Monday, January 08, 2007

Industrialism vs Natural Agriculture

You see a system that runs on sun and rain, year after year, with no one to cultivate the soil or plant the seeds. (Benyus)

Wendell Berry:
THE WAY OF INDUSTRIALISM is the way of the machine. To the industrial mind, a machine is not merely an instrument for doing work or amusing ourselves or making war; it is an explanation of the world and of life. Because industrialism cannot understand living things except as machines, and can grant them no value that is not utilitarian, it conceives of farming and forestry as forms of mining; it cannot use the land without abusing it.

I hold the most archaic values on earth, they go back to the Paleolithic; I try to hold history and the wilderness in mind that I may approach the true nature of things, and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Identification with that other totally alien, nonhuman can be experienced in tilling the soil, shaping word or stone, the lust and ecstasy of the dance, or the power-vision in solitude.

Gary Snyder:
"Wild mind means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating. That's what wilderness is. Nobody has a management plan for it."



Notes
45,000 sq ft to feed a person, 10,000 vegetarian

biointensive minifarming
deep cultivation to aid root growth
compost crops
closely spaced palnts in widebeds to optimize microclimates
interplanting of mixed species to foil pests
bioneer kenny ausubel
the land institute
ecology action
masanobu fukuoka
ecoagriculture
Natural Systems Agriculture
Wes Jackson


wallace stevens
gary snyder's essays on the wild.

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