America

American prisoners and persons on parole or on probation number over 7 million; Americans in danger of losing their homes number in the millions; and, the U.S. unemployment number is above 15 million. These numbers will grow indefinitely unless the U.S. Army of Quick Profits and Political Naivety increases its inflow of desperate recruits.

But, wait a minute, the tax burden created by soldiers and war machinery is even greater than that created by prison and welfare!

What to do with all those millions of people? Well, the biosphere is under assault; desertification and drought are predicted to ravage the agricultural sector, peak oil will ruin the industrial agricultural model, and an ailing economy cannot continue to subsidize agriculture.

The solution? Take a few weeks to train millions of Americans to grow food in desert-like conditions using permaculture-agroforestry techniques and command the national guard and the U.S. army to help build swales, cob or adobe houses, and temporary wells. The crime rate will plunge, the land will heal, carbon points will be scored, and the participating farmers can be taxed in the form of an organic food tax that will feed millions of “normal” Americans.

If this sounds a little too idyllic, that’s because it does. What’s missing is not a vision of sustainable agriculture but a vision of a sustainable and unifying culture. Without such a culture, any large-scale permaculture project dooms its permaculture-participants to a life of resentment, violence and possible rebellions. Since a permaculture vision does not afford governments the luxury of pacifying people with drugs and media, and, assuming that modern American prisoners will refuse to convert together to a single religion for the sake of unity, some other form of entertainment and enjoyment must be provided, something low-tech and yet so pleasant, seductive and ‘addictive’ as to wipe out competing traditional cultures.

When will our scientists develop such a culture? But it is already developing, growing, flourishing among Americans who are learning to laugh at everything sacred, learning to speak up in the face of authority, learning to live without hope in politicians and promises, learning to enjoy childhood and childishness, and learning to nurture body, mind, community and nature more than all their ancestors did.

Problems related to population growth, sexuality and the compulsion to own things and people must be pre-empted by the culture itself. The concept of property is childish and has served its historical function; in a utopian project it has no place among adults. It is not a question of going back to earlier forms of cultural expression, as those forms evolved into what we presently suffer; to go forward we need a culture in which ownership is a joke, in which raising children and playing with them is central, where laughing is essential, where everything is a good game and men and women soak their minds in the threefold visionary ecstasy of the body’s atomical oneness with nature, of consciousness’s imminent nothingness, and of the flow of consciousness across generations.

Growing Food Insecurity and Climate Change

Four Problems

1. Climate. The vast majority of the world’s nations have become and are becoming heavily dependent on agricultural imports, particularly imports from North America and Brazil. Presently food reserves are low. The slightest climatic hiccup could mean starvation for millions, even billions. Predictions of global warming do not bode well for food security.

2. Seeds. A U.S. biotech giant is threatening to control food production through biotech patenting and GM seed production. Thus far this has benefited few people besides the biotech giant’s operators and its bribees. Indeed, third world farmers have been driven to suicide by the giant. Moreover, GM production has actually further reduced agricultural diversity and created a global dependency on an increasingly narrow genetic spectrum of plant and animal stock, thereby worsening the risk that millions could starve if just one new disease ruins a harvest. Additionally, the long term health risks of GM food remain impossible to determine until a long term passes.

3. Energy. Modern agriculture’s dependency on petroleum fuels and petroleum-based fertilizers spells trouble for a world whose population continues to grow and whose oil production has apparently already peaked.

4. Soil. While much arable land could still be forced into food production, humankind already uses a vast majority of the world’s arable land, and uses an even greater percentage of global photosynthesis for its purposes. Thanks to industrial agricultural techniques, deserts are spreading, and artificial fertilizer rather than soil is keeping productivity artificially and unsustainably high.

How the Permaculture Solution Solves Many Problems

Permaculture has already proven itself capable of reclaiming  or greening deserts without recourse to technology. What’s needed is large-scale applications of the permaculture alternative to modern agriculture. This could bring agricultural productivity precisely to countries most dependent on agricultural imports, i.e. desert and semi-desert countries.  While establishing a large-scale permaculture project could involve machinery, once established a permaculture-based food production project requires no machinery or chemical fertilizers. Of course, if the project exists to produce organic food for urban centers, some form of mechanized transport seems necessary. However, by turning deserts into fossil-fuel free gardens containing a far greater intensity of photosynthetic activity than found in industrial agriculture, permaculture projects also reduce the greenhouse effect, as photosynthesis requires and absorbs atmospheric carbon. Additionally, permaculture would either prevent or moderate the other dangers described above.

Qs and As Regarding Large-Scale Permaculture Projects

Because permaculture requires far more workers than industrial agriculture requires, the question of labor arises. But the world has plenty of unemployed people living in dreadful slums and on dying farms; large scale permaculture projects could offer a permanent and humane living standard. Plus, little training is needed to create a competent permaculture farmer.

Desert countries have no cheap sources of modern construction materials to provide housing for permaculture farmers. Earth-based building materials like cob and adobe provide the most sensible solutions and could provide safe and affordable shelters even on a large scale.

Electricity need not be supplied, as earth-based housing is cooling- and heating-wise in warm climates and the permaculture farmer has no intrinsic need for electricity, and the same might be said for us all.

Water need not be supplied, as permaculture projects can easily dispose of human waste without it, using human waste to enrich the soil and boost production. Rainwater can be stored in basins and body water is partly acquired through diets based entirely on fresh fruits and produce.

Once established, in order to ensure that a permaculture plantation (if I may use a word with an ugly history) is not a huge subsistence project, but produces enough food to feed its urban masters, the permaculture worker population and morale must be otpimized. For this end I recommend…

The Future Exodus

As rising ocean levels threaten heavily populated coastal regions, as disappearing glaciers threaten over a billion people dependent on glacier-fed rivers, as soil degradation leads to desertification and peak oil results in peak food, likely within this century we must choose between 1) global famine, war, and massive migrations to struggling urban centers and 2) alternative agricultural practices that have the potential to turn the world’s deserts into food-bearing forest gardens. Since, converting deserts into gardens will take time, preparing in advance in crucial.

Being an optimist, I foresee massive migrations of people into deserts; Asians armed with green knowledge will pour into the Australian and Indian and other deserts. North American cities will depopulate as millions migrate to the warm, inland, Southwest, and the same pattern will be occur across the globe. The Middle-East will be united in its common struggle to become green. Unity is crucial, especially as some evidence shows that desert rainfall patterns improve as vegetation returns.