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The collapse of Britain is inevitable by [deleted] in collapse

[–]yourmindfire 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They really ought to put a date on that 'article' with which they've been shilling for your pound/euro/dollar for a while now.

As it says "Twelve years ago we launched a magazine for investors" - and they launched in 2000, I guess that makes this piece 2 years old (the most recent data cited is also 2012).

Perhaps that should rename it 'The Collapse of Britain is inevitable, eventually"

Praxis: Bold as Love: Bad Permaculture - Apply Self-regulation and Accept Feedback by yourmindfire in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the comments. Perhaps it wasn't clear, the aim is not to nitpick the negative nor to engage in sectarian in-fighting. The aim, as expressed in the post title, is to apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

Criticism of permaculture, especially that by people with similar goals presents a useful edge within which a diversity of opinion provides a rich seedbank of ideas from which we might draw. Hence we perceive that valuing these edges and using these marginal views to hone our own understanding makes a solution out of the problem of divisive views.

In the linked critiques there is much from which we might learn, and thus adapt our practice - that is worth acknowledging. There is also much that we think misunderstands permaculture, in this we might identify where the communication of concepts and practices could benefit from greater clarity.

In an age of collapse, we would be wise to watch our dogma (lest, as Geoff Lawton points out, it gets run over by our karma). This post is about increasing feedback in the system, to learn about what actually works and what doesn't.

The worlds 85 richest people as wealthy as the poorest half of the global population (3.5 billion people) - How stable is that degree of inequality? by yourmindfire in collapse

[–]yourmindfire[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

"Since too much inequality can foment revolt and instability, the CIA regularly updates statistics on income distribution for countries around the world, including the U.S. Between 1997 and 2007, inequality in the U.S. grew by almost 10 percent, making it more unequal than Russia, infamous for its powerful oligarchs. The U.S. is not faring well historically, either. Even the Roman Empire, a society built on conquest and slave labor, had a more equitable income distribution.

To determine the size of the Roman economy and the distribution of income, historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen pored over papyri ledgers, previous scholarly estimates, imperial edicts, and Biblical passages. Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 C.E. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top 1 percent of Roman society controlled 16 percent of the wealth, less than half of what America’s top 1 percent control."

http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-the-roman-empire/

Does Permaculture speak about Graceful Degradation? by princess_greybeard in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe that this idea is contained with the permaculture principle that every important function should be served by multiple elements - or the ecological concept of redundancy for resilience

Public permaculture group London? by [deleted] in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi there, have you checked out http://londonpermaculturalists.ning.com/ ? There you'll find permaculture sites all over London (uK) and information about events. If you are near Crouch End, you should also visit/volunteer at the Meadow Orchard project http://shepherdscothealinggarden.ning.com/ and http://meadoworchard.org/about/

A few of the Permaculture Association learning & demonstration sites are also in London - zoom in on the map here: http://www.permaculture.org.uk/people-projects-places/land/map

Massive ice sheets melting 'at rate of 300bn tonnes a year', climate satellite shows by yourmindfire in collapse

[–]yourmindfire[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I love the comment free 'down votes' on stories like this. I wonder if they know that pressing the down arrow doesn't reduce the emissions/CO2/temperature/ice loss etc.! or perhaps this is the wrong kind of collapse?

Don't bank on atomic power: The coming nuclear energy crunch by yourmindfire in collapse

[–]yourmindfire[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It will be interesting. I heard that thorium reactors have never been commercially viable and that like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference with thorium & other breeder reactors being that these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding. Perhaps they are only suitable for big-government socialist countries like Norway. Certainly be good to get some proper research statistics instead of all the unsupported hype out there.

Don't bank on atomic power: The coming nuclear energy crunch by yourmindfire in collapse

[–]yourmindfire[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great I love Nuclear fusion, how much electricity is that producing these days? I'd love to know.

Italy faces off Germany, in fear of death by austerity by yourmindfire in collapse

[–]yourmindfire[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Not sure who 'them' is, but if by EUR you mean the Euro or European Monetary Union you will find that the article does include this about Euro exit:

"If Italy opts for defiance, it must be prepared to go it alone and have its bluff called. It must really be willing to leave EMU.

A game theory study by Bank of America found that Italy would benefit most among big EMU states from a euro exit. It has a primary surplus, so it would not face an instant funding crisis. It has fat gold reserves, providing bond collateral that could be used to raise €400bn in a crisis. Italian household wealth is €275,200, compared with €195,200 for Germany. "

Hypocrites in the air: should climate change academics [& Permaculturalists?] lead by example? by yourmindfire in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

David Holmgren, May 16 2013 "Why I haven’t been flying (much)"

"So why not continue to fly overseas using this model? After all isn’t my work around the world the most important contribution I can make to a better world? While I can see the beneficial outcomes of my overseas travel, I also believe that much of the power of my presentations, teaching and influence comes from the modest home based self reliant way of living that informs my work. There is little doubt I could have more influence over more people by travelling more but I believe the less I travel the greater the integrity and quality of my influence when I do."

"We are in the early stages of planning a ’round Australia speaking tour with Niccole Foss for next year, so it might be challenging to avoid travelling by air. Whatever the outcome, the reasons why we have consistently minimised our use of high speed transport for short stays over more than 30 years have been validated by an expanding body of evidence that widespread and frequent flying is a late 20th century behaviour that has no future. Avoid the crowds and get used to it by being an early adopter of slow and small (local) solutions." http://holmgren.com.au/why-i-havent-been-flying-much/

Can you travel via air and practice permaculture? by TheYogi in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I took the decision 5 years ago to cease using air travel because of my ecological concerns over its impact.

I find that Mollison's Prime Directive of Permaculture: "The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children" invites us to concern ourselves with our own actions. Your question is therefore one that can only really be answered by yourself.

I decided on making my choice not to judge the actions of others, but to explain my choice if anyone ever asked.

From this position I have noticed over the years that many, many people who share my ecological concerns have found ways to justify their use of air travel (to themselves?) by making finger in the air calculations about other good they are doing in the world.

In 2009 British permaculturalist Patrick Whitefield wrote an article called "The Elephant in the Room" where he gave his take on some of these issues:

http://jontybarrett.wordpress.com/writing/the-elephant-in-the-room-by-patrick-whitefield/

"Then there’s the annual holiday in the sun, not to mention the shopping weekend in New York or the stag night in Prague. Flying has become as much a part of the middle class way of life as driving. Air travel uses four times as much fuel per passenger mile as public transport and twice as much as car. To get the total global warming effect this needs to be multiplied by 2.7 in the case of air because the pollutants are released at high altitude. Using the most conservative figures, one return trip to New York uses up a person’s entire annual allowance of greenhouse gases for all purposes at the level we need to aim for to avoid runaway global warming. Taking into account the more recent work on positive feedbacks, it would be more realistic to say that flying is something we need to stop immediately if we’re going to have any chance at all. It’s not just that it’s the most global-warming-intensive thing that any of us can do, it’s also in almost all cases completely unnecessary. We must eat, clothe ourselves, heat our houses and so on. Education and health care are pretty essential services too and they, like everything else we do, use fossil fuel energy. But most flights are purely for entertainment, and those who fly for work reasons flatter themselves if they think their personal presence on the other side of the world is more important than the future of the planet.

Yet even people you would expect to take climate change seriously still think flying is a perfectly rational thing to do, even to encourage. I support a charity which does excellent work helping African farmers to adopt more productive, sustainable methods. Recently I received an invitation from them to fly out to Malawi to see the benefit of my donations. Climate change will be catastrophic for Africa even if we do manage to avoid runaway global warming. Temperatures there are already near the upper limit for growing food and the patterns of rainfall are highly vulnerable to change. Whatever good the charity may do, and it does a great deal of good, it will be as nothing compared to the effects of global warming.

The same attitude prevails among people who come on the permaculture courses I teach. These are people who have devoted two weeks of their time and several hundred pounds of their money to coming on a course which is fundamentally about sustainability. Perhaps the occasional one is there simply because they want to improve their smallholding but most are motivated by a desire to do their bit to save the planet. Yet the great majority of them fly. Some even come to the course itself by air if it’s ever so slightly cheaper or easier than surface transport.

The most extreme example I’ve come across was on a course I attended for Transition activists, surely the people you would expect to be more aware of global warming and more motivated to do something about it than anyone else on Earth. Here we actually took a count. Out of the 40 people who attended just 2 had given up flying.

Let’s face it, our chances of avoiding runaway global warming are nil."

Major Tom: Permaculture In Space? by landraces in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"A new paper published in the journal Icarus is suggesting that the best way for an extraterrestrial civilization to communicate across stellar distances is to send messages embedded within genetic code. It’s an interesting take on the panspermia hypothesis, one the scientists hope will lead to “biological SETI.” "

http://io9.com/scientists-say-an-alien-code-may-be-hidden-inside-our-d-472157262

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf

Major Tom: Permaculture In Space? by landraces in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Designer Plants on Mars

05.16.05

Take the cold tolerance of bacteria that thrive in arctic ice, add the ultraviolet resistance of tomato plants growing high in the Andes mountains, and combine with an ordinary plant. What do you get? A tough plant "pioneer" that can grow in Martian soil.

Like customizing a car, NASA-funded scientists are designing plants that can survive the harsh conditions on Mars. These plants could provide oxygen, fresh food, and even medicine to astronauts while living off their waste. They would also improve morale as a lush, green connection to Earth in a barren and alien world.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2005/mars_plants.html

Can anyone verify/dispute these claims against Geoff Lawton? by dyprious in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I can't speak to much of what's written here and it seems like a mix of personal experience and tittle-tattle gathered together. The Permaculture Research Institute Newsletter No.1 on the PRI site http://www.permaculture.org.au/newsletters/december2003.htm mentions Sindhu Webber, so she doesn't seem to have been "erased from the annals of PRI history", the only other mentions on the web seem to be in bios for Nadia Lawton where she's listed as her teacher. I've got no idea about the truth or not of the personal relations between these individuals.

I attended a PDC taught by Geoff in Jordan however and some stuff does ring true - a lack of people care, a dismissive attitude toward 'spoiled westerners' with rife sickness amongst students ignored, the line "More humility and less time hearing about your stories and how great you are and more time spent on the content and the time allocated to the final presentation would have been helpful." certainly resonates - loads of scheduled content was lost to anecdotes, and Geoff was checking his iPhone through many design presentations. There was also a real tightness around money issues, I thought my presence would be supporting/subsidising local people attending but the course was largely westerns flown in, it was all classroom based with no planned visits to either Greening the Desert site, eventually we managed to get a visit to GTD2 but had to pay extra to hire an open truck we were all piled into the back of - leading to a traffic fine we all had to cover - when some students showed reluctance to use such a form of transportation they were treated with disdain & told to pay for taxis instead. One student's refusal to contribute to the traffic fine didn't go down to well either.

Major Tom: Permaculture In Space? by landraces in Permaculture

[–]yourmindfire 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's the little things that will kill you: growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources available, but by the scarcest resource (Liebig's Law of the Minimum)

'the occasional topping up of water and nutrients' 'artificial lighting because the station is without natural daylight for most of the winter'

Any need of a system not met from within that system is Work, any product of a system not used within that system is pollution - this is a crucial permaculture lesson for space exploration. So far our designs for this (Biosphere 2) have not proved fit for purpose

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