I Have No Idea What I'm Doing - New

Thinking about the three ethics.

Show Notes

Thinking about the three ethics.


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  • Scope of this episode
    • I want to explain the value of permaculture
    • I will try to avoid jargon
      • It can be alienating
      • Also, I am dummy and have lots to learn
  • What is Permaculture?
    • Permaculture is hard to define
      • Permaculture, as an idea, is sprawling and all-encompassing. It can be difficult to easily define because it is almost like a whole ideology or culture.
      • It is a system
        • The thing about it is, it’s not sectarian
          • This is why you’re just as likely to find it practiced by anarchists or free market chuds
        • Though there are prominent and foundational figures, there’s no czar of permaculture and there’s no codified creed.
      • There is a “founder”, but it sort of acretes concepts and practices like a sort of katamari damacy
      • Perhaps the best way to define it is to begin by explaining its origins.
    • Origins
      • What is it’s root? Where did it come from and why was it created?
      • Tasmania, 1978
        • 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.
      • 1979–1983 Eastern Australian drought - Wikipedia
    • Ethics, Principles Methods, Developments
  • Why is it important?
    • Water loss
      • Runoff
      • Pumping more ground water than is absorbed
      • Floods
    • Soil loss and fertility

      • Traditional agriculture treats topsoil as a consumable resource

        Every second, North America’s largest river carries another dump truck’s load of topsoil to the Caribbean. Each year, America’s farms shed enough soil to fill a pickup truck for every family in the country. This is a phenomenal amount of dirt. But the United States is not the biggest waster of this critical ical resource. An estimated twenty-four billion tons of soil are lost annually ally around the world-several tons for each person on the planet. Despite such global losses, soil erodes slowly enough to go largely unnoticed in anyone’s lifetime. (David R. Montgomery. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Kindle Locations 61-64). Kindle Edition.)

      • It takes time to naturally build topsoil

        The United States Department partment of Agriculture estimates that it takes five hundred years to produce duce an inch of topsoil. Darwin thought English worms did a little better, making an inch of topsoil in a century or two. While soil formation rates vary in different regions, accelerated soil erosion can remove many centuries turies of accumulated soil in less than a decade. Earth’s thin soil mantle is essential to the health of life on this planet, yet we are gradually stripping it off-literally skinning our planet. (David R. Montgomery. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Kindle Locations 296-298). Kindle Edition.)

      • Example: Rome

        • Rome had flourishing agriculture that fed the city, but soil-loss and fertility loss became a major factor in the ‘fall of rome’

          In 1916 Columbia University professor Vladimir Simkhovitch argued that lack of dirt caused the decline of the Roman Empire. Soil exhaustion and erosion had depopulated the Roman countryside in the empire’s late days; he pointed out that the amount of land needed to support a Roman farmer had increased from the small allotment given to each citizen at the founding of Rome to ten times as much land by the time of Julius Caesar. (David R. Montgomery. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Kindle Locations 794-797). Kindle Edition.)

        • The economics of empire pushed for more and more slave-labor high-value crops
        • This lead to worse and worse agricultural practices with tremendous erosion
        • Rome relied more and more on expanding their empire and turning formerly mixed-use land into intensive cereal or olive production
        • Much of the desertification of Northern Africa can be attributed to Roman imperial agriculture
    • Inevitable contraction of globalism
    • Carbon sequestration
    • Resilient and diverse food systems
    • Regenerative
  • What are examples of it in practice?
  • What comes next?

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