Paul, I heard your review of Broken Limbs and the role of John Ikerd, agricultural economist, in the film and his discussion of Triple Bottom Line economics. I've met Ikerd and have even delivered mail to his home, frankly, I don't think this academic even has a garden. I think if you looked into this Triple Bottom Line economics and Ikerd's positions you'd come to disagree with it. Paul, when you think of solutions to problem, your first instinct is a private sector solution, a more libertarian viewpoint. John Ikerd is a big government control solution seeker, very authoritarian in his thinking. I challenged him after a talk he gave here on the Mizzou campus on that point.
There are a lot of people out there that you may think of as co-belligerants in protecting the environment who are seeking to move people off the
land and have been making it impossible in some areas to build a rural home unless you have at least forty acres. This is the Smart Growth land use planning that is causing that. I'm afraid that the things that many permacultureists want to do is going to be made illegal in these land use plans. The authoritarians are trying to make it necessary everywhere to even have a permit to prune a tree so forget about building swales,
hugelkultur, and other
permaculture techniques. John Ikerd and others want bureaucrats to make these decisions, not you. Look at that Wikipedia definition of Triple Bottom Line, that you linked to, and see that this is heavily connected to the United Nations and the UN NGO ICLEI, and greater
freedom for our agricultural innovations is not in their agenda.
