More recently, after hearing a lot about peak oil - the prediction that consumption demand would accelerate just as production capacity would greatly drop off - I got interested in studying Permaculture - an acronym meaning 'Permanent Agriculture' but also 'Permanent Culture'. The idea being that we as humans are the most appropriate and capable agents of restoring ecosystems, having for centuries and milennia being the most active agents of destroying ecosystems and planetary life support.
It started in many ways as a reaction against post-World War II practices of agriculture - the so-called 'green revolution' that fed a lot of people but did so with industrial methods that pumped pollutants into the air, soil and water, has ravaged topsoil that took thousands of years to create, wrecked life systems that had gradually co-evolved, and generally made a mess of things.
Agriculture has become a petrochemical industry, has created efficient methods of animal confinement and cruelty, etc. Not a pretty picture the closer you look at modern farming.
Meanwhile engineers have diverted water in ways that are helping lead us to a massive international water crisis. By focusing on moving water quickly through concrete drainage systems, instead of the time-honored ways that streams and creeks meander into rivers that meander and build into lakes and oceans, they have bypassed and disrupted the way things naturally unfold in order to build these culturally and economically rich but artificial environments we call cities.
As a result, many involved in Permaculture more or less question professional approaches to things, and long to restore 'comon sense' and a closer relationship to nature. Of course, there are civil engineers who are into Permaculture. Modern technology and scientific thinking are not necessarily at odds with recycling, reusing, restoring and replenishing the planet. But there are a lot of fundamental - assumptions - that may merit - questioning, inquiry - given the current state of economic and ecological systems that many of us thought were doing OK and aren't.
Permaculture emphasizes a positive human role as a kind of honest broker in natural plant, animal and food, interrelationships. For Permaculture, humans have had the power, skill, motivation and methods to re-do everything and create a lot of havoc along the way, and people also have the power, skill, and responsibility to come up with ways to do things more in harmony, more in balance, more in care for the present and the future.
An experienced Permaculture teacher recently talked to me about the 'foodshed' as analogous to a watershed. He rounded a stick on the ground and illustrated out the way food and people relationships have become terribly dysfunctional and need to be changed.
Sure we can get a whole lot of stuff at the supermarket, and sure a wholistic supermarket is an improvement relative to one that is not, and our present food system of big stores and lovely restaurants, does give us comfort and convenience, variety and nourishment - but with all the pesticides, petroleum for agriculture and shipping, tearing up of forest land, diversion of water, etc. we're contributing rapidly to destroying topsoil, species, and the planet in general.
But if we restore self-reliance and cooperation in taking care of self and family and community, we rebuild natural relationships with our food and each other. We start having a connection again to where our food is coming from. There is nothing more basic to life than the way we obtain or cultivate or share - our food.
So Permaculture isn't just about food, it's about whole systems, but Permaculture is also very much about whole systems - towards which regrouping our relationship to food cultivation and distribution, making it more a part of our lives, is a 'prime directive'.
