----- Original Message ----- From: "Allan Balliett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 6:15 PM Subject: FWD:Saharasia
> From: Mark Shepard of Wisconsin: > > I just read J. DeMeo's link from the BDnow site and was fascinated! I > decided to read it while cross-referencing Lewis Mumford: "The Myth of The > Machine". > If you look at the timing of the desertification and the distribution of > societies gone from Matrist to Patrist, they directly correlate with the > development of annual tillage agriculture. They exactly correlate with the > development of the major grain crops in use today in both the old world and > new. > Also, check out his examples of art from this transition period... > (Mumford has other art examples that show the same thing) The "eden phase" > was followed by pastoralism, then by ag/war and priest/kings. Perhaps the > desertification was started first by the grazers... clearing and burning > forest brushland and savannas to graze cows. (a lot less dangerous and more > predictable than hunting wild Aurochs!) Anyone who has grazed cattle knows > that they don't eat everything and their pasture has to be "maintained" with > inputs...mowing, occasional plowing and re-planting and lots of seed. Just for the record, this is nonsense. Read Andre Voisin, Grass Productivity, or any of the more recent stuff from Bill Murphy's Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence, to Allan Nation's Stockman Grass Farmer literature www.stockmangrassfarmer.com to Allan Savory's Holistic Resource Management materials. > Ancient grazers, not having these tools, turned first to sheep. After > the sheep finished eliminating the last of the most palatable plants, no > other grazing animals could survive but goats. When you get to the goats, > you're at the ecological dead-end and you have a nomadic, degraded ecosystem > populated by hungry, pissed off asswholes. Saharasia... No doubt it didn't > happen all at once overnight, but little by little for millennia... > > Which came first, the chicken or the egg... Did NATURAL climate change > cause the need to shift to annual agriculture and patrist societies? Or did > patrist leaders (ie unemployed hunters... well armed and unemployed because > they killed all the game) gain control of their populations via annual > agriculture...the destruction of complex, intact ecosystems and tillage of > soil which lead inexorably to desertification ? > > In either case, they went hand-in hand. Where are we now? 99% of all > agricultural land in the USA is a functional desert for 6-8 months of the > year. (RIGHT NOW TODAY it is Poisoned, exposed soil) Where does that type > of agriculture (and patrist social structure) lead us? It is a degrading > resource base with increasing costs. > > Read Lewis Mumford concurrently with DeMeo... Follow it up with J Russel > Smith (Tree Crops) and Uncle Bill Mollison (Permaculture) then GET OUT > THERE AND DO IT! I love trees, Lewis, J. Russel, and Uncle Bill. I also love Wes, Wendell and Gene (Jackson, Berry and Logsdon, that'd be.) St-Barbe Baker is quite a fellow too, as is Jean Giono's Man who planted trees. Ursula LeGuin is one of my fave speculative fictionaries, 'The Word for World is Forest' one of her goodies. I have planted them, I will plant them. More than that, I use 'tree power' in composting, taking a fair amount of 'bois rameal fragmente' or 'ramial chipped wood' or just chipped tree trimmings (branch wood) for composting and mulching. Elaine Ingham's latest e-zine contains a fascinating discussion of the problems with plate count assessment of species richness and diversity, and the advantages of other methods. http://www.soilfoodweb.com/ezinearchives/feb2002.html Some interesting bits pulled from that discussion include: "Using DNA analysis, the number of species present in soil or compost is much, much higher than what is assessed using plate counts. For example, poor agricultural soil has species diversity of 5,000 or higher. Good agricultural soil has species diversity of 25,000, while forests may be as high as 40,000 species per gram. " "Yes, old growth forest soil has enormous diversity. Yes, it has a greater diversity than compost. But we don't add compost to old growth forest soil. We add compost to poor agricultural soil in order to improve the life in that soil." My grandfather showed me how to 'rob the woods' to get rich soil for the vegetable garden when I was a child. Ruth Stout mentioned people using wood chips instead of hay and getting good results using her permanent mulch method. More recently, researchers here in Quebec have developed 'ramial chipped wood' application techniques for field scale treatment of soils. http://www.sbf.ulaval.ca/brf/regenerating_soils_98.html Part of the method includes inoculating the wood chip mulch with forest floor duff. I am unclear on just what balance between arboreal and pastoral needs to be struck in our planet paradise paradigm. But I do not buy the simplistic notion that grazing leads, willy nilly, to desertification. How 'bout them turnips at Storch's, eh? Frank Teuton----dances with paradigms
