FB We need to redesign the gardening and farming system is because the standard Western approach just does NOT WORK to meet real people’s real needs in the real world

https://www.facebook.com/groups/permacultureglobal/permalink/3341113852606642/?__tn__=K-R

FB We need to redesign the gardening and farming system is because the standard Western approach just does NOT WORK to meet real people’s real needs in the real world

"I’M TIRED of arguing about RACE AND COLONIALISM AND POLITICS that have NOTHING to do with Permaculture! Let’s ARGUE about GARDENING TECHNIQUES for a change instead!

The reason we need to redesign the gardening and farming system is because the standard Western approach just does NOT WORK to meet real people’s real needs in the real world! Using the standard approach you spend $1000/season, and hundreds of labor hours to grow $300 of produce!

And in a way that uses more materials and is worse for nature than shopping at a grocery store, which doesn’t make sense!

That’s because this system historically evolved out of colonial agriculture that relied on slave labor, so the extra “input” work was “free.” Traditional home and community gardens around the world followed the “law of diminishing returns” (80/20 principle) and people stopped doing extra work after that extra work no longer made sense! In most horticultural societies people grow most of their own food on a few hours of labor per week. These gardens met human needs sustainably while actually increasing biodiversity.

20% of weeding work, for example gets you 80% of the crop yield benefit, but completely weed free “clean” fields were conspicuous consumption that showed a land owner was so wealthy he could put his slaves to work doing useless aesthetic labor. This reduction in biodiversity has no benefit to humans. In fact, now we realize that because it has a huge negative impact on ecosystem health, it may even be a case of where it goes beyond diminished returns and causes “negative returns.”

But the basic aesthetic of this system is the “dominance of nature,” utterly destroying an ecosystem and converting it to exclusive human use. The main benefit is that it allows farming and farm land to be centralized under hierarchical control so the yields of a worker can be distributed upwards to a ruling elite. This is no secret, it’s a well-known corner stone of the colonial “divide and conquer” strategy, to confiscate sustainable productive family and community farm land and centralize it under a ruling elite, which then has an incentive to maintain an oppressive social hierarchy. This was done around the world in the colonial era.

But look of the slave labor approach was seen as “culturally superior” and exported around the world with colonialism, replacing highly efficient in human labor and ecologically beneficial farms, on the grounds that our “clean” looking agriculture in tidy rows was “superior.” This was used as justification to remove indigenous people off their land. Because even though many of these highly sustainable indigenous systems were documented to be many times more productive than dramatically unsustainable European systems of the time, the indigenous farms were claimed to be “undeveloped.” Thus, colonizers spread across America, claiming “undeveloped land” and destroying highly diverse, sustainable and highly productive agroecologies with low-production, unsustainable deserts. Healthy native landscapes were replaced by the already colonized models of Europe.

Later, the same aesthetic judgement was used to confiscate land from African American farmers. After being freed from slavery, many black families were given access to land to farm. Others acquired land in other places around the country. Period reports from white policy makers were quite clear that the black families had used the land to set up highly efficient food forest systems that met their needs on a few hours of labor, which was seen as unacceptable because it did not utilize black labor to produce an excess for white society. So the land was confiscated and given to white land owners to force the black farmers to farm in the colonial manor at low or no wages.

The rise of “green revolution” techniques using fossil fuels and plastics allowed a whole new level of centralization, and many statist colonial theorists like Henry Kissinger well-recognized the divide and conquer potential. Armies of “agriculture” students were sent as apostles for the new methods around the globe, selling the new techniques to dictators and warlords. Indigenous peoples were pushed to even more marginal land with thin soils, and the rich soils and ecologies their families had created over generations of investment were burned off to demonstrate the “high yield” potential of the “superior” western techniques. Meanwhile, the poor productivity of indigenous farms on their new desert landscapes were used to show how “poor” indigenous productivity was, and to justify Westernization as “defeating hunger!”

Meanwhile old growth food forests burn, people grow fat while malnourished, ocean dead zones grow, and a mass extinction continues on.

And the same is true in the developed world, where the same agribusinesses, created as tools of colonial warfare, are exploiting people’s desires for self-sufficiency and connection with nature, to sell their corporate products of oil, plastic and concrete, and an HGTV aesthetic of clean tidy gardens that leaves no room for nature. Nature must be dominated with their handy and affordable products! People’s good intentions are used to make money for the wealthy at the expense of their own health and nature, and the idea of white, western supremacy is reinforced relative to the “dirty, uncivilized” look of traditional societies around the world who live in cooperation with nature.

When we begin to embrace working with nature instead of against it, we’re unwriting one of the most basic ways we’ve been indoctrinated into the mindset of “modern” Western supremacy and superiority, as well as the idea of dominating nature, which has been used to perpetuate some very violent and destructive systems.

So, anyway food forest gardens are way better than HGTV style veggie beds, amiright?"