Solutions & sustainability – July 7

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Masanobu Fukuoka links via Culiblog
The Fukuoka Farming website: The Fundamental Reality that Underlies Fukuoka’s Principles, By Emilia Hazelip
Soil is created by living plants working with microorganisms, and by the plants’ residues and the microorganisms’ corpses after their death.

Soil is drained of nutrients by cultivation, NOT by plants.

Tilling and cultivation of any sort diminishes the natural fertility of the soil in three ways…

Masanobu Fukuoka – Greening The Desert, In Context interview from 1986
Masanobu Fukuoka is another of the major pioneers of sustainable agriculture who came to the 2nd International Permaculture Conference. We spoke with him a few days before the conference while he was visiting the Abundant Life Seed Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington.

He likes to say of himself that he has no knowledge, but his books, including One-Straw Revolution and The Natural Way of Farming illustrate that he at least has wisdom. His farming method involves no tillage, no fertilizer, no pesticides, no weeding, no pruning, and remarkably little labor! He accomplishes all this (and high yields) by careful timing of his seeding and careful combinations of plants (polyculture). In short, he has brought the practical art of working with nature to a high level of refinement.

The Plowboy Interview: Masanobu Fukuoka, 1982, in Mother Earth News (please excuse the ancient terms)
Masanobu Fukuoka, with his grizzled white beard, subdued voice, and traditional Oriental working clothes, may not seem like an apt prototype of a successful innovative farmer. Nor does it, at first glance, appear possible that his rice fields – riotous jungles of tangled weeds, clover, and grain – are among the most productive pieces of land in Japan. But that’s all part of the paradox that surrounds this man and his method of natural farming.

On a mountain overlooking Matsuyama Bay on the southern Japanese island of Shikoku, Fukuoka-san (son is the traditional Japanese form of respectful address) has – since the end of World War II – raised rice, winter grain, and citrus crops . . . using practices that some people might consider backward (or even foolish!). Yet his acres consistently produce harvests that equal or surpass those of his neighbors who use labor-intensive, chemical-dependent methods. Fukuoka’s system of farming is amazing not only for its yields, but also for the fact that he has not plowed his fields for more than 30 years! Nor does he use prepared fertilizer – not even compost – on his land, or weed his rows, or flood his rice paddies.
A chapter of One Straw Revolution is available at SoilAndHealth.org

A must-see 5 minute online documentary also called ‘Greening the Desert’ based on the work of the Fukuoka-inspired permaculturist Geoff Lawton is available at the Permaculture Research Instute (look about half way down the page in the right column). I would caution that the amount of organic material required to bring the patch of land up to such remarkable fertility is a lot, relative to its availability in the desert, so these efforts aren’t magical. If they were to be replicated on a large scale they perhaps could realistically only procede slowly. Inspiring stuff though.
-AF

What Can We Learn from Jamie’s School Dinners? – 10 Insights for Energy Descent
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
I’m sure you all saw this when it came out, but not having a TV I only just saw it on the newly released DVD. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Jamie Oliver is a TV chef who undertook to try and change school dinners in the UK. The programme and the campaign that arose from it have had a huge effect on school meals in the UK, and, it could be argued, did more to put one issue on the public agenda than any single campaign run by an environmental group over the last 50 years. So, what can we learn from Jamie’s School Dinners that can help with energy descent planning projects?

As has been argued before here at Transition Culture, peak oil demands a response on an unprecedented scale, what Lester Brown calls a ‘wartime mobilisation’. The fact that Jamie Oliver managed to initiate the most sweeping rethink of school meals in the UK leads me to think that we might learn something from his approach. Clearly we are not all TV celebrity chefs, we do not have well funded research teams behind us, and we do not yet have his degree of credibility. However, I think, having watched the series, and having developed a deep admiration for what he achieved and how he achieved it, that there are 10 things we can learn from it that can inform our energy descent work.
(6 July 2006)

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Steven Lagavulin, Deconsumption
I read this fascinating paper over the weekend by systems analyst Donella H. Meadows, called “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System“. Leverage points are those “places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”

The central thesis of Leverage Points is to elucidate a theory by MIT professor Jay Forrester that “People know intuitively where leverage points are…[however] everyone is trying very hard to push [them] in the wrong direction!” So Meadows observes that paradoxically “Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.”
(6 July 2006)
More commentary at Deconsumption, or go straight to Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (.pdf format, 20 pages). -AF

Feel lonely? You’re not alone
Ely Portillo, The Seattle Times
Americans, who shocked pollsters in 1985 when they said they had only three close friends, today say they have just two. And the number who say they have no one to discuss important matters with has doubled to 1 in 4, according to a nationwide survey released today.

It found that men and women of every race, age and education level reported fewer intimate friends than the same survey turned up in 1985. Their remaining confidants were more likely to be members of their nuclear family than in 1985, according to the study, but intimacy within families was down, too. The findings are reported in the June issue of the American Sociological Review.
(26 June 2006)
Why is this in the solutions section? In the permaculture spirit of ‘the problem is the solution’, loneliness might be seen as a kind of untapped potential. There’s the opportunity to create local peak oil mitigation efforts, for instance community garden networks, neighborhood energy efficiency events, street-based community supported agriculture (CSA) and resource/tool sharing schemes etc, and in doing so fulfill a need for community and friendship at the same time. -AF