Comments on: Woodchips With Everything

By: Vailhem

Vailhem — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:56:05 +0000

Bussard-Polywell fusion… too small to fail

By: Diane Hall

Diane Hall — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:03:44 +0000

Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton stress the importance of “IT’S A MATTER OF SCALE” in their teaching.

IMO all one-size-fits-all-solutions, which are a substitution for real thinking in civilisation, must be done away with. Biochar, put forth in the proposed manner, is another example of too-big-to-fail thinking that is sure to fail!

It is just these kinds of tactics that leads me to think TPTB are running blind and do not have their NWO on-track as some, who are running scared, would have us believe. We just may have a future after all.

Acknowledging and living in our niche is the only thing that will help us to mitigate and, hopefully, reduce the intensity of the changes we face with climate change. Permaculture gives us many of the tools to do this.

There are as many ways for humans to live as there are habitats as there are ways of interacting with those habitats. This is the tribal-ecosystem-watershed way of living that brings everything back to a viable scale.

By: Tom Toogood

Tom Toogood — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:24:38 +0000

A thought for Zachary and others – Permaculture does not require the “cutting down of natural forests & replacing with nitrogen fixing trees and other multi-layers”. Indeed Zone 5, the wilderness zone, is to be left as the natural eco-system.
It has usually gone through its own self-managed succession including, in the early stages, often nitrogen-fixing species, and does so again and again if natural or man-made disturbances don’t completely wipe it, and even then birds can re-seed it, and so on.

Mollison said the best way to save the bush (Aus. term for wilderness) is to stop clearing it for chemical farms and bring back food-growing to the cities.
This would release so much of current farm-land back to the natural eco-system, with maybe a little human help to re-plant/re-seed local native species (early to mid stage succession stuff) to hasten succession.

One of the best brief & clear explanations of natural succession in 2 pages is in Ross Mars “The Basics of Permaculture Design”, p21-22, comparing natural succession species in Britain, U.S and Australia, including the nitrogent-fixers.

Bio-Char seems well worth us trialling on small scale, and learning from each other’s experiences. Its Indigenous originators used it only on the tribal scale, at most. Its when big agro-industry or state ideology wants to take it over, (sadly likely from what we are hearing), with the usual utopian fantasy of a global miracle, that is the scary part. We haven’t learned from the failures of Fascism, Communism and Capitalism….Industrial BioChar is like faith in Scientism.

By: Zachary Stowasser

Zachary Stowasser — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:16:24 +0000

ahh I can see the problems between permaculture and environmentalism

I think we should be planting trees everywhere we can, starting with the deserts and abandoned (unused) land first.

Cutting down slow growing forests and replacing the with nitrogen fixing trees and other multi-layers surely would rise concern for purists and need for wild places, so lets do what we can with the blank places first and then ask the harder questions later.

By: Marcin Gerwin

Marcin Gerwin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:03:40 +0000

George, I’m glad you have added at the end that charcoal has some benefits for farmers. I agree that using it as a silver bullet approach to solving all problems with climate change doesn’t seem to make sense. But – to use it as a soil amendement is a whole different story. That’s what the Amazon Indians used it for, to deal with the poor tropical soils and I find it very interesting that charcoal provides a particularly good habitat for microbes. I hope I’ll be able to test it in the garden this season and see if it works in temperate climate as well