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Sustainable Future v1.0a

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MelCat

MelCat

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Hey guys,

Sustainability has been on the tip of my mind for awhile now.

It's like it's a new buzzword that people throw around but what does it really mean?

Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time.

Diverse, productive and keeping your footprint to a minimum. That's what it's all about.

I intend on updating this post quite a bit so I'm definitely open to constructive criticism so that the most people can benefit from this information.

Ok, so lets begin with the notion of diversity.

Geoff Lawton of www.permacultureplanet.com (torrent available at http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/1653047/30399201/ ) suggests flowing with nature instead of against it.

The problem with agriculture today is that it's mostly mono-crops. Mono-crops are horrible for the soil so farmers end up using fertilizers that typically do more damage than good to the soil.
They create massive insect problems which most farmers treat with pesticides that cause further problems to the soil. [need more negative reasons for mono-crops]

I ask you, where in nature do we see mono-crops? There is always some level of diversity there. Nature breaks up mono-crops with weeds that try to heal the damage that's been done. Certain weeds only sprout after fires to neutralize all of the excess phosphorus around. Nature is consistently trying to repair herself but we continue to rape her faster than she can recoup.

So back on track with Geoff's notion of flowing with nature.

This is all described in the video with way more detail, so I highly recommend checking out the torrent above.

Take the notion of a typical forest. It's made up of several layers and they all work in diverse harmony. Geoff's notion is to take that concept and orchestrate the plants yourself. So you start with a ground and root layer of herbs and potatoes and whatnot. Then you add a layer of small food producing, nitrous infusing legume bushes. Then the next layer is bigger legume bushes. The next layer will be regular trees, followed by canopy trees. You can also add a vine layer such as pepper to climb the trees.

The concept is that you start out with a LOT of the smaller plants to begin with (10,000+) and only a few trees (~100+/-) and as the smaller plants grow up, mature and die, they will nourish the bigger trees and infuse more nitrous into the soil.

So you end up with a few bushes here or there and an abundance of food producing trees in VERY healthy soil.

With the diversity of all the different plants, the beneficial insects are right at home and the non-beneficial insects get confused and then consumed.

He goes into many natural ways to combat pests and ways to get started. It's very valuable information that can only help in the extended scope of things. It requires a bit of work at the beginning but the minimal long term maintenance and huge benefits make it very worth the effort.

So that is one way to feed yourself and your family. You'll also have excess that you can preserve in cans or mason jars for the future or you could sell it or give it away.

Here's a quick video showing a 30 year old food forest:

and a 300 year old food forest:
[YOUTUBE]


Another way is aqua culture.

I don't have a lot of information on aquaculture so I'll just share a couple of videos and let you see for yourself how it works. Definitely something I want to try in the future but the food forest seems more fool proof.

[YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]

The cool thing about aquaculture is that you can integrate it into your Earthship house.

What's an Earthship house you might ask?

Check this out... :D

[YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]

So where does that leave us?

We are now growing our own food, living off of the map and building our own new reality that isn't dependent on oil or fossil fuels. Greener really is better.

So what's next?

We have to wake people up!

We have to let them know the faults in money and that there is a better way!

What is that better way you ask?

It's all about The Venus Project!

While I admit, it's going to take some effort to get from where we are now to a society like the Venus Project proposes, but I think it is a goal worth working towards.

When people say there isn't enough money, they are really saying there isn't enough cooperation.

If we can find enough people to cooperate, we can accomplish anything!

So before I go any further, if you haven't watched Zeitgeist Addendum in it's entirety, I highly suggest you do so now.

It tells the truth about the monetary system and it gives you a look at the Venus Project and their goals and ideas.


The next video is the Zeitgeist Activist Orientation video. This sheds a little more light into how things are and how you can help.


Please keep in mind, The Venus Project is the main hub. Peter Joseph created the first Zeitgeist before he was aware of the Venus Project. Once the two discovered each other, they made Zeitgeist the activist arm of the Venus Project. The Venus Project is located in Venus, Florida and their tours of the facility will resume when they return from their world lecture tour.

I admit that it will take a lot of effort to get humanity to adopt a concept as powerful as the Venus Project. It's such a radical change to our current way of thinking.

Granted we don't have the resources right now to fully automate every aspect of human life, so what can we do in the meantime?

All of the posts in this sustainable fora give us a good start.

The next step is learning to connect with people and our environment on much higher levels than we are currently doing. (Nexians excluded from that statement)

I believe that this guy is definitely on the right track.


I'm done with this post for tonight.

Please feel free to give constructive criticism to make this post valuable to all. <3
 
Thats a lot of info there, thanks! Permaculture sounds very interesting! I knew it very superficially, it gives me the desire to research more :)

The whole zeitgeist story, from seeing both sides of the argument it seems to me there's a lot of interesting points being raised but also some innacuracies and assumptions and so on. It seems very popular with the 'conspiracy theory' people which im a bit wary of. But I havent watched it yet so I cant say for myself. I think that its important to try to be sustainable and movements that question the status quo, but have to also keep the foot on the ground, have critical thinking and be pragmatic. Like, what can we change in every single day, instead of projecting and giving away our responsibility to certain people we imagine are in control of things and never doing anything to change in daily life.

As for the earthships, I love the idea of having a sustainable house. Some of them look really cool, some look very ugly! I think they need better designers :D But yeah I think thats the way to think if we want to bring anything long-lasting and positive for this planet, making due to our gift of being alive, and that our part in the story of existence is worthy



Btw, somehow related, there's something very interesting called 'Terra Preta' (black earth), which is a very rich kind of earth they found in the amazon. The interesting thing is that, contrary to what many people think, the earth in the amazon is not very rich in general, the layer of organic material is quite superficial, so the forest depends on all the vegetation constant presence and over-ground decay to be able to sustain the plants. Thats why when trees are cut, the soil quickly degrades.

So anyways what they found out is that there are places with this very rich earth, instead of a few cm of good organic nutrients, many meters of it! And from finding pottery and human rests, they saw it was due to the indigenous people. The tribes had a system of always burying the food rests and carbon from woodfire and other things.. So even though they had the abundance they needed, they still acted in sustainable ways that made a considerable impact on earth. Big lesson to us unsustainable 'civilized' people
 
On the same lines as Terra Preta, the Indians in the Northwest US contributed a lot to how the landscape there used to look. If you read accounts from the original settlers in New Jersey (I THINK it was Jersey... I could be wrong), the whole area was made up of huge, beautiful old forests. And now there are movements to give the land back to nature. But land in Jersey that is given back to nature ends up being kind of a dryish scrub. The Indians were the ones who had, over hundreds of years, helped the ecosystem there and maintained the forests until they were capable of being self-sustaining.

Being truly "sustainable" or "green" isn't just about cutting back on energy expenditure, nor is it about "returning" land to nature. Ideally it's integrating ourselves into the ecosystem, or (as needs to happen more often these days) creating our own ecosystem in which the ecosystem helps us help it so that we both can achieve more than either could on our own.

I read an article about people trying to cut back on energy consumption in the US, and their goal was to cut back until their annual carbon output was below the global average. But in modern America, without permaculture integrated into your lifestyle (or living in a hut with a yak) it's nearly impossible to get below the global average. The people whom the article was about cut their carbon output by half, but were still far above the average. And THAT AVERAGE IS THE AMOUNT OF CARBON PER PERSON THAT'S FUCKING THINGS UP SO QUICKLY ALREADY.

Living a sustainable lifestyle is much more than cutting back; the western world needs a radical change in lifestyle to REALLY turn things around... and integration of ourselves into an ecosystem, or building one around us, and maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship with that ecosystem is probably the only way to meet that goal.
 
Permaculture just has to replace a large bulk of the dominating mass monoculture methods. Much more local small permaculture gardens... that's the way to go or we're doomed. Combine that with good mycomanagemant (Stamets) and we're back on track!

I think I watched most vids about Earthships years ago, it's a great concept. But I can hardly imagine all those city masses in earthships.

Thanks for the tips I didn't know yet, I'll check them out!
 
I'm sceptical that permaculture could work on an industrial scale, because it's relatively labour intensive. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'd be really interested to hear more. For example, the Haudenesawnee grew 'the three sisters'- first the corn grows, then the beans climb up the corn, while the squash grows on the ground below. How could a combine harvester be used in such a field? I envisage commercial farming working similar to now, except with proper crop rotation to keep soil fertile instead of chemical fertilisers. Perhaps borderless strip farming could help to break crops up to reduce pest infestations, thus reducing pesticide use, as well as introducing natural predators etc etc. It's been suggested that all sewage should be converted for fertilising land, in fact you can already buy fertilising pellets made from human sewage. Permaculture I'm guessing is better for private gardens (if you can't afford machinery then permaculture is meant to be a less labour intensive method), it would be great if people started farming their gardens in the west. We need to also give land multiple uses wherever possible, such as farming chickens, pigs, bees etc within forests.

The modern version of terra preta is being developed- 'hydrothermal carbonisation'.

A big thing for me is land reform- I believe that any individual should be allowed to build their own home on their own land, provided they do not reduce the amount of farmable land by doing so (i.e. it's either mobile, earth-roofed or on stilts) and do not use polluting materials. Land laws in my country has produced a shortage of housing, so now one has to work an entire lifetime just to be able to afford your own home... ridiculous when one person could build an entire house alone themselves within a year. People have become further enslaved by building legislation.
 
Permaculture may be labor intensive, but the point of it is that each person can effectively raise enough food to feed themselves most of the time. It's not meant to be a new form of commercial agriculture.
 
Great thread-so full of wonderful idea's!!

Permaculture is all about input and output. While it may be more labor intensive if put beside the mass crop machines working the majority of land today, the outputs still out weigh the input. I enjoy working my body and I feel positive effects from it so I guess it depends on how you look at work. It also has a huge focus on the human side of life even more so than growing food or "doing" things to the land. Basic knowledge is that the earth can do fine without us and the more we let nature do it's thing without human hands the better. Work smarter not harder!

Weedless gardening 4 Rules for Weedless Gardening – Mother Earth News
Lasagna gardening Lasagna Gardening 101
No till http://www.no-dig-vegetablegarden.com/no-till-gardening.html

I like the idea of earth ships but when faced with living beside tires and cement I just do not see it as an answer for me. Along with the humidity of the living plants/gardens and waste water system in these houses, I just do not like them. How can cement and tires as a sustainable building material? When I think of what I want to support, using waste from the auto culture is not high on my list.

I LOVE straw bail homes! They feel, smell and resonate harmony with the Earth in my mind. Ahouseofstraw Given the all natural building supplies with the ability to grow all I need to build a home, it is the best ideal for my situation.
 
This might be a bit of a mess of thoughts as I'm constantly readjusting my ideas but I'll try to write some of it down.
I think a very critical thing is having the right to land, without that it will be very difficult to live in a sustainable way. With control over land concentrated over a very small number of people it will simply be impossible for everybody to live sustainably without somehow taking that land out of the control of those few.

Simply looking at what we need, I view it to be warmth, shelter, food, community, entertainment
Let's start with warmth, let's look at the sustainable resources we have available. We create our own warmth from inside our body as a result of our constant metabolism, we can adjust how warm we are by putting on and taking off layers of clothing.
Clothing also needs to come from somewhere, eg animal skins, fibres such as hemp, flax, cotton etc, these different materials need to be carefully chosen as many have different implications in their use and in some places may be difficult to use sustainably. I'll just use any clothes I find really, there's a lot of things that I do that may not be sustainable in the long run but since they are byproducts of things that I am not contributing to I can justify them.

In the middle of winter it can be too cold for simple insulation to be enough, this is where I think it's important to look at earth-bermed and earthship style dwellings, dugouts etc, as the earth is at a constant 12C (varies depending on location of course) all year round once you get below a couple feet, so as long as you're willing to keep some layers on you can be pretty warm all year round.

If not, then I see wood as the main source of heat for cooking as well as heating, although this certainly needs to be done with a lot of care. If you're looking at mature forests, dead wood forms a very essential part of the ecosystem by hosting recyclers such as bugs and insects, which in turn birds etc feed on and it's quite an integral part of the support for wildlife in an area, so indiscriminately stripping an area of dead wood can be quite destructive. Dead standing trees are a better choice but still have to be taken with care.

It will often actually be better for everything around you to actually cut down one or two mature live trees, chop them up and properly season them until they are burnable. Good burners and insulated buildings can cut down on wood use a lot, open firepits while useful take up quite a bit of wood, though small pits no bigger than a foot across use less wood, this is where proper skills of living out in the woods for a while are absolutely essential to live in sustainable ways, although I'm very used to it it's amazing seeing visitors who've never really used fires before trying to light fires; they either totally fail and end up with a soggy mess, burn green wood or use fires that are far to large for the purpose they serve, but they learn quickly and it's a very useful skill to have.

Shelter can be made from a lot of different natural materials, keeping them waterproof is usually the hardest part; personally I still use plastic tarpaulins for the roofs of shelters as they are just the easiest waterproof way to do things, while they may not be sustainable in the long run if it's the only plastic I buy then I'd say it's a lot better than 'the average'. A general 'shed' style building is the easiest to make, but there's a lot of different designs such as treehouses, benders, yurts, tipis, dugouts etc etc, all with their own pro's and cons, again this just needs trying and experience and it's not really all that difficult. I see having shelters that are biodegradable as a very positive thing, even if it means rebuilding your home every few years I don't see a problem with it.

Food is really the main one, and it's quite complicated to actually figure out things that will work for everybody. A lot of people do say that the planet simply does not have enough resources to feed the number of humans on this planet sustainably, to be honest I'm not really sure but to live sustainably while nourishing and being one with sustainable ecosystems there will probably have to be less people on the planet in simple terms of land use, although with different techniques it may be possible to feed everybody, I simply do not know.
A list of food sources I can think of, then I'll talk about some of them.
Growing plants
Foraging
Hunting
Scavenging
Domesticating animals
Fishing

Growing plants is what I see to be a major part of my food source, but I acknowledge that it can not always be relied on. Even with the best skills some years may have worse weather than others, crops can and do fail and diseases can come along and wipe out huge portions of the food that you rely on.
Permaculture is very important imho, and beyond just the growing food aspect of it, I guess permaculture is what I'm talking about for all of this. But it needs work for different ecosystems, for example nut trees really don't grow very well in the scottish highlands, and forest gardening can be very difficult there as it encourages a high humidity inside the system which leads to a lot of good food rotting, these techniques need developing for all ecosystems and bioregions.
Failing the very 'continuous' theories of forest gardening and similar things, I oppose the use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, plowing and deforestation in order to grow food. Crop rotation and the appropriate use of natural fertilizers such as seaweed, animal manure (where appropriate of course), urine and composted human feces, other natural plants such as comfrey and the appropriate use of leaf mulch and forest humus can take the role of fertilisation and hopefully the continuous improvement of soil nutrients over time.
Nice plants to grow: peas, beans, nuts (where you can), fruit trees, lettuces and other brassicas, root crops such as potatoes and parsnips.
Foraging I believe can take a small but important part in our diet, mainly from fruit trees and berries which can give us important nutrients and minerals, but for example even nettles can provide quite a lot of protein year round if the bushes are kept cut back well. Over time you can develop a knowledge of what plants are edible, which are the highest in nutrients and how to harvest and cook them, again this needs experience.

Hunting is a bit difficult for me, as for now I do follow veganism, but I do recognize that (as before said), crops do fail etc etc and it may be difficult to get a properly complete diet without small amounts of meat. For example in the scottish highlands deer are very common around, and although I would wish to say that we could just let them roam wild and never shoot them, they would soon become as common as the sheep which have totally decimated the whole of the beautiful bioregion of the caledonian forests and turned the hills into bare vistas of grass and heather, so I see shooting small amounts of deer and only as much as is absolutely necessary as being possible in a sustainable future; I also see a difference in terms of environmental and "animal rights" 'factors' between ending the life of an animal when you really need the food from it's own natural environment where it has lived all of it's life without domestication or control from humans and the alternative which would be farming non native animals on land under constant control and cruelty from humans; it's not ideal but it may be necessary.

Scavenging is probably a pretty small part but worth mentioning, I mean finding dead animals and putting their energy to use in your body, recycling the nutrients and continuing their life. As an example I would say I'm vegan but I will occasionally eat roadkill meat (last weekend had some roadkill deer cooked in a maori style earth oven, amazing), and don't see anything wrong with it really. Or scavenging in terms of eating from the bins of establishments such as supermarkets etc, all the food is going to landfill anyway so I view it as a good thing, while not really sustainable in the long run it is a good food source that many people do live off of all year round.
Domesticating animals is something I am really against so I won't say much about it but the reasons why: I view animals as free spirits and confining them with fences, controlling their diets and environments, raising them for the only reason to have food for us as a negative and spiritually unsustainable thing, and however you raise them they will have a negative impact on the ecosystem; whether it's through the large inefficiency in grain-fed animals or the destruction of land (a lot more than just with farming food) with grazing animals I see them as a negative impact.
Fishing I have a similar opinion on as hunting, just to say that ocean ecosystems are in general quite well balanced and great care must be taken not to overfish, however pole and line fishing probably won't have that huge an impact as long as it is done sensibly and with care.
I'll do a quick summary of the community and entertainment; I'm not really sure if there is 'one way' in which we are supposed to live, but personally I love living in a communal almost 'tribal' way, it spreads the necessary tasks between people and makes life a lot easier to live; for example if you have 1 person they have to cook every single meal for themselves, if you have a 'tribe' of 30 people then each person would only have to cook once a month if shared evenly, and it's barely any more effort cooking for 30 people than it is one, not to mention a lot more efficient on resources such as firewood.
Entertainment is also a very important one and one that should not be neglected, I also mean in sustainability of mental and spiritual health, I believe that people can make their own entertainment and help each other with it, and I oppose the concentration of entertainment onto mass media and disconnection from the person and the situation they are in.

Hope this provides a bit of insight, and it doesn't just disappear into the ether, thanks :)
 
ohayoco said:
I'm sceptical that permaculture could work on an industrial scale, because it's relatively labour intensive.
Click to expand...

Good point by Bananaforeskin. This can only work on a grand scale if people from all layers of the population are prepared to put some serious effort into it. I like the idea of lawyers having to grow their own vegetables in their backyards just to survive ;)

'This is where the designer turned into a decliner' - Bill Mollison
[YOUTUBE]

Check out 'swales', these saved the dustbowl states in the USA earlier, and can turn a huge global portion of semi-desert into fertile green land. It's a matter of digging trenches in the land isometrically, so that no water can run off; all water soaks into the land feeding local life instead of running off eroding the landscape. With a bit of smart management we can outsource much labour to Nature!
 
Excellent topic. Such a treasure of usefull information regarding Sustainability.

Off course our current agraculture isn't the only unsustainable thing.

We are also in dire need for sustainable energy; to drive vehicles, machines and electricity generators.
Sustainable ways of energy-production are:
- Wind energy
- Solar energy
- Methane gas- energy ( from Methane gas filtered off of sewage and organic waste. )

Put together these 3 can provide the world's households, medical and technological facilities and electric cars with electricity.

Also our housing can be made ALOT cheaper. Can be built much more sustainably than concrete houses.
Here's an excellent example of just how Cheap, easily and sustainable houses can be built:
Eco- Dome houses

To build an eco-dome house, no more is needed than sandbags, barbed wire and dirt or sand.
And finally some cement & gypsum to plaster the inside walls smooth and the outside walls watertight.
These houses, depending on their design, can withstand hurricanes and are very fire proof as well.
They isolate very well so heating or cooling the house may hardily be nececairy.

I think Eco-dome villages, cities and towns could be very sustainable if every household had a little patch of land available to cultivate their own vegetables & fruits. In between all these Eco-domes and vegetable&fruit gardens should be lush permaculture forrests. I don't see how homelessness and hunger could continue if we were to live like this. Chicken could be kept for meat and eggs, sheep for meat and wool, cows for meat and milk. Fish, shrimps and lobsters could be bred in large basins or in fenced off parts of ocean near the shores. This way we don't have to rely on the bio-industry for meat. Also we don't have to overfish the seas anymore; we can just breed our own fish. And we could even release some fish, shrimps and lobsters into the oceans to compensate for the overfishing of others.

But this change can only be achieved if the Housing/Real Estate-corporations and Energy-corporations are removed from their places of power.
Needless to say; These corporations don't want to see this change at all as it would mean the end of their monopoly and the deathgrip they have on
societies worldwide. I just don't see these cancerous corporations ever cooperating and helping in the execution of such plans.
 
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