Reflections for the new year

 Jan 5, 2013

Cooking rice and lentils on our wood stove  

Four weeks without posting! I mean to post more often but things got in the way, I guess, among which, bouts of pain and hay fever, a theft at our house, and the holidays with family visiting from Brasilia.

One thing we have in abundance here is time to read, and we’ve downloaded numerous Kindle books on permaculture to help us develop our land in sustainable ways. Peter Bane’s The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country (2012-06-26, New Society Publishers. Kindle Edition), focuses primarily on gardens and farms in the US and Canada, so it leaves something to be desired for our rural area here in Brazil. But much is applicable and some of his analysis is universal. The following passages struck deep chords in me. The first helps explain my attraction to Brazil where a much larger percentage of the population remains connected to farming.

Today only 0.3% of Americans and 2.2% of Canadians derive their primary income from farming.  This is the smallest proportion of the population devoted to farming in the history of either nation or in the history of the world. No other societies have made our basic connection to the earth and the garnering of sustenance such a marginal specialty. Are we, as economists and prophets of progress proclaim, more evolved and more efficient, freeing up labor from the drudgery of farming to perform more complex and rewarding tasks in industry or the creative professions? Or have we so lost ourselves in thrall to the logic of the machine, that we will sacrifice everything to it — the quality of our food, our health, the land, even our very souls? 

This agro-forest bed planted on Dec 1 is doing really well.

Unfortunately “progress and efficiency” march on relentlessly in Brazil as well, and “the basic connection to the earth and the garnering of sustenance” is becoming “a marginal specialty.” Guy and I are part of an effort to reverse the trend toward huge monocultures and mechanized agriculture. We’re working with others to develop and model viable ways for young people and families to sustain themselves on small properties, raising much of their own healthy and diverse food. I believe this is a way to reclaim our souls.

Here’s the second passage from The Permaculture Handbook that I want to highlight, with its familiar critique of the suburbs and its surprising outlook for them.

The depression of the 21st century, outwardly visible from 2008 onward, has been the occasion of much writing on the link between energy supply, settlement patterns and the shaky basis of the US economy. Social critic and geographer James Howard Kunstler has called the suburbs “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”  There can be little doubt that paving over much of the nation’s best agricultural land and cutting old growth forests to frame shoddily built McMansions was a tragedy of epic proportions, but the question is not whom to hang but what can be done with it now?

However disreputable its causes, the emptying out of many American cities and the spreading of the population over broad metropolitan regions marks a necessary and inevitable turn toward a state of lower social and technological complexity that will develop progressively as energy supplies decline. 

Guy can tell you how often I’ve remarked, when driving by large suburban properties in the US and gawking at the enormous lawns, that a whole third world village could feed themselves from that amount of land. Well maybe it’s the American suburbanites that will rise up as the new farmers, maybe it’s already happening. Our property here is about half an acre, most of which was pasture until we closed it in. We expect to raise enough vegetables, tubers and fruit to get by on if we had to, and if we raise chickens and perhaps a mama goat, fish, and rabbits, we’ll eat very well.

Our wonderful mango tree - don't you think you should start planning your visit?