greenstorm | Sources

scratchdaddy asked about my sources. Me and all my internet time answered:

I'm not directly quoting anyone; I've been doing permaculture for a long time and a lot of stuff has sort of seeped into my consciousness at various points. Everything from articles in National Geographic to academic lectures to common sense to research into 'antiquated' farming systems put together with general knowledge of some of the major systems movement of food and waste through north america informs the comment. Reindeer herding is practised in Norway, Finland, etc, and was a big thing in Siberia for awhile on a more commercial scale than it is now: see rangifer.net and wikipedia (reindeer and Sheldon Jackson). More info can be found if you speak Scandinavian languages or Russian, but there's a lot there. The wikipedia article on chickens is great and pretty comprehensive though it doesn't touch on the waste-disposal issues of factory farming, and it's got a bunch of citations. Standard US agricultural practice as regards to soybeans (and thus tofu, faux-meat products like veggie dogs, textured soy protein, and protein bars or shakes, is widely accepted as pretty awful - wikipedia agriculture and look at 'environmental impacts' and 'agriculture and petroleum' for some citations. Soybeans are also one of the major GMO crops.

Essentially, you have more time to pursue sources than I, but wikipedia is a good collection of starting points. Michael Pollan's books the Omnivore's Dilemma &c have a pretty good bibliography, and reading that one book isn't a bad starting point. Botany of Desire is a worse book in terms of uneven writing, but there's some good info there too. I can't find, offhand, but have seen: map of arable (ploughable) land, map of range-able land, here's a map of more or less current reindeer herds: http://www.rangifer.net/rangifer/herds/images/herd_species_big.jpg (you can see that's a lotta land that can't be put to conventional agriculture because it's frozen as close to all the time as makes no difference, and the soil is easily destroyed if its disturbed in the thaw stage-- it turns into essentially barren mud then).

Essentially, if you're trying to make an ecosystem out of food and human-use plants and then harvest out of that ecosystem at a sustainable rate, there is no reason to harvest -only- plants (no generalisation is true across all biomes) as long as you're careful. Animals are an important part of the systems in almost all cases.

Our tendency is to separate the different parts of agriculture; cows over here, grain over there, lettuce in a totally different state yet again. That causes both waste and an extraordinary draw on resources to feed the system, when in a well-designed system there is no waste, only a resource for the next link in the chain. Reintegration is common sense in a lot of ways.

Youtube has some great videos (Bill Mollison or Bill Mollison + permaculture) too.