Dr. Mercola Interviews Joel Salatin

Online markets or CSA’s are a great tool to expand a farmers reach. I also like the idea of selling to small vendors who in turn connect directly with the customers. However, ultimately the public will invest more of their energies into these kinds of farms only if they see them personally. In addition to online ventures and regular business farms need to get the public on the farm! Advertise tours, set up large community gatherings or picnics.

I particularly like what he said about all our tiny decisions aggregating into our current situation. We can NOT continue to blame big corporations like Monsanto for our food ills. You and I are to blame!!! My father and mother, your grandmother and grandfather are to blame. We have made those aspects of our society which we despise the most. Likewise we can create those food systems which we cherish and promote biodiversity.

       
  

Economics of Energy

“The bottom line of energy is, it needs to be stripped of its emotion, it needs to be subject to proper economic cost- benefit analysis…”

He is right. His only error (I suspect) is that he does not take his words far enough. I wish no emotion in my analysis of our condition. I demand all costs and all benefits considered. The bottom line however does not deal with energy, but people. We need to strip ourselves of our emotional bias toward our egos. Our passions for “I” is the foundation for the greatest economic blunder conceivable. Understand that growth or stagnation or decay is of the whole system not just our neatly segmented “economic” portion of the system. All economics is a subset of natural economies. Priced correctly, human economic growth would launch the natural world into the greatest expansion it has seen since the Cambrian explosion. Priced with a distorted human-centric model, the only biome of its kind in the entire universe (for all we know) will decrease its overall yield. Unfortunately as of now I have little guidance on how to price things “correctly”. This field needs work desperately. How do we account the loss of the generic information of a species? Or an entire ecosystem? Ecology and economics are the same discipline, one applied to “nature” one applied to “humans”,only after we lose that duality can growth occur.

hiddeninnature:

“Green Gold” Permaculture documentary by John D. Liu

This is a fantastic example of organic/permaculture solutions to our planetary threat to biodiversity. These solutions are as simple and ironic as it gets. This is the REAL revolution going on right now..Join in & take a part! Then go, & plant a seed. ;-)

I’m in. Annual agriculture must end, our lands must be restored ecologically while providing for human needs. What if we change?

Earthships!

We are a people that need a new way and that have the intellect to find and execute that new way. Surely Earthships can be part of our change, design our homes to be in tandem with natural flows, we need not even curb our demand, merely alter how we satisfy it. Do these things as far as they can be done and THEN use our conventional methods to meet the difference our insatiable apatite brings.

…We will argue self denial later.    

Agroforestry Practices

A good overview of how different people have chosen to use forest ecosystems in different ways. I particularly enjoyed the first man and how he uses “scrap” wood and turns it into high quality products. I would like to learn to cut like that myself. However, I am less enthusiastic about row cropping trees. Granted, I prefer it to annual crops, but it is still a mono-culture with great biodiversity absence. My aim here is to familiarize myself with these more standard practices, so that one day I can integrate them into a more complete forest farming operation. I aim to stress biodiversity, biomass flow, and total yield of my operation.