habitat. But much of the energy spent on yanking exotics and planting natives is misdirected and futile, evidenced by the failure of so many restoration projects in which the nonnatives quietly reestablish after the funding or labor pool runs out. Without major changes in our land-use practices, the campaign to eradicate exotic plants approaches futility. A little ecological knowledge shows why. Look at most opportunistic plants. European bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle swarm over New England’s forest margins. Kudzu chokes the roadsides and forest edges in the South. Purple loosestrife sweeps across the waterways of both coasts and the Midwest, and Russian olive springs up as small forests in the West. In nearly every case, these plants are invading disturbed land and disrupted ecosystems, fragmented and degraded by grazing, logging, dams, road building, pollution, and other human activity. Less-disturbed ecosystems are much more resistant to opportunistic species, though opportunists can move into them if they establish at entry points such as road cuts and logging sites.
>One pro-native garden writer describes what he calls “the kudzu phenomenon, where an exotic displaces natives unless we constantly intervene.” But our intervention is the problem. We assume nature is making a mistake when it creates hybrid, fast-healing thickets, so rather than allowing disturbed habitat to stabilize, we keep disturbing it. We can spray and uproot bittersweet and honeysuckle all we want, but they’ll come right back. These are species that love sunlit edges, and we’ve carved forests into countless tiny pieces that have more edge than interior, creating perfect habitat for these exotics. The same goes for kudzu, loosestrife, and nearly all the rest. In the East, purple loosestrife followed the nineteenth-century canals into wetlands; and in the West it has barreled down irrigation ditches into marshland and ponds. Humans create perfect conditions for exotics to thrive. I’ve often heard blame put on one or another opportunistic species when a native species goes locally extinct. That’s understandable. When we lose something we love, we search for a scapegoat, and a newly arrived species makes a ready target. But virtually every time I’ve examined that charge, it turns out that the place had first been severely disturbed by development, logging, or other human use. The opportunist moved in after the primary damage was done and often in direct response to it.
>Opportunistic plants crave disturbance, and they love edges. Those are two things development spawns in huge quantity. Unless we stop creating edge and disturbance, our eradication efforts will be in vain, except in tiny patches. The best long-term hope for eliminating most opportunistic species lies in avoiding soil disturbance, restoring intact forest, and shading the newcomers out with other species. In other words, we need to create landscapes that are more ecologically mature. Opportunistic plants are, with a few exceptions such as English ivy, almost exclusively pioneer species that need sunlight, churned-up ground, and, often, poor soil. For example, kudzu, Scot’s broom, and Russian olive are nitrogen fixers whose role is to build soil fertility. So they prosper in farmed-out fields and overgrazed rangeland and are nature’s way of rebuilding fertility with what is available.
>Here’s why opportunistic plants are so successful. When we clear land or carve a forest into fragments, we’re creating lots of open niches. All that sunny space and bare soil is just crying out to be colonized by light- and fertility-absorbing green matter. Nature will quickly conjure up as much biomass as possible to capture the bounty, by seeding low-growing “weeds” into a clearing or, better yet, sprouting a tall thicket stretching into all three dimensions to more effectively absorb light and develop deep roots. That’s why forest margins are often an impenetrable tangle of shrubs, vines, and small trees: there’s plenty of light to harvest. Just inside the edge, though, where there is less light and little disturbance, forests are usuallyopen and spacious.
>When humans make a clearing, nature leaps in, working furiously to rebuild an intact humus and fungal layer, harvest energy, and reconstruct all the cycles and connections that have been severed. A thicket of fast-growing pioneer plants, packing a lot of biomass into a small space, is a very effective way to do this. Permaculture’s cooriginator, David Holmgren, calls these rampantly growing blends of natives and exotics “recombinant ecologies” and believes that they are nature’s effective strategy of assembling available plants to heal damaged land. Current research is showing the value and healing power of these new ecologies. If we clear out the thicket in the misguided belief that meadows should forever remain meadows even under heavy irrigation, or that all forest edges should have tidy, open understories, we are just setting the recovery process back. Nature will then relentlessly return to work, filling in with pioneer plants again. And she doesn’t care if a nitrogen fixer or a soil-stabilizing plant arrived via continental drift or a bulldozer’s treads, as long as it can quickly stitch a functioning ecosystem together.
>The sharply logged edge of a woodland abutted by a lawn or field—so common in suburbs—is a perfect home for sun-loving exotics. If we plant low trees and shrubs to soften these margins, thus swallowing up the sunlight that pierces the forest edges, the niche for the opportunist will disappear. Simply removing the exotic won’t do much good except in a highly managed yard. The plant will come right back into the perfect habitat that waits for it. That’s one reason that herbicide manufacturers are helping fund the campaign for native plants. They know a repeat customer when they see one. Nature abhors a vacuum—create one, and she’ll rush in with whatever’s handy. To eradicate opportunists, the habitat for it must be changed into a more mature, less hospitable landscape. The conditions that support the opportunist must be eliminated.
>This approach is far from “live and let live” and more effective than an eternity of weed pulling. Pioneer weedscapes may be nature’s way, but most people don’t want their yard edges to be a tangled thicket. Yards can be kept free from opportunists, particularly in small spaces and if we’re willing to be persistent for several seasons. But it’s hard to succeed when we’re stuck on the old “clear, spray, and curse” treadmill. An easier and more productive strategy is to learn from the more mature forest edges near us. Again, observing nature can teach us what species naturally nestle into the sunny margins of old woods. Look at these places, and you may find dogwood, cherry, crabapple, alder, or small varieties of maple. The species vary around the country, but edge-loving trees and shrubs are good candidates for jump-starting a yard or wood-lot margin toward a more mature ecological phase. Plant them at those overgrown woody edges to fill in the gaps before something you don’t want takes hold. You can’t fight nature—nature always bats last—but you can sometimes be first to get where it’s going.
>The nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Henry Huxley likened nature to a brilliant opponent in chess: “We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.” Nature has a patience that humans lack. We may uproot some bittersweet or kudzu for a few seasons, but nature will keep reseeding it, year in, year out, waiting until we tire of the battle. Nature takes the long view.
>It is only our limited time frame that creates the whole “natives versus exotics” controversy. Wind, animals, sea currents, and continental drift have always dispersed species into new environments. Remember that for millions of years there have been billions of birds, traveling hundreds or thousands of miles, each with a few seeds in its gut or stuck to the mud on its feet. And each of these many billions of seeds, from thousands of species, is ready to sprout wherever the bird stops. The planet has been awash in surging, swarming species movements since life began. The fact that it is not one great homogeneous tangled weed lot is persuasive testimony to the fact that intact ecosystems are very difficult to invade.
>Our jet age mobility has arguably accelerated the movement of species in unnerving and often economically damaging ways. But eventually an opportunistic species, after a boom-and-bust period, comes into equilibrium with its surroundings. It may take a decade or a century, time spans that seem like an eternity to a home owner contending with bittersweet or star thistle. But one day the new species becomes “implicated” into the local ecosystem, developing natural enemies and encountering unwelcome environments that keep it in check.
>“Native” is merely a question of perspective: is a species native to this hillside, or this county, the bioregion, continent, or perhaps just to this planet? I see a certain irony in immigrant-descended Americans cursing “invasive exotics” for displacing native species. And often an opportunistic species is playing an important role, where nature is working on a problem that we may not recognize and using the best tools available. For example, purple loosestrife, perhaps the poster child of exotic-species eradication enthusiasts, turns out to be superb at both tolerating and cleaning up polluted water. It, like many other opportunistic species, is screaming out to us that there is a problem—contaminated water—and is one of nature’s best agents for solving the problem by scouring out the pollutants. Also, research is showing that once pollution levels recede to relative cleanliness, the loosestrife dies back. Other researchers have found that, contrary to assumptions, loosestrife patches support just as many native pollinators and birds as surrounding areas of native plants. This shows that we need to look deeper into our reasons for demonizing certain species.
>Of course, it is foolish to deliberately introduce a species known to be locally opportunistic. Permaculturists use a hierarchy of safety for choosing plants. First, use a native to fill the desired role if at all possible. If no natives for that niche exist, then use a tested exotic. Only after a great deal of research would a person then consider a small-scale introduction of a new exotic; and, to be honest, I have never done that, don’t personally know anyone who has, and don’t recommend it. There are thousands of species that have been tried in many habitats, and if one from that huge assortment won’t work, perhaps what you have in mind doesn’t need to be done.
>I love native plants and grow them whenever appropriate. But nearly the whole issue—from branding certain fast-spreading, soil-building pioneer plants as evil, to creating the conditions that favor their spread—stems from not understanding nature’s ways. When we think ecologically, the problem either evaporates as a misunderstanding or reveals solutions inherent in the life cycle of the opportunist.A plant will thrive only if conditions are right for it. Modify those conditions—eliminate edge, stop disturbing soil, cast shade with trees, clean up pollution—and that opportunist will almost surely cease to be a problem.
>I’m also uneasy with the adversarial, polarized relationship with plants that an overzealous enthusiasm for natives can foster. It can result in a “natives good, everything else bad” frame of mind that heats the gardener’s blood pressure to boiling at the sight of any exotic plant. Rage is not the best emotion to be carrying into the garden. And we’re all utterly reliant on nonnatives for so many of our needs. Look at our diet. Where did this morning’s breakfast come from? I’d be surprised if many Americans regularly consume a single plant native to their state. About the only common food crops native to North America are sunflowers, hops, squash, and some nuts and berries. Nearly everything we eat originated on other continents. Get rid of exotics, and most of us would be pretty hungry until we learned to prepare local roots, berries, nuts, and greens.
>>8451You might think this but lawns are too polluted by
>lead leached from garden hoses>glyphosate from RoundupTM and similar chemicals from other weed killers>various other poisons from pesticides>various heavy metals from runoff from roof shingles>various contaminants accumulating from car exhaustYou could technically do it but it would have pretty bad health consequences if you don't at least have a transition period where you decontaminate the soil and remodel the housing units and swap out the transportation for something that isn't actively contributing to that pollution. There are some solutions for that, at least. Sunflowers are pretty good at pulling contaminants from soil, but you have to then harvest the plants and dispose of them properly to actually remove the contaminants from the environment.
>>8454Well that's a nice dose of hopium. Thanks anon.
>>8455>human intervention isn't separate from nature>but we're going to win the "chess game" thoThese statements contradict each other. The fact that humans are a part of nature means that we can never "win the game." However much we "master" nature, what we are fundamentally doing is submitting ourselves to the laws of nature, just a particular subset of its natural laws (physics, engineering, etc instead of ecology).
>>8457I think that the human tendency for modifying the environment will eventually culminate in the ability to engineer entire biospheres. There is no contradictions.
The problems we have today is not the fact that we mess with flora and fauna, it's perhaps more that our abilities are not yet advanced enough to realize our ambitions . That and capitalism, that's really shit at accounting for externalities.
>>8464article:
https://archive.ph/4d1mF
>Wearable biospheres>These living, breathing, bio-engineered sources of energy function together as a makeshift factory, providing each space-suit with all the essentials necessary to sustain life in outer space. These digestive-track inspired 3-D printed suits are the result of a collaborative design created by MIT professor, Neri Oxman, and German designers, Christolph Bader and Dominik Kolb.You can pretty readily find Oxman in particular talking about these kinds of projects.
>>8470Also people forget that there's social utility for having community gardens that you can walk through as a park and just pick the fruit that's ready right off the tree etc. You can have a vegetable garden built into a housing unit such that people can just walk into it to grab some fruits and vegetables to put in a basket and take home. It doesn't take any special skills or any more labor to do that than it takes to go to the grocery, and it's actually doing the gathering behavior that grocery stores sink a lot of design effort into simulating.
Stuff like eggs or grains take more effort but not necessarily more in total than it takes under capitalist mechanized production. And tbh the different elements of food production are things that should be part of general knowledge in the same way that cooking should be, since regardless of what other technology we develop we still are going to need food production.
>>8472Ya. If anything the idea if the food industry should be deconstructed and instead everyone, especially men, should be taught to cook from raw ingredients.
Also, there's an issue of excess production. What if nobody picks some oranges and they're wasted? Well, for this we need distribution and transportation. But it will be orders if magnitude less than the current system. For this we also need excess labor. It can involve labor quotas saying you must work your monthly quota similar to old agricultural pagan festivals where the whole community got together.
>>8472>Stuff like eggs or grains take more effort but not necessarily more in total than it takes under capitalist mechanized production.>>8474> If anything the idea if the food industry should be deconstructedBefore mechanization was a thing 90% of labor was used to make food.
After mechanization was introduced and fully developed the labor share on food production fell to about 3%
I do like the idea of community gardens and preparing meals your self instead of eating processed fast food. But It would be crazy to go back to an agrarian mode of production. You cannot turn back the clock on machine automation. If you want to do permaculture methods instead of traditional farming methods you still need to use lots of machines as labor saving devices.
>>8476>After mechanization was introduced and fully developed the labor share on food production fell to about 3%That doesn't account for the labor that goes into every aspect of the food industry besides the direct production of food, including all the labor involved in the industries that support agriculture, like producing fertilizers or the machines that are involved in said mechanization.
But putting that aside, one of the most common ways that people express alienation under capitalism is in the form of separation from the production that sustains them. Fantasies about growing your own food are ridiculously common. Video games simulating agriculture or even just survivalism are wildly popular. Maximum production efficiency (for a certain view of efficient - capitalism wastes a huge amount of food) is not the only thing to consider here. Some things could be produced better in larger areas of dedicated farmland, but that would still benefit from an intelligently designed system where crops are interplanted rather than isolated as monocultures etc.
I think what the other anon was getting at is that we really need to better integrate living areas and productive areas into mixed use urban planning that includes agricultural production. Nobody wants to fully return to agrarian production, just bring that form of production closer to the destination and integrate it more into the average person's lifestyle when it comes to the end stages (harvesting and preparing food).
Not everyone needs to or should be planting and harvesting all the time, but everyone should have enough training to function at that capacity if they needed to. If something were to happen to disrupt our large scale supply chain we would need to support the population while the problem was being fixed. At the moment we do not really have a way to do that.
>If you want to do permaculture methods instead of traditional farming methods you still need to use lots of machines as labor saving devices.The key labor saving "device" in permaculture is the fact that when you intelligently design the system, it can function productively with little input. Instead of having to repeatedly plow fields, drop fertilizer, spread pesticides, and so on, you account for these needs with the species you include. Plants and animals function best when they are in an ecosystem that suits their needs. Industrial farming we use today attempts to simulate this by having people or machines fulfill those needs with products manufactured to do so, but you can bring in species to do all of those things. If you have worms in your soil you can attract moles which will aerate the soil and improve irrigation (and are carnivores who won't eat your plants). Many plants fertilize themselves by dropping leaves seasonally, but you can also co-plant specific species that will improve the contents of the soil, particularly plants that fix nitrogen and other elements or which can tape into minerals deeper in the soil. Pests are best controlled by introducing predators, many of which are attracted to certain plants or may be kept as livestock (like chickens). Pest-predatory species double as an extra source of fertilizer.
The problem with your critique is that you are thinking of technology in terms of building a machine in a factory rather than more generally as arranging forces and materials in a particular way. The former is pushed onto people by capitalism because a machine made in a factory is the kind of technology you can most easily commodify, and it's dangerous to bring that thinking into socialism.
>>8474>What if nobody picks some oranges and they're wasted?They'd probably fall to the ground and be recycled into the system just like happens in nature with uneaten food. That includes animals scavenging the food, which is normal and fine because it will help fertilize the soil.
>>8477>That doesn't account for the labor that goes into every aspect of the food industry besides the direct production of food, including all the labor involved in the industries that support agriculture, like producing fertilizers or the machines that are involved in said mechanization.Giant chemical production plants for fertilizers usually only need 100 to 300 people to run it and can produce enough fertilizer to support food production for tens or hundreds of millions of people. You seem to have no idea how ridiculously high labor productivity in primary sector industries has become.
>The key labor saving "device" in permaculture is the fact that when you intelligently design the system, it can function productively with little input. Instead of having to repeatedly plow fields, drop fertilizer, spread pesticides, and so on, you account for these needs with the species you include. Plants and animals function best when they are in an ecosystem that suits their needs.That sounds very good, but how can that be true ?
Permaculture isn't new, people have been doing that for thousands of years.
People in the pre-industrial past were not stupid, if there was a way to design a biological system with an array of flora and fauna that just spits out lots of food without much labor inputs they would not have worked them self's to the bone manually plowing fields with oxen and horses.
Your claims about the labor inputs of permaculture do not pass the sniff test.
I have done a cursory online search and actually existing permaculture farms may have a tendency to subsidize them self with education rackets where students are required to pay money and donate free labor
https://medium.com/invironment/permaculture-design-courses-the-free-labor-problem-152000bb420bI don't know how common this is but my guess is that permaculture in it's present form is very labor intensive compared to other methods.
If you were to be advocating for a scheme that proposes modifying/replacing tractors and combine-harvesters with farming machinery designed to do permaculture specific tasks , as in mechanized permaculture, i could see this as something interesting worth investigating and trying. But if you insist that you can make the plants and animals do all the labor, i can't take you seriously. People have been trying to do that for at least 10k years, if that was possible it would already be the default farming technique. I get the same vibe from you as those people futilely trying to build "free energy" perpetual motion machines who endlessly tweak their mechanical contraptions, just replace mechanical contraptions with plant compositions.
If you position permaculture in opposition to industrial production, it's never going to catch on. What you are doing is not effective advocacy.
>>8481>i can't take you seriously>I get the same vibe from you>it's never going to catch on>Your claims do not pass the sniff test. This isn't twitter.
>Giant chemical production plants for fertilizers usually only need 100 to 300 people to run it Where do they get the raw materials though? Factories don't make things out of thin air.
The inputs for fertilizers involve mining for phosphorous and calcium components which is not sustainable and in many parts of the world is still labor intensive (and a lot of the stuff used in industrialized countries gets imported from countries where it's labor intensive production). And the factory has to be built first, as well as integrated into the production supply chain. All of this is additional process that is often not necessary when fertilizer can be produced nearby or on site with the proper organisms. And that's to say nothing of integrating waste disposal systems to recycle human waste into fertilizer.
>People in the pre-industrial past were not stupid, if there was a way to design a biological system with an array of flora and fauna that just spits out lots of food without much labor inputs they would not have worked them self's to the bone manually plowing fields with oxen and horses.Well they did that in some parts of the world while in others people figured it out. Either the premise that people will figure out a solution if it's possible is wrong or the conditions simply didn't allow this in many places. Or both. Another likely reason is that permaculture and similar methods make it harder to establish property boundaries that are necessary for a ruling class to emerge. Fields tend to have clear borders while a food forest blends into the natural woodland and people's living spaces. How food production is controlled has huge political implications. Another big reason is that deforestation was carried out in many places (especially Europe) which significantly reduced biodiversity making it harder to create a full ecosystem of production. Desertification is a major issue with cutting down forests to operate monoculture fields, because it further reduces the fertility of the land and erodes it.
>I have done a cursory online search and actually existing permaculture farms may have a tendency to subsidize them self with education rackets where students are required to pay money and donate free labor That's not an analysis of the required labor inputs. It's just pointing out part of what (the trademarked version of) permaculture does. Which they do because part of the goal is to educate people. Free labor from students might be dubious, but people in capitalism follow the rules of capitalism. You have to actually do things to be trained, and the money they make and save allows them to promote the process more. Nothing is stopping people from learning it on their own or from elsewhere and implementing it. There are plenty of examples unrelated to the Permaculture™ education industry if that's what you don't like.
>If you were to be advocating for a scheme that proposes modifying/replacing tractors and combine-harvesters with farming machinery designed to do permaculture specific tasks , as in mechanized permacultureThe problem with this is that those machines and monoculture have developed in tandem and mechanized permaculture would need to pretty much go back to the drawing board with machines because by design you don't have huge fields of a single plant that you can mass-harvest. Part of the reason why some parts of the world did things that way is because once you start going in that direction, the optimizations required for that method make it more difficult to pivot into any other approach.
>But if you insist that you can make the plants and animals do all the laborNobody said all the labor. The point is to leverage what the organisms will naturally do and reduce the need for mechanizing in the automation process. There's more to efficient production than the ratio of labor to capital. If you can produce the same amount or more with equal labor but less capital, it's "more labor intensive" even if people do the same amount of labor, simply because the capital side of the ratio was simplified. And the truth of the matter is that the organisms are already doing a significant portion of the work in a physical sense, but this is simply ignored in your calculations in the same way as businesses ignore externalities like pesticide and fertilizer runoff. The notion that we need to keep mechanizing and definitely can't reverse because of the labor:capital ratio is the same kind of abstract economics brain rot as "line go up."
>>8483> fertilizers is not sustainableCurrent methods are not sustainable , true, but they do need very few labor inputs.
Industrial fertilizer production could however be made sustainable, the science and engineering problems are solved, it's just that capitalists don't like to invest in upgrading their means of production if they still can milk profits from the old capital stock.
Upgrading fertilizer production to sustainable techniques would of course also require labor inputs, but that's going to be a one-time expense, not an ongoing one.
Remember I'm replying to your original assertion that industrial food production has high labor inputs, which is patently false.
You have indirectly made an additional argument that industrial production can't be sustainable, that is an altogether different point, and in my opinion also false.
Industrial production means human labor-power enhanced by machines, there is nothing inherently unsustainable in this. You appear to be making a false generalization, because currently some (by no means all) industrial praxis is not sustainable. Alot of industrial un-sustainability can be explained with capitalist investment reluctance, and has little to do with industrial production in general.
>they did permaculture in some parts of the worldIf permaculture had used less labor inputs, these parts of the world would have been able to develop faster and become the dominant system.
Remember that making food production less labor intensive paved the way for societal and technological development.
Given that before the industrial revolution and the green revolution, roughly 90% of all labor was spend on food production, having a farming technique that required less labor would have been a huge advantage. There is no way that the people with the inferior food production method are able to become the dominant powers in the world during that time . Even if we stipulate something preposterous like permaculture food makes people peaceful and unwilling to conquer, they would still have developed so much faster that they would have been indomitable. There would be peaceful scifi countries in the world that would have been invulnerable to conquistadors showing up with sail/steam-boat gunships, filled with musket wielding soldiers.
>Nothing is stopping people from learning it on their own or from elsewhere and implementing it. There are plenty of examples unrelated to the Permaculture™ education industry if that's what you don't like.So what prevents permaculture from taking over ? Capitalism does try to minimize investment into machine capital and labor inputs, you are saying that perma-culture uses less labor and less machines. it doesn't add up. Why are they still scamming students instead off out-competing big-agro-business ?
>The problem with this is that those machines and monoculture have developed in tandem and mechanized permaculture would need to pretty much go back to the drawing board with machines This sounds true, but why is that a problem ? Having to design new machines hasn't stopped us before.
>The point is to leverage the organismsNo the point is to make food, and the ultimate goal is to have a hole in the wall that will molecularly construct a cup of tea from a material-cartridge if you say "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!"
>There's more to efficient production than the ratio of labor to capital. If you can produce the same amount or more with equal labor but less capital, it's "more labor intensive" even if people do the same amount of labor, simply because the capital side of the ratio was simplified.I only care about the ratio of labor to capital because there's a maximum amount of capital that can be sustained at any given technical level, that's relevant on a societal level and i don't see the connection here.
Not sure where this came from, but to be clear i think un-mechanised permaculture would produce less food per unit of labor power inputs.
>And the truth of the matter is that the organisms are already doing a significant portion of the work in a physical sense, but this is simply ignored in your calculationsthat's true, but I only care about human labor, plants are just biological machines.
> businesses ignore externalities like pesticide and fertilizer runoff.that's also true, but the environmental cause has to be about building cleaner machines not going back to working people harder
>>8481>Giant chemical production plants for fertilizers usually only need 100 to 300 people to run itGreat, but you forgot all the workers that run the companies that give them their input raw materials, transport them, build the cars that transport them, drill and process the oil that powers the transportation, maintain the financial system that links all of this together, etc.
>>8481>People in the pre-industrial past were not stupid, if there was a way to design a biological system with an array of flora and fauna that just spits out lots of food without much labor inputs they would not have worked them self's to the bone manually plowing fields with oxen and horses.Yeah and that's exactly what they did in many cases. But modern agricultural production allows predictable and uniform production of food. Permaculture is sporadic and harder to understand and use the products, but it makes better effective use of the soil, square footage, and takes care of the soil and creates micro-climates. You have to look at the greater system not inputs and outputs, you have to look dialectically at what it means when a region of land is enclosed and turned into and input output system
>>8481>I have done a cursory online search and actually existing permaculture farms may have a tendency to subsidize them self with education rackets where students are required to pay money and donate free labor It's not profitable, it's not compatible with capitalism, but that's the point
>>8481>But if you insist that you can make the plants and animals do all the labor, i can't take you seriouslyWhy are you just making up shit?
>>8484>I only care about the ratio of labor to capital because there's a maximum amount of capital that can be sustained at any given technical level, that's relevant on a societal level and i don't see the connection here.>Not sure where this came from, but to be clear i think un-mechanised permaculture would produce less food per unit of labor power inputs.Nothing's going to replace mechanically harvestable fields of grain for net efficiency of human labor for resultant calories. But you aren't realizing this will be stopped by climate change. When water supplies rapidly dry up and shift, when climate change makes entire regions not able to produce similar crops, when massive swarms of disease and pests can take out entire monoculture fields of crops, the efficiency will not be maintained.
Only permaculture food forests, note the "perma" in its name, can keep self-maintaining ecosystems of food producing plants thriving. If you don't think we can rapidly produce robots to reduce the human labor if we truly needed to, think again
>Drones that automatically scan forest for harvestable food above and below ground>Communication systems that tell workers where to go to harvest>Robots that come and harvest it and transport it to transportation vehiclesNone of this is developed because permaculture has not been done in the modern age on any mass scale. And it won't because the capital requirements are too high, and profit opportunity low. It's a socialist technology
>>8484>Given that before the industrial revolution and the green revolution, roughly 90% of all labor was spend on food production, having a farming technique that required less labor would have been a huge advantage. There is no way that the people with the inferior food production method are able to become the dominant powers in the world during that time .The roadblock in most cases was lack of resources. The average peasant only had access to the seeds of certain local plants, whereas today people around the world can obtain seeds to grow anything that will survive in their environment. And even if peasants could get their hands on any seeds, they wouldn't know anything about the foreign plants in terms of what they need or their effects on the environment around them. Today we have the internet and most people could feasibly research these things.
Additionally, it was typical to practice widespread logging both to provide lumber for building and to better control the land (it's easier for bandits and rebels to hide among the trees). The loss of forests isn't just the loss of trees, but all the other ecological niches in a forest biome. Farmland and grazing land is a very different environment that supports different (and fewer) species. There used to be people surviving on agroforestry as a kind of intermediate method between gathering and "agriculture." In many cases they were conquered by other people who were driven to expand their territory. While "traditional" agricultural methods allow for a division of labor, they also degrade the land and require acquisition of new territory to farm, which acted as a driver to take over cultures practicing sustainable or regenerative food production, replacing that with "traditional" farming.
>>8485Current industrial food production really does not involve a lot of labor-power, that's not some capitalist accounting cheat, that's looking at the entire system. People in the past were not too stupid to use permaculture,
seriously wtf?. They also were able to modify food so that it lasts a long time, and they were able to plan for sporadic production. And square footage of soil is not that important, it doesn't justify wasting more labor power than necessary
I think un-mechanized permaculture is not profitable because it's using too much labor. While socialism doesn't care about profits, it still cares about getting stuff done with as little labor as possible. Nobody likes to work more than they have to.
>>8487>The net labor to produce one edible food though is much lower with permaculture since entire industries and supply chains are avoided.I could believe that if you were advocating for mechanized permaculture, maybe the industrial stack for perma-culture would use less labor. However Industrial systems tend to be orders of magnitude more effective compared to manual labor praxis, in term of the ratio for labor input versus production output. What you are saying isn't even remotely plausible.
>>8488>Nothing's going to replace mechanically harvestable fields of grain for net efficiency of human labor for resultant calories. Well, lets not be to hasty, there's always fully synthetic food production that might eventually get more efficient, and maybe also more palatable ;)
>But you aren't realizing this will be stopped by climate change. When water supplies rapidly dry up and shift, when climate change makes entire regions not able to produce similar crops, when massive swarms of disease and pests can take out entire monoculture fields of crops, the efficiency will not be maintained.If that's true and the situation for food security gets as dire as you say, i guess maybe synthetic food production will get more popular. You know the artificial starch-synthesizer powered by the nuclear reactor next to it might not look as bad when food is super expensive and scarce.
>rapidly produce robots to reduce human labor >Drones that automatically scan forest for harvestable food above and below ground>Communication systems that tell workers where to go to harvest>Robots that come and harvest it and translport it to transportation vehiclesBig thumbs up for that plan
This sounds like perma-culture i could get behind.
> It's a socialist technologymaybe
>>8496>fully synthetic food productionThis is basically magical thinking. Synthetic food production still requires raw inputs and all the industries required to make the food factory exist. You criticize permaculture for being impractical and you posit literal food replicators from Star Trek as the real viable future.
Bro you are dumb as shit.
>>8503>Gardening is a very popular hobbyYeah. The poor are actively prevented from having a place to grow their food. Historically peasants and slaves were allowed (forced) to grow their own food to survive. But the proletariat is not even allowed to do that, they're forced to purchase it in commodity form. Beautiful nature and gardens are reserved for the bourgeoisie or wealth proletariat.
I want this for everyone, even the poor, and for it to be livable. This is do-able, in fact I would posit that the native plants of every bio-region are enough to survive on when placed into a well designed food forest. There are exceptions and help that can be had by non-native plants and even transporting food though, that doesn't need to be abolished
>>8498>You're so desperate for things to get badYou brought that up stop projecting. You have to admit that if things get bad, within the current structures, industrial food synthesizers are way more likely than billions of people starting their own perma-food-garden, at least 50% of the population lives in cities where food-gardens can't possibly produce enough for bare survival subsistence level. Do you think all those people will move, and start the largest migration in human history, or do you think they go for a techno-fix that lets them continue with their life-style even if it doesn't taste very good.
>>8501Nuclear reactors could also power farming robots for mechanized perma-culture.
And i dislike you to, because you want to have a nature-essentialism circle jerk, and exclude discussion about applying industrial methods to stuff like perma-culture
>>8503>People like making their own food though. Gardening is a very popular hobby.it's fun as a hobby, sure, but if you have to live of that, it's not fun at all, it turns into brutally hard work.
>>8505>This is basically magical thinking.No , it's near future stuff, the basic food stuffs can be made.
>Synthetic food production still requires raw inputsSure but there is no reliance on weather or climate conditions.
>You criticize permaculture for being impractical and you posit literal food replicators from Star Trek as the real viable future.No i don't think perma-culture is impractical, i'm criticizing the people that do not want to apply industrial methods to perma-culture.
>you posit literal food replicators from Star Trek as the real viable future.As an aspirational goal, so people can understand the direction it's going.
I know scifi replicators are a bit unrealistic, if you move that many individual atoms quickly they would heat up from friction and Picard's tea would be as hot as the sun and burn him to death just from standing next it, but that's not really the point.
>>8513also if the point of the post was to say
>lobsters have legs so Idk if they will stayI did indeed laugh
>>8533>I really want to but can't get landWhich is why the whole permaculture bullshit is nothing but a pettit boug or actual boug bullshit. It's likt dong charity without doung actual charity, but still acting like you are saving the world.
Permaculture is mostly an overblown fashion trend. Most of it is not really applicable to to climates outside of subtropics. And where it is applicable it's not going outside of some wealthy snob garden because it can't compete in profits with industrial agriculture techniques.
>>8538Imma grow herbs and maybe veggies in a terrarium in my cupboard just to spite you
Also seedbombing
>>8540lessee the coolest method I can think of for the cupboard terrarium is red light emiting diodes a few blue and hook it all up to a battery and a solar panel in the window
I suspect it'd grow interesting chillis and garlic done right
>>8540That ain't permaculture, lol. Seem like most of you retards don't even know what you are talking about.
>>8541>red light emiting diodes a few blue and hook it all up to a battery and a solar panel in the windowSure, you can grow something like that. It's just gonna cost you several times more than what you can buy in the store or market.
Like i said, for people like me gardening is way to get sustenance, for people like you it's an expensive hoddy that makes you feel better.
>>8543>Sure, you can grow something like that. It's just gonna cost you several times more than what you can buy in the store or market.It's a motherfucking terrarium the point of those is that you can just leave them sitting for years in a corner and water then once in a blue moon
Just cut a bit of glass and make a box air seal the seams and you can leave it in a corner and just add a bit of water once every few months
My brother in Marx seedbombing is indeed permaculture if you make the plant you choose a useful edible tasty endemic weed
FUCK THE CONSERVATIONISTS PEACE LAND AND BREAD >>8546>It's a motherfucking terrarium the point of those is that you can just leave them sitting for years in a corner and water then once in a blue moonAdd the cost of lights that aren't gonna kill your plants to the cost fo solar panels. Each of those has a limited time of working before it breaks down. See how many harvests you gonna get from that time. Divide the costs by harvest, asess how much crops you have per harvest. Do the math, dumbass.
At least grow the shrooms or something.
>My brother in Marx seedbombing is indeed permaculture if you make the plant you choose a useful edible tasty endemic weedAnarcholibs are not my brothers. Second, permaculture differs from regular organic gardening by being "perma" (who would have thought, right?), meaning that it focuses on crops that can give something without being destroyed. Graclic is definitely not the permaculture crop. At least read Permaculture One or something, booklet.
>>8548 (me)
>Second, permaculture differs from regular organic gardening by being "perma" (who would have thought, right?), meaning that it focuses on crops that can give something without being destroyedAlso it aims to create sustainable ecosystem that you disrupt as little as possible. Terarium with garlic is not. I don't think that would even qualify as organic gardening. What is your plan to help the soil in restoring itself, for example?
>>8550You'd be amazed at the efficiency gains plants are green because they reject that spectrum precisely
More importantly garlic and presumably other aliums grows great in dog poop and
human fecesYou'll thank me if the lights go out for several years a person can live on onions potatoes and carrots
Now let's talk about Cuba's food gardens that some people call degrowth even though in reality it is a kind of regrowth within an austerity caused by the United snakes blockade
>>8552You NEVER grew crops in your life, am i correct?
Good luck with doctor's appointment, i at least hope you are not in burgerstan and can recieve healthcare services that don't cost exurbitant fees.
>>8553I've grown shit on literally cracks in the pavement
What crops have you grown?
>>8555Everything, from potatoes and cabbage to cucumbers and tomatoes, to berries and nuts. I grow food to eat, dumbfuck. I grew up in a family where we had to grow our food or starve and for the last 7 years i have my own garden to fulfill like 70% of what i need in food another 25% comes from other villagers and remaining 5% from stores (stuff like salt and tea).
Good luck growing garlic on shit, but at least use your own, that way on the off chance you don't kill it with too much nitrogen, you at least not gonna acquire some exciting guests in your guts.
>I've grown shit on literally cracks in the pavementAre you retarded or pretending to be one for some reason?
>>8035>>>19342 This was a post replying to
>>8018 I have found it and am reposting it finally with the pdfs and images that were included
Wayback is how I found my old effort post
https://web.archive.org/web/https://bunkerchan.xyz/hobby/res/12707.html This was the father of Soviet agriculture and biological study.
One of the people who were inspired by his work was Lysenko. As part of anti-sovietism the man who was researching then unknown sciences is often scorned today, including by leftists. The reality is somewhat different. Like Vavilov, his contributions are forgotten and dismissed and the fact that he was a respected man by many contemporaries is ignored.
https://inbredscience.wordpress.com/essays/in-defense-of-lysenko/http://www.rusproject.org/pages/analysis/analysis_10/nauka_lisenko_miron.pdfhttp://www.lalkar.org/article/295/lysenkosgreat-contribution-to-the-understandingof-heredity https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~neretin/misc/biology/Zhivot.pdfThe claim that some of Lysenko's ideas were disproven or false is meaningless. Darwin's work is also not perfect and has errors, as did famed biologists and naturalists like Lamarck and Cuvier. It is also interesting to note that in
The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon, Volume 1: Genetics and Agriculture in the Soviet Union and Beyond, Lysenko correctly identified Wheatrust's impact on the 1932 famine. (Pg 112, Tauger)
Lysenko's biggest flaw would be his ideological obsession (something that much of /leftypol/ who dismiss Lysenko are ironically also afflicted with). Stalin removed all mention of “bourgeois biology” from one of Lysenko's reports, The State of Biology in the Soviet Union, and in the margin next to the statement that “any science is based on class” Stalin wrote, “Ha-ha-ha!! And what about mathematics? Or Darwinism?” (Rossianov, 1993). One of Lysenko's most outspoken critics was the East German geneticist Hans Stubbe (1902–1989), Director of the Institute of Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben, who demonstrated that Lysenko's experiments on graft hybridization were not reproducible and concluded that he was a fraud, vehemently fighting the influence of Lysenkoism in the German Democratic Republic (Hagemann, 2002).
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/embor.2009.198However Graft Hybridization is STILL being researched and debated to this day, and the fact that Rabbage (Radish + Cabbage hybrid) and other such hybrids were made, implies that they weren't totally off.
>Inb4 he opposed MendelSo did many other scientists, Mendel's ideas of hereditary traits was a heavily debated topic of the time. Lysenkoism was a product of this. Lysenko was discovering things and had to analyze what was discovered by other scientists at that moment. Moreover Lysenko was not anti-Darwin, but was critical of some Darwin's views because they were Malthusian rubbish. Having read Origin of Species, this can be stated to be true to an extent, and Malthus is certainly an ideologue.
Leone, Charles A. (1952). "Genetics: Lysenko versus Mendel". Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science. points out some issues
> Lysenko claims to have changed a spring wheat to a winter wheat in two, three, or four years of autumn planting. He asserted that Triticum durum, the macaroni wheat, was transformed into several varieties of Triticum vulgare, the bread wheat. Plant breeders and cytologists generally regard: this transformation as genetically impossible. The conversion of the tetraploid species with 28 chromosomes to a hexaploid species with 42 chromosomes in itself would not be impossible. The difficulty arises from the fact that the 28-chromosome wheat (T. durum) has only genomes A and B while the 42-chromosome wheat (T. vulgare) has genomes A, B, and D. Genome D cannot in any way be derived from genomes A and B. Lysenko may have planted a mixed lot of seed which contained the seed of the 42-chromosome wheat, and selected for these over the period of the experiment. American plant breeders are well aware of the ease with which such seed contamination may occur, even to the extent of wheat-barley, and wheat-rye mixtures. Lysenko's rejection of this criticism of his work was based on hisrandom inspection of the seed to see that it all looked alike>In his book, Soviet Biology, Lysenko. (1948, p. 36) claims that "altered sections of the body of parent organisms always possess an altered heredity." He states that an altered twig or bud of a fruit tree, or the eye (bud) of a potato tuber, if cut away and grown separately (i.e. vegetatively propagated) as an independent plant will possess a changed heredity. Asseyava (1928, pp. 1-26), a countrywoman of Lysenko, investigated many such somatic mutations in potatoes and found in all cases that "the characters of the mutant are not transmitted through seed and its offspring are similar to the progeny of the original varietyWhile his idea of Vernalization being hereditary wasn't correct, he essentially discovered that fact itself and moreover Lysenko nor Mendel didn't know about a phenomenon called Epigenics nor did they actually know the details about genes and DNA and how it functioned. Part of the reason he opposed Mendel was the theory of one Thomas Morgan, which held that genes were a real thing you could find, and that the key to understanding biology was to discover the real gene and isolate it in a lab. Morgan's work is where we discover the chromosome, which is accepted in modern genetics.
A key thing to understand is that Darwin did not have a theory of genetics in his work, and the earliest research in genetics arguably began as an attack on Darwin and natural selection. In order for the theory of natural selection to work, it was literally impossible to have a static "gene" model for heredity without the possibility of mutation - which would mean, on some level, the "Lamarckian" theory of acquired inheritance had to be true, which is the centerpiece of attacks on Lysenko's theory. At no point was Lysenko saying "heredity is all bunk", it was commonly accepted by everyone that traits pass to offspring in a fairly regular way. It was more an attack on the genetics theories which, up to that point, had failed to make any meaningful progress in understanding biology or understanding what biological entities actually do. Even the aforementioned Morgan acknowledged that genetics was only really useful for understanding hereditary traits, and that the practical application would be genetic counseling (aka eugenics, still a prevailing belief in his lifetime).
Lysenko made a lot of colorful claims and exaggerations to be sure. Here's a good PDF of how Lysenkoism influenced Japanese study of genetics and biology, which is quite critical of Lysenko but acknowledges the debate rather than just saying "DURRR LYSENKO DOESN'T BELIEVE IN THE SCIENCE":
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.856.2064&rep=rep1&type=pdfToday Genes are considered a theoretical construct in studies of heredity, not a "thing" you see in a microscope. If you're dealing with life at a chemical level, you're dealing with DNA, RNA. The abstract "gene" is used to look at hereditary traits, but you don't just splice in another "gene", because there's no bit of DNA you can isolate and say "this is a gene". If you're going to talk about something like "genetic engineering", what you're really talking about is working with DNA, or some sort of selective breeding process. It's pretty important to remember this if you're going to make claims about biology, biologists and the potential of genetic engineering or gene manipulation. I see the future in understanding what DNA is doing directly, and understanding the body mechanically in a better way than we do now.
TL;DR: Lysenko actually did discover new information regarding crop developments; he correctly determined that certain crops can develop traits of resillience in a few generations if exposed to the right conditions. We now know this to be 100% true, so discrediting him completely is pretty reductive. He is just like any other communist figure ever to have existed; a lot of what you'll read on him is bourgeois propaganda, and while he obviously was in the wrong for many things you need to assess him more critically than just believing every lie about him.
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