Subject: any writings or speakers in Permaculture Philosophy?

From: [email-masked] (harold waldock)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 20:16:29 -0400

Hello:

A friend asked me if there were any writings on Permaculture philosophy.  I
said that it did not appear to be much work on it beyond:

1) Chapter 1,2 and the last chapter in the Permaculture: A Designers Manual
         - Lovelock's 'The Gaia Hypothesis' is mentioned.

2) Manosubo Fukuoka: (I saw somewhere that somebody called him "The
Permaculture Philosopher" ... the books of his are The One Straw Revolution
and The Natural Way of Farming

But, as I have had tired eyes from too much computing on bad computer
screens, I have not read every book on Permaculture yet and there are so
many new ones.

I guess that D. J. Sholto & Robert Hart's " Forest Farming" might be a good one.

What other books shall I suggest to my friend who is increasingly wanting
to talk and speak introducing permaculture ideas? I am particularly
interested in the latest works by people who are explicitly
permaculturalists.

I've heard Larry Santoyo speak interesting asides on this but I have not
heard of any writings.

Who else can and do speak on such subjects?

I find both tough questions during planting season when I want to abandon
my computer and reading.

Thanks,

Harold Waldock
Edible Landscape Creations
Vancouver Permaculture Network: http://www.alternatives.com/vpn
[email-masked]
pgr/vmbox: 604 645-9529

---

From: Miekal And <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 09:25:07 +0000

2 of our 3 perm/terns are vegans & I had to honestly tell them that I
didnt know of many examples of animal less permaculture,  the plants for
a future project in the uk is the only one I can think of off hand. 
anybody know of any US ones, especially somewhere in the midwest that we
could visit.  also other handy dandy tricks for closing the nutrient
loop other than cover cropping & composting...

Miekal
_____________________________________
Dreamtime Village
http://www.net22.com/dreamtime/index.shtml

---

From: Lee Flier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 12:16:55 -0400

Miekal wrote:

>could visit.

Hmm.  Well I'm sure they exist, but IMO "vegan" and "permaculture" are
kinda mutually exclusive, with all due respect to PFAF who do tremendous work.

I don't mean that everybody has to eat meat.  That's a diet choice.  I
don't eat it myself in fact.  But the vegan philosophy - that is, that any
use of animal "products" is exploitative - just doesn't fly in the real
world, in my experience.

The thing is when you set up a Permaculture site, it has to include animals
- if not domestic ones, then wild ones.  The world has plants and animals
in it and it needs both.  If you decide you're going to be vegan and be
self sufficient, food-wise, then what happens is if you don't have
domesticated animals, the wild ones move in and start eating your food.  At
that point you have to do something about it or you will have a wildlife
population problem in a big way.  That's the "problem" with abundance!

Possibly you could get around this problem if you encourage and are able to
attract other predators such as cougars or wolves.  However I think it's
kinda folly to say that cougars and wolves are predators and humans are
not.  There has never been a vegan tribal society and there are good
reasons for that.

Anyhow what a lot of people will do who don't want to kill animals is to
fence them out of their gardens.  If you're vegetarian and you have to grow
a lot of grains and legumes to feed yourself, this becomes a problem
because you've had to fence off, and possibly clear, fairly large
quantities of land to accomplish this.  You could preserve a lot more of
this land if you were willing to kill a few deer and eat them.  The deer
eat things that you couldn't eat anyhow.  And the deer or other wildlife
are in any case liable to die if they are fenced out of their usual
territory and cut off from resources that are normally available to them.
Just ask the Kalahari bushmen whose antelope herds were found piled up dead
against farmers' fences.  You think that because you didn't eat the cow
that nobody had to die to feed you, but you don't see the thousands
antelope that died because somebody fenced them off their land in order to
grow your soyburger.

There is no way around the problem of having to kill something in order to
eat. All living things have to do that and if you don't kill when you must,
you end up killing a lot of things that you never see because you ran from
that responsibility.  I still struggle with this issue myself, but I do
realize that one can't philosophically defend veganism, especially if you
are trying to follow the permacultural principles of interrelationships
between all things.  Sooner or later you reach an impasse.

I certainly won't eat factory farmed meat, which IS exploitative, but to
compare animals in a permaculture situation to factory farms is just like
comparing home grown veggies in a PC site to genetically engineered,
factory farmed soybeans.

Well anyhow... don't mean to stir up a big argument or anything, just some
food for thought and an explanation as to why there aren't more vegan
permaculturists. :-)

= Lee =

***************************************************************************
Lee A Flier
[email-masked]
Atlanta and Ellijay, Georgia, U.S.A.
http://lflier.home.mindspring.com

---

From: Michael Yount <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 11:30:37 -0600

Hi Harold,

I'm currently reading Forest Gardening, by Robert Hart, and 
have a copy of The Permaculture Way, by Graham Bell.  Both
are "easy to get one's head around."

Please contact me privately if you'd like publisher details
and so on.

Michael
[email-masked]

 :}Hello:
 :}
 :}A friend asked me if there were any writings on Permaculture philosophy.  I
 :}said that it did not appear to be much work on it beyond:
 :}
 :}1) Chapter 1,2 and the last chapter in the Permaculture: A Designers Manual
 :}         - Lovelock's 'The Gaia Hypothesis' is mentioned.
 :}
 :}2) Manosubo Fukuoka: (I saw somewhere that somebody called him "The
 :}Permaculture Philosopher" ... the books of his are The One Straw Revolution
 :}and The Natural Way of Farming
 :}
 :}But, as I have had tired eyes from too much computing on bad computer
 :}screens, I have not read every book on Permaculture yet and there are so
 :}many new ones.
 :}
 :}I guess that D. J. Sholto & Robert Hart's " Forest Farming" might be a good one.
 :}
 :}What other books shall I suggest to my friend who is increasingly wanting
 :}to talk and speak introducing permaculture ideas? I am particularly
 :}interested in the latest works by people who are explicitly
 :}permaculturalists.
 :}
 :}I've heard Larry Santoyo speak interesting asides on this but I have not
 :}heard of any writings.
 :}
 :}Who else can and do speak on such subjects?
 :}
 :}I find both tough questions during planting season when I want to abandon
 :}my computer and reading.
 :}
 :}Thanks,
 :}
 :}
 :}Harold Waldock
 :}Edible Landscape Creations
 :}Vancouver Permaculture Network: http://www.alternatives.com/vpn
 :[email-masked]
 :}pgr/vmbox: 604 645-9529
 :}
 :}
 :}

---

From: "uwe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 98 13:00:41 PDT

Hi Lee,

my former secretary has a cat which is a vegetarian! But there is good (historical) reason for that. She found that little kitten about one or two days after it's birth on the roof of her house; somebody left it up there. So she feeded the baby with cow-milk. As it looks, the milk of a herbivore altered the cat's taste, and that's why now it prefers brocoli over meat. - Nowadays, how do many women feed their babies? I think that could explain the reason why in history there never were any vegan tribes.

Uwe

----------

(snip)

> There has never been a vegan tribal society and there are good
> reasons for that.
>

---

From: Lee Flier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 03:16:13 -0400

Uwe wrote:

>my former secretary has a cat which is a vegetarian! But there is good
(historical) reason for that. She found that little kitten about one or two
days after it's birth on the roof of her house; somebody left it up there.
So she feeded the baby with cow-milk. As it looks, the milk of a herbivore
altered the cat's taste, and that's why now it prefers brocoli over meat. -
Nowadays, how do many women feed their babies? I think that could explain
the reason why in history there never were any vegan tribes.<

Interesting story about the cat, but it has nothing to do why why there
were never any vegan tribes.  There weren't any because it would have been
impossible to survive. Grains and legumes normally don't grow wild in
sufficient quantity to have fed hunter-gatherer people.  Even in abundant
climates rich in plant life, people ate meat - craved it in many cases,
because those who lived on a diet of mostly tropical fruits didn't get
enough protein.  Warfare in abundant rain forest climates often had to do
with controlling sufficient hunting territory or hog forage - which puzzled
anthropologists for awhile who couldn't figure out why people needed to go
to war when they obviously had so much food.  The problem was that the most
abundant food wasn't by itself enough to sustain them.

And once you get into the more marginal climates like deserts and tundras,
there is very little plant life that's edible for humans.  So the diets of
desert bushmen and the Eskimos of the Arctic are almost exclusively meat.
About the only vitamin C available in the Arctic comes from eating liver,
while the only reliable source of zinc in deserts is the ears and testicles
of animals.  So it would be kinda hard to be vegan in these places.

Also in most other cultures, insects have played an important role in the
diet. Western culture seems to pretty much overlook this important
resource, and I do admit it's a cultural bias that I have a hard time with
myself. :-)

Really the only places where it would ever have been possible to survive as
a vegan would be temperate climates as in Europe and the U.S.  But even
here there is the problem that if you don't eat some of the animals that
are sharing the same food sources as you, then those animals will become
overpopulated and eat all your food, and if you don't do something about
the population both you and they will starve.

People who lived in close contact with the land couldn't survive as vegans.
 It would not have even occurred to them to set this as a goal, nor would
it have occurred to them that killing and eating animals was a "wrong" or
hurtful thing to do any more than it is for lions or wolves.  Of course
when people, animals and plants are all aware of their interdependence on
each other, living, eating and dying are all done with a much different
attitude than they are in our culture.  Tribal people didn't have factory
farms, would have considered such things as abhorrent as vegans do.  But it
seems to me Permaculture is about restoring that awareness and respect,
having a true understanding of where our life essentials come from.  Part
of that awareness for me has been coming to terms with the fact that death
is a part of life, that no life could exist without death and that is the
way it's supposed to be.  I think when I really got into making compost was
when I first realized this, and realized that you don't have to be vegan to
have the ultimate respect for life.

= Lee =

---

From: Lee Flier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 03:16:13 -0400

= Lee =

---

From: "April Sampson-Kelly" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 10:12:50 +1000

ARE THERE ANY VEGAN MAMMALS?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of uwe
> Sent: Saturday, 18 April 1998 6:01
> To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: vegan permaculture
> 
> 
> Hi Lee,
> 
> my former secretary has a cat which is a vegetarian! But there is 
> good (historical) reason for that. She found that little kitten 
> about one or two days after it's birth on the roof of her house; 
> somebody left it up there. So she feeded the baby with cow-milk. 
> As it looks, the milk of a herbivore altered the cat's taste, and 
> that's why now it prefers brocoli over meat. - Nowadays, how do 
> many women feed their babies? I think that could explain the 
> reason why in history there never were any vegan tribes.
> 
> Uwe
> 
> ----------
> 
> (snip)
>

---

From: Miekal And <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 09:25:07 +0000

Miekal

---

From: Lee Flier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 12:16:55 -0400

= Lee =

---

From: Michael Yount <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 11:30:37 -0600

Hi Harold,

Michael
[email-masked]

 :}Hello:
 :}

---

From: "uwe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 98 13:00:41 PDT

Hi Lee,

Uwe

----------

(snip)

---

From: Lee Flier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 03:16:13 -0400

= Lee =

---

From: Lee Flier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 03:16:13 -0400

= Lee =

---

From: "April Sampson-Kelly" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 10:12:50 +1000