Build back our soils
Angus Soutar
When I started with permaculture (some 35 years ago) there was a lot of scepticism about it working in the British Isles. "Will permaculture work?" Bill Mollison's response was direct and clear: "Will plants grow?". Patrick Whitefield was asked if Permaculture could feed the world and his reply was "can modern agriculture continue to feed the world?".
Many of us were already aware of the growing deserts that were left behind by mechanised agriculture and the failures of the "Green Revolution"; the weapons of war had been turned against Nature. This destruction of our soils was the starting point of permaculture in the 1970's when Bill and David were developing their ideas up on Strickland Avenue in Hobart.
The Australians used to joke wryly about how slow new things tended to catch on in Britain: "It's those huge distances between their settlements". But the weather doesn't help here with crop growing. Make a mistake, and you have to wait a whole summer for the lessons to be learned and to start again. Meanwhile, in the tropics, gardens can easily give 4-5 crops per year and everything grows much faster. Nevertheless, the last 30 to 40 years have brought us increasing confidence in permaculture across all climate zones. We now have reports from all over the world about permaculture designers, and people following the same principles, have successfully restored landscapes, built soil and, yes, fed people, As William Gibson famously said, "the future has already arrived, it's just not evenly distributed". But which future are we going to choose? And why isn't the planetary repair work going any faster? To answer that, we must shift our focus to what's happening above ground.
As a society, we have real-world limitations to deal with. A lot of those limitations are to do with our thinking. And our thinking is limited by our perceptions. One of the big problems at the moment is our blindness towards the amount of energy and minerals needed to maintain our society in its current state. We want to believe that our current problems are only temporary, and that soon everything will get back to "normal".
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We continue to ignore energy and mining: the energy cost of energy extraction, the energy cost of mineral extraction and the massive environmental degradation that goes along with them. We ignore the environmental damage that will be caused by the massive energy and mining implications of so-called green energy on a large scale. Resource availability is heavily shifting against us already, all the easy wins have gone. Our technologies are struggling to keep up with the challenges. The current globalised system is full of weak points including resourse constraints and, in particular, a vulnerable transport system.
In principle, it seems obvious that the global system is open to change. But who gets to change it? I would prefer it if we allow people to see the possibilities and let them act accordingly. People don’t necessarily want the wearying complexity that we live with now. Further, we all have to face up to the inevitable: if we don't do simplify the system, it will be simplified for us. As energy becomes less available, the global transport network will be one of the first things to go, we will be dependent on what is available locally and local prduction will become critical.
The response from The Global High Command is to mandate policies such as Net Zero and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Just a quick look at the work of Simon Michaux, Nate Hagens and others will illustrate the vacuousness of these policies. They are not really plans at all, they're just wish lists, typical of technocrats who think they can just pass some legislation that will conjour up resources out of nothing.
Michaux reports on the hard, brutal evidence. We don't have enough physical resources to carry out the current Net Zero plans. Even if we did, we'd have to find the same all over again after 25 years when the so-called "renewables" wear out. Meanwhile, there will massive environmental damage across the planet as a result of the policies. The big picture is elegantly summarised in Professor Jem Bendel's recent essay "The Nine Lies of the Fake Green Fairytale".
For me, these "policies" are a confection of conceits, or perhaps a facade, like a Potemkin village or the fake town in the desert that Mel Brookes commissioned for his movie "Blazing Saddles". Look more closely and you'll see that "Policy" is all about maintaining the current consumer economy in all its glorious destructive excesses.
| Is Net O the new fake Rock Ridge? |
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As Simon Michaux says "The Industrial Revolution was a wonderful thing: but we will never be able to do it again." It was a period of immense changes brought about by a step change in the development of our technologies and the resulting massive exploitation of fossil fuels. Moving from where we are now will require upheavals of a magnitude similar to those in the England of the early 1800s.
People forget that the Industrial Revolution did not emerge as a matter of policy. Where I live in Lancashire, the landscape still bears imprints of its early activity. It was a time of energy, intellect and small-scale innovation. Now we need to recapture that spirit. I'm convinced that we will, sooner or later, build our future the same way that our forebears did. But this time we will be working with Nature out in the landscape and back in our homes, with relatively small, and increasingly local, initiatives.
The pressure is already on us. It's time to get ready. If you care about your future, it makes sense to move nearer to your food - or else to move your food nearer to you. We have to be healthy and stand tall against what's coming. It's not just about avoiding hunger, it's about staying healthy, too. There are many ways that you can get involved in this great adventure and I will write more about that later. For now, I'll leave you with food- food for thought?
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This was part of Angus's talk "Local Food - Getting it Together" at The Peoples Reset: UK conference in Bath on 27th September 2024 Part 1 is here