Emelle Tuesday

Gava, thank you for bringing this up. It is a long and exhauting mess of misinformation. I am aware of these arguements against science. The people who write about this usually have no formal training in Ecology or really any natural sciences at all.

Species evolve in certain conditions and find themselves in an ecological niche'. All species do this. They have everything they need to survive in that specific niche'
within certain parameters.

Before planes and ships, the parameters stayed relatively stable for long long periods. When they changed they changed slowely. Sudden changes were rare and catastrophic. Causeing mass extinction. What civilization is doing now is the 6th great extinction to have occured on Earth in 6 or so billion years.
It is the only one caused by a species.
A huge part of that is us spreading species around the globe and destroying outright what us there.

Before the spread of european colonizers the lands abroad were "pristine" meaning they were ecologically intact.
This is the apologists creed, "humans have always messed up the environment." This is varifyable and easily proven wrong.
Civilizations in the western hemisphere and africa and se asia caused local destruction. But the local ecology was able to rebuild itself becuse enoigh intact plant and animal community remained.

Your land? You likely wont eradicate all thise invasives. They are filling a niche a huge hole left when the land was logged or plowed and geneally destroyed.
Some plants are colonizers ecologically speaking, their job is to invade damaged or new land, in the cae of volcano or earthquake.
There are native weeds. But just as in some permaculture teachings, ecosystems have successional species and climax species.

The idea for thoughful science based Earth care is to restore the native plant community as best as you can while also growing a nice amount of food.
Many, many native plant nurseries exist acrosss a large swath of plant communites check your local area.

Even if you dont care about native plant communities you will care about all the insects and microbes and fungus and birds and etc etc.. That live in close symbiosis with those plant communities. Did you know that many insects benefishials only use one native plant species to survive.?

Its all very resiliant ubless your a civilization , then the whole thing is as fragile as a china shop.

Once you get a portion of your land back into some stable native plant community, you can experiment with some selective rotational use.
The thing is real permaculture, the only kind that is anything close to perma and culture is on a non human time frame. Meaning it will take, in a temperate climate a decade or decades and millenia, in tropical areas you can shorten that time span but then you also have invasives that never rest.

Certain species of invasives basically need to be eradicated or will eat up time and resources, buckthorn and canada thisle are 2 that will utterly make it impossible to do anything with eradicating. If you dont get it all it will be back even worse. Completely shading out and preventing any growth.

A native plant community often will have hundreds of species in a few meters. When we say community we mean these species form a bond and interdependence that makes a permaculture "guild" look like a one night stand. Can you dig that?
Paul staments work on mushrooms in Pacific Northwest has uncovered a tip of the ice burg inregards to fungus role. What we dont know about what we have and are destroying vastly outweights what we do know.

Do the best you can, its all we can do.

Tyler, doesnt sound like he's taking credit for "inventing" the word. Even if he did try to take credit for a word. How would he prove it?
Writers popularize ideas and spread language.
Are you not interested in the topic? Sustainable ag and agroecology or permaculture in practice?

Linguisticly speaking.

Also, It is impossible to credit a word to an individual. Somewhat less difficult to credit any word to a certain century.

Lastly, the article can be argued word for word to avoid and distract from its real purpose which is to ad to a contructive dialog surounding issues of importance.

Be well.

Who cares its only a word. Yes, lets proceed anyway in the spirit of seeking wisdom and clarity.

Agroecology or simply Ecofarming has a much more clearly definable definition. Permaculture by contrast is an almost meaningles catchall word that can mean almost anything to anyone, and so almost functions as a secret handshake for those in the know.

Permaculture: at it's best represents more than "just" growing food, for those in the know, it represents an entire way of living that is much more benign or even benefishial to the Earth than mainstream culture. However, food and growing it is the heart and of course stomach of the term permaculture, it is the main topic of most literature and discussions under the heading "permaculture". And rightly so, food, is not only how almost every living thing survives, it is what defines culture from an anthropological view. Human cultures have always been based around food and its attainment.
So isnt permaculture then a perfect name for what we are discussing on this website? In someways yes, but glaringly no in one big way, food is not implied in its definition. O.k. Sure, once you become aquainted with the word as secret handshake you know growing food is part of the game. The problem, as i see it, is that its such a broadly defined word that just about anyome or anything can define it in almost any old way. Yes im being a bit polemic now but bear with me. Lets move on to the other term.

Agroecology. This has a specific meaning! Agriculture or Agronomy is the discpline of growing food in abundance. And ecology is this amazing word that really is only 50 or 60 years old in acedemia and really only become widely accepted in the early 70's means the study of the relationships on earth. Specifically the economic relationships between species. Economic? Yes how a species gets its food is the basis of the word eco nomy the sustainable use of Resources.
So this word conjuction agroecology is the practice of using the earths model of relationship economics to help us grow alot of food. As opposed to the by any means nessisary method that has been applied in the industrial civilization and more specifically since ww2 with the onset of chemical agriculture.

So we all know what agrononmy is but how many know what ECOLOGY IS? What i like to think of it is civilization slowy figuring out what all of our ancestors already knew living in the real permacultures of band socities and tribes.
Ecology is the thing that created every living thing, including us. It is first and formost species relationships with each other forming communities which for the last billion years or so has meant plant communities as its backbone, fungi and all the other kingdoms of course, but plants get the damn energy from the sun and turn it in to something we can use, biological energy.

The real issue with this word play definition is that permaculture at its worst ignores what it purports to want to help and is no differnt in that regard than chemical industrial ag. Yes. By supperimposing the will of our species hubris onto the amazing planet that created us. Chemicals sl ag says we need P K and H right? Phosphorus potasium and nitrogen and you just dump that in and grow what you want. Permaculture practice sometimes says just dump these species in and they will make a bunch of food. The ecology is often lacking, not entirely absent but lacking. Sure legumes fix nitrogen etc... But this is nothing compaired to all the divese interactions that happen in a native plant community.
At its worse permaculture totally ignores even dismisses these miracles of evolution, many plant communities are 10's of thousands of years old, many are 100's of thousands of years old. Make no mistake the members of these communities NEED each other to survive. Permaculture at its worse seems to ignore the 6th great extinction we are now making on Earth and arragantly thinks we can throw a few species together and it will be not only o.k, but better than what a billion years of evolution could create.

So ecology, seems to me, needs to be the cornerstone of what is called permaculture. So much of what is though of as permaculture origin is actually agro ecology. Fukuoka's rice beds were not permaculture it was agriculture but with the study of ecology included. His amazing transformative story of the mandarins is not permaculture its ecofarming. Meaning in order to grow an unnatural amount of food to feed and unnatural amount of our species we still need to work our asses off in a less diverse environment. Holzers used agriculture to support themselves, they learned how to do it in a more ecological way for their speciific ecosystem.

Your not going to form any alternative to chemical farming with what many people call permaculture. Permaculture for many is a hobby, what used to be called a gentlemans garden. It is what i would call an introduction to ecology. A great hands on introduction to ecology.
At its best permaculture opens peoples minds! Opens their eyes! To the natural world. But its mostly gardening. And when you get hungry you go to the store and buy some food! Hopefully from a organic farmer and maybe if your lucky and ecofarmer. The united nations has declared that in order to feed what will soon be 8 billion people we must adopt agroecological small farms.
And i would like to believe that most people that follow permaculture ideas want that. Small independent self sufficient ecologically sound farms. Soooo, they will all need to grow more than is natural. Not by gimmicks or getting disposable income from lucky folks in rich countries or selling ideas in "design courses and books and video but by growing a hell of a lot of damn food!
I am grateful that permaculture exists as an umbrella to push ideas and a place for folks to gather to think together.

Permaculture is, in the main, a urban suburban pasttime, a healthy progressive wholistic societal force. Its not a culture, its not permanent.
In damaged or destroyed urban and suburban landscapes and old ag land you can hardly do any wrong by any ole growing of anything. But on large scale growing enough food to feed a community and not get forclosed... Without residual income...without a trust fund, is hard dirty work, and many permaculture ideas are just that, ideas. Not something to bet the farm on, as it actually would mean. Can you imagine what it would take to do a 40 acre hugle bed? How much it woukd take away from the local nutrient cycle of the local ecosystem? If your fortunate to have anything that could vaguely be classified as a intact ecosystem.

Ill leave you with this, ecologists, botanists and anthropologist have found many examples of food forests and agroecology practiced by indigenous natural cultures. We used to know how to live on Earth as not only a benign species, but actually as a benefishial species just like all others.
In order to do this again we need to listen and learn from the amazing diversity that is left on earth. And first do no harm.
Can you protect and even restore native plants communities while growing an abundence of human food?
I believe we can , i have done it.
First, do no harm. In order to do no harm. Understand nearly everything about the land your at. We need "new" approaches, local approaches, natural is, in stark reality a very local reality in deed.

Nessesity is the mother of invention. And nessity means poverty, it means hunger. This is and has been the great inovator and this i believ is one of main missing components to seeing permacultures true virtue and its honest limitations.

Be well. Grow food, together.