permaculture aid ships and other big permacultural ideas

julian Gerona wrote:With regards to formal education. Lets take for example me and my brother who just graduated from a 4 year agriculture course. I am not two months reading here on permie but yet I can tell that I know more than he does. Why because I am learning directly from people who are at the cutting edge and people who are actually doing it This should be the kind of school we must have. A school of people for the people and by the people. formal education is an insanity in comparison to permie school.

I sometimes dream of having a sailing ship, or sometimes a heavy-lift cargo airship, that would carry a hardcore technical permaculture school, travelling to places it's needed, dropping the seed of permacultural civilisation in the way that organisations today have floating aid hospitals and the like, providing not just aid, but a plan forward for each individual on how to better enable themselves, both to build or rebuild, and to help feed people and the earth.

Imagine being on such a vessel.

After the danger of hurricane season had passed each year, we'd find ourselves back in the Gulf of Mexico, helping the survivors of the annual 1000-year hurricane events clean up, and helping to transition to a permaculturally-aligned, hurricane-proof infrastructural model.

In the spring, the regular record-breaking flooding of the North American continent would take us there, where the mistakes of the Army Corps of Engineers would be undone, rejuvenating estuaries, riparian areas, marshes and swamps, giving the waters somewhere to go again, and incidentally, replenishing aquifers.

We'd drop in after monsoons, typhoons, tsunamis, wildfires, you name it, we'd beat FEMA or any other damned organisation there, put boots on the ground, and get protective landforms, shelter, and food systems in place, the whole world over.

All we'd need are a few good permies... Oh, and money. That'd help.

-CK

Chris Kott wrote:
I sometimes dream of having a sailing ship, or sometimes a heavy-lift cargo airship, that would carry a hardcore technical permaculture school, travelling to places it's needed, dropping the seed of permacultural civilisation in the way that organisations today have floating aid hospitals and the like, providing not just aid, but a plan forward for each individual on how to better enable themselves, both to build or rebuild, and to help feed people and the earth.

Imagine being on such a vessel.
...
-CK

This is brilliant. Reminds me of a story I heard about someone questioning why the US always sends in an aircraft carrier after a natural disaster and the military representative explained how they can provide ship to shore power, airlift injured, full on board hospital, etc.

Imagine the next ship over being another aircraft carrier scale ship that can provide the support to rebuild like this. Brilliant.

We may need a new thread for this.

There is Permie that shared their work on making a press:Cinva Ram CEB press

I love the idea of a Permie ship, every time a cargo ship/crew is left adrift at sea by a corporation, I have wished there was a way little people to band together and take possession of it.
A traveling seed bank/library/ machine shop/wood shop/power plant could get a lot done.
Equip it with designs from https://www.opensourceecology.org/

Maybe sailing vessels with one last trip left in them, or a vessel build to be dismantled and reused at the other end would be the way to go.

William Bronson wrote:There is Permie that shared their work on making a press:Cinva Ram CEB press

I love the idea of a Permie ship, every time a cargo ship/crew is left adrift at sea by a corporation, I have wished there was a way little people to band together and take possession of it.
A traveling seed bank/library/ machine shop/wood shop/power plant could get a lot done.
Equip it with designs from https://www.opensourceecology.org/

Maybe sailing vessels with one last trip left in them, or a vessel build to be dismantled and reused at the other end would be the way to go.

There are a number of options, and yes, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

Imagine such a ship outfitted for permacultural relief duties, with the civilisation-building kits from Open Source Ecology.

Imagine also an artificial island depot in international waters where these hulks are gathered to be either retrofitted into more permie ships, or turned into the seed kernel of a seacrete-growing artificial island that supports a mobile coral reef on its underside and sequesters carbon it pulls from the ocean, reversing ocean acidification.

Imagine the permaculturally aligned mariculture that could happen in conjunction with such constructs.

But the relief angle is huge. What if a permie relief ship had docked in Puerto Rico after their last hurricane destroyed everything? We could already have whole swathes of geography remade on permacultural models.

-CK

Careful my friends, creation starts with a thought. warning: You might get what you are dreaming of.

Caleb Mayfield wrote:
We may need a new thread for this.

And done! I copied the posts here. :D

Chris, feel free to rename this thread something better!

“permaculturally-aligned, hurricane-proof infrastructural model.”

As a resident of the Gulf Coast, I am interested in what folks think the main features of such an infrastructure would be

julian Gerona wrote:Careful my friends, creation starts with a thought. warning: You might get what you are dreaming of.

Julian, I am curious as to how you think a permaculturally-aligned humanitarian and ecological aid ship concept could go so wrong that we would regret it.

Oh, we could call the first of such ships the P.S.S. (Permaculture Support Ship) Three Ethics.

Then we could actually see the Three Ethics at work.

-CK

Jennifer Richardson wrote:“permaculturally-aligned, hurricane-proof infrastructural model.”

As a resident of the Gulf Coast, I am interested in what folks think the main features of such an infrastructure would be

That's a great question. I am thinking it would probably start off-shore, in historical hurricane paths, with undersea artificial reefs built on seacrete, generated with renewable energy. We could have solar rafts, kites, or tethered buoys, harvesting energy from sun, wind, and wave, turning it into electricity and feeding that into a metallic form built to accrete sea minerals into the aforementioned Seacrete, on which coral thrive, by the way, and whose formation should theoretically also manage to reverse ocean acidification by sequestering carbon from the water into mineral form.

These reefs would form the basis for artificial landforms that would eventually support mangrove swamp ecosystems. I envision these reef and mangrove systems acting as moderating barriers for most of the time, texturizing the sea floor, taking some of the energy out of storm systems before they ever make landfall.

In terms of housing in flood-prone areas, I would suggest marine infrastructure. If your house is designed to either float on water, or to be sealed up and be protected from the lashings of the storm either by rising flood waters or by actually sinking below the normal water level, it can't very well be storm-battered.

Likewise, if housing is built two-thirds into the top of a hill, such that the hill would need to be compromised in order to damage the house, well, should the house be damaged, there are already larger issues at hand.

Realistically, I would like to see seaside communities transform into shallow undersea communities whose partial focus is the development of sustainable, resilient, and renewable infrastructure to help themselves and the continent as a whole adapt to, and decrease the adverse effects of, storm damage. I would also like to see a hell of a lot of permaculturally-aligned seafloor vertical mariculture, with an emphasis on encouraging the lowest trophic levels, those that will escape the system to go on and be a food source for diminishing wild stocks of sea life.

Mainly, though, a lot could be done in hurricane-prone areas with regards to building codes. Not building matchstick and paper buildings in low-lying areas is a good start; not building matchstick and paper buildings at all is a better step. It's frankly easier to envision enacting the kind of change we're talking about in a situation like post-hurricane Puerto Rico, or any area badly-hit enough that it's effectively a blank slate.

I have also heard the concept of extremely durable windmill designs whose purpose is to literally take energy out of storm systems by being placed in their path and generating electricity. While I admire the function-stacking, I am hesitant to do things to limit the efficacy of a natural system whose job it is to move excess heat from the equator to the poles.

-CK

Chris Kott wrote:

julian Gerona wrote:Careful my friends, creation starts with a thought. warning: You might get what you are dreaming of.

Julian, I am curious as to how you think a permaculturally-aligned humanitarian and ecological aid ship concept could go so wrong that we would regret it.

Oh, we could call the first of such ships the P.S.S. (Permaculture Support Ship) Three Ethics.

Then we could actually see the Three Ethics at work.

-CK

Sorry I forgot the smiley. I'm kidding. Who would not want such an idea?