#permaculture — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #permaculture, aggregated by home.social.
-
https://spectra.video/w/9prrdfC6KEGtjhoKxwYTzd
I finally got around to putting up a video.
#solarpunk #permaculture #gardening #garden #subsistence -
Growing Your Own Food, For Real: Strawberries, Sorghum, and the Hard Truth
-
The 12 #Permaculture Design Principles
-
@unchartedworlds
My first guess is try permaculture fora.
#permaculture
#sustainability
#water
#rainwater -
@juliensueur @theloopfarm @zerology
Reading now: John Jeavons Grow Biointensive method: https://www.growbiointensive.org/
I don’t have a vegan garden (our compost is full of eggshells) but I’m trying to phase out store bought soil amendments and I don’t want to keep animals, so all of this information is helpful for me.
#gardening #permaculture -
I really love #permaculture design, but everywhere I look I see a lot of food and almost no complete diets.
A lot of the big PDC's import food for their certification courses.
Or their farms rely on so much free labor that they likely couldn't support themselves without it.
Permaculture is to design autonomy. How can someone who isn't growing their own complete diet without free labor, teach you how to do so?
-
Here is What i Consider like a Great Simple Model of Permaculture Family Garden (Around 600 m2, 5-7 Years for Making it, 8 M3 of Water Needed, Inputs : 600 Kg of Hay + neighbors' grass mowing ...)
#permaculture #solarpunk #vegan -
Here is What i Consider like a Great Simple Model of Permaculture Family Garden (Around 600 m2, 5-7 Years for Making it, 8 M3 of Water Needed, Inputs : 600 Kg of Hay + neighbors' grass mowing ...)
#permaculture #solarpunk #vegan -
Here is What i Consider like a Great Simple Model of Permaculture Family Garden (Around 600 m2, 5-7 Years for Making it, 8 M3 of Water Needed, Inputs : 600 Kg of Hay + neighbors' grass mowing ...)
#permaculture #solarpunk #vegan -
Here is What i Consider like a Great Simple Model of Permaculture Family Garden (Around 600 m2, 5-7 Years for Making it, 8 M3 of Water Needed, Inputs : 600 Kg of Hay + neighbors' grass mowing ...)
#permaculture #solarpunk #vegan -
Here is What i Consider like a Great Simple Model of Permaculture Family Garden (Around 600 m2, 5-7 Years for Making it, 8 M3 of Water Needed, Inputs : 600 Kg of Hay + neighbors' grass mowing ...)
#permaculture #solarpunk #vegan -
This is how our tomatoes look in the bed house because before planting them we first put them in green earth to get hardened in order to survive in the world of competition like the sun once comes high can't be just bit them so we need to first put them in green house tomatoes and cabbage. So how do you prepare yours?
WELCOME BOOSTS!
#gardening #permaculture #regenerativeagriculture #nature #solurpunk #foodsecurity #today #mastoart #fediverse -
This is how our tomatoes look in the bed house because before planting them we first put them in green earth to get hardened in order to survive in the world of competition like the sun once comes high can't be just bit them so we need to first put them in green house tomatoes and cabbage. So how do you prepare yours?
WELCOME BOOSTS!
#gardening #permaculture #regenerativeagriculture #nature #solurpunk #foodsecurity #today #mastoart #fediverse -
This is how our tomatoes look in the bed house because before planting them we first put them in green earth to get hardened in order to survive in the world of competition like the sun once comes high can't be just bit them so we need to first put them in green house tomatoes and cabbage. So how do you prepare yours?
WELCOME BOOSTS!
#gardening #permaculture #regenerativeagriculture #nature #solurpunk #foodsecurity #today #mastoart #fediverse -
This is how our tomatoes look in the bed house because before planting them we first put them in green earth to get hardened in order to survive in the world of competition like the sun once comes high can't be just bit them so we need to first put them in green house tomatoes and cabbage. So how do you prepare yours?
WELCOME BOOSTS!
#gardening #permaculture #regenerativeagriculture #nature #solurpunk #foodsecurity #today #mastoart #fediverse -
This is how our tomatoes look in the bed house because before planting them we first put them in green earth to get hardened in order to survive in the world of competition like the sun once comes high can't be just bit them so we need to first put them in green house tomatoes and cabbage. So how do you prepare yours?
WELCOME BOOSTS!
#gardening #permaculture #regenerativeagriculture #nature #solurpunk #foodsecurity #today #mastoart #fediverse -
Here is a List of WorldWide Experts of Permaculture (Using LiveStock)
#permaculture #solarPunk
https://permies.com/t/voices123 -
Here is a List of WorldWide Experts of Permaculture (Using LiveStock)
#permaculture #solarPunk
https://permies.com/t/voices123 -
Here is a List of WorldWide Experts of Permaculture (Using LiveStock)
#permaculture #solarPunk
https://permies.com/t/voices123 -
Here is a List of WorldWide Experts of Permaculture (Using LiveStock)
#permaculture #solarPunk
https://permies.com/t/voices123 -
Here is a List of WorldWide Experts of Permaculture (Using LiveStock)
#permaculture #solarPunk
https://permies.com/t/voices123 -
@wood5y Doesn't #permaculture teach these long established building techniques?
-
New server so a new #Introduction.
I have been enjoying the fediverse from raphus.social, but wanted a more local instance. I live in northern #NJ outside of #NYC. I am a physics PhD working at a scientific instrument company. Over the past few years I have dived into #unschooling , #nvc , #permaculture , #botany , #freeSoftware , #foss , #sociocracy. Recently, I am interested in #limitsToGrowth , #collapse , and #degrowth. I'm married, and a dad of two boys 8 and 5 years old.
-
Making an impact
I’m entering a midlife crisis. I know that I can not continue in the direction I’m going, but I’m not sure where to go next. One thing is clear: I want to make a positive impact. Here’s an exploration into my calling.
Over the past few years, I’ve gained some clarity about what’s important to me.
- Sustainability. I want my kids and their potential kids to have just as wonderful of a world as we have now.
- Freedom. I want there to be greater ability for people to pursue their interests and to choose how they live their lives.
- Common wealth: I want there to be more good things that are shared by all. We are used to having shared roads and powerlines. I think we all could benefit if we had more in common.
- Unity with the natural world. We are part of the natural world. Success for me means that all of nature is thriving
- Cooperation: I love it when people get together and work through their differences. We can do great things and solve difficult problems together!
So I want to find a way to do more to advance these aspirations. Unfortunately, when I look at the world I see problems that are taking away from these values. I want to understand these problems so that we can address them.
Our changing world
First some observations about the world we live in:
- Global energy use was 286 TWh in 1987 versus 2,476 TWh in 2024. The energy use growth rate was around 3.62% in 1987 and 2.61% in 2024.1
- Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 349ppm to 431ppm in my lifetime (1987-2026). Global temperatures have gone up about 1C in the same time.2
- In 1987 the CO2 concentration was increasing about 0.4% per year, and in 2024 it was increasing at around 0.6% per year.3
- The human population was 5.05 billion in 1987 and in 2023 was 8.09 billion. Global fertility rate was 3.48 live births per woman in 1987 and in 2023 was 2.5 live births per woman.4
These are well established facts, and suggest that the world is changing. There are more of us humans and collectively we are using massively more energy than we have in the past. Much of this energy is from fossil fuels and there is an associated increase in global CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. But importantly the growth rate of energy use and of human population is slowing.
There have been other things changing as well that are more difficult to measure and probably more controversial.
- The difficulty in mining, specifically the energy intensity, is increasing for minerals5 and for fossil fuels.6
- And yet there are lots more fossil fuels to burn.7
- In the 1850s, the combined biomass of wild mammals was ≈200 Mt (million tonnes). The 2025 total biomass of wild mammals was only around 60 Mt.8
- Biodiversity has been decreasing. The Living Planet Index has declined 73% from 1970.9
- On average, the poorest half of the population owns €2,900 per adult (or $4,100) and the top 10% own €550,900 (or $771,300) on average.10
- There is concentration among companies. In the early 1930s the top 1% of corporations owned 70% of assets and in 2023 the top 1% increased their share to 97% of assets.11
The connection between all of these items is growth. Energy use, population, wealth have all been increasing exponentially. It has been called the Great Acceleration.12 This growth has created amazing benefits especially for the wealth, but also comes at an increasing cost.
My take on the costs of growth
The ever increasing demands of our civilization lead to resource exploitation. Now all the easy sources of fossil fuels and minerals are being used up, so people are exploiting ever more difficult reserves and at an increasing cost to humans and to the planet. The explosive spreading of our civilization, puts pressure on the rest of the web of life. So our growth — all the farms, cities, roads, and mines — relentlessly encroaches on habitat for wildlife leading to a decrease in the collective mass of plants and animals. The disruption of ecosystems is decreasing the biodiversity worldwide. Many amazing species which have evolved over millions of years are going extinct.
This same increasing pressure is also affecting humans. Growth leads to concentration of wealth among the elite and the top companies. More complex organizations and economic structures are needed to sustain the massive human civilization. These are harnessed by those in power to enrich themselves by exploiting other humans.
The European great powers and the United States grew their power and empires through colonialism and slavery. Now that the economy has been globalized, this exploitation is happening everywhere in new ways. I see that happening now in the US. Good paying jobs are drying up. Software services are entshittifying.13 Government is being taken over by the interests of the rich. Gig economy jobs advertise flexibility and entrepreneurship, but in reality are oppressive management by algorithm. We are manipulated through surveillance and targeted ads, and our data is being used to train AI technology aimed at replacing the majority of professions. Our civilization is beginning to eat itself.
Despite these problems, it’s not easy to slow growth. People generally love growth (if not population growth, then definitely economic growth). I love it too. It’s wonderful in the beginning. Each generation has a better life than the last. With more people and more economic power, there is more science, arts, and culture.
In the US, our whole society is built on growth. We rely on growing 401k’s to retire. Our social security program is designed around many young workers providing support to relatively fewer elderly adults. In the US, we worry about “falling behind” if our economy is no longer the most powerful (although we never seem to worry about the rest of the world falling behind). So we all have an incentive to keep this growth going at all costs.
It’s a death spiral. This dependence on growth is creating a positive feedback loop that encourages this growth. We are speeding faster and faster towards widespread extinctions of wild animals and plants.
It doesn’t make sense to me. I intend to pull out of this death spiral and to contribute towards a more sustainable way of living. I have a ways to go. We are currently living an American lifestyle: two internal combustion engine cars, natural gas heating and cooking, air conditioning in the summer, consuming meat, and using smartphones and other technology devices.
Addressing concerns
Some of you might strongly disagree with the previous section. Many see growth not as the problem but as the solution. With more people and more resources available to each person, there is a greater chance of new ideas that will address the environmental problems.
This is the promise of green growth, and in a lot of ways it is happening now. We are in the midst of this turn towards clean tech: the cost of solar and wind power is getting lower and lower, there are a variety of promising new battery chemistries, and new approaches to nuclear and geothermal power are coming online. On the conservation front, scientists are tracking more and more species and finding innovative ways to protect species on the brink of extinction. Wildlife tourism can provide economic support for maintaining protected areas. And as we push up against the finite boundaries of this planet, we can reach for the stars. SpaceX is proposing a million datacenters in space, to colonize Mars, and to mine asteroids. There is the promise of almost limitless clean, solar energy in space, many of mineral resources that can be exploited, and more room for humans to grow. In this view, the future is bright.
Even more so according to this view, anything that slows this green growth is worse for the planet. If economic growth slows then life becomes hard and desperate for people, and they would be less likely to think of good ideas. We wouldn’t have the capital available to transition to clean energy or to explore outer space. We would be stuck with our current technology which has some serious environmental issues. Culturally it would be horrible because there would be nothing to look forward to. As people struggle to survive, science and the arts would lose funding leading to a decay of our collective knowledge and our culture. It’s a scenario that should be avoided at all costs.
Scenarios of the future
These are valid points, and I agree that we should avoid the scenario of economic contraction before we have gotten on the path toward sustainability. Nate Hagen in his podcast the Great Simplification, calls this scenario the Mad Max scenario.14 The environment continues to be degraded but civilization collapses. But he lays out three other scenarios, one of which we already mentioned, green growth. The scenarios are based on two dimensions, sustainability and economic growth/contraction. Here are the scenarios:
- Green Growth: growing and sustainable, good for the environment
- Mordor: growing but unsustainable, horrible for the environment
- Mad Max: declining/stabilizing but unsustainable, environment gets worse and worse
- The Great Simplification: stabilizing (after a decline) and sustainable, humanity and nature thrive together
Of these scenarios, I think it is pretty clear that we want to avoid the Mordor and the Mad Max scenarios. In some ways we have been in the Mordor scenario because our civilization has been built on entirely unsustainable fossil fuels. So there can be good that comes out of this scenario, but we don’t want to stay there.
Green Growth is wonderful, while we can sustain it. We definitely need growth in the green parts of our economy to that we can fully shift away from exploitative industries.
The Great Simplification scenario is different. Nate Hagens calls it a simplification because he believes that we have already overshot, we are using more resources than the carrying capacity of the Earth. So he believes a future sustainable civilization would use less energy and resources leading to less complexity. But despite the simpler civilization, humans in this scenario would be thriving with other life on earth and ideally would be able to continue to thrive for thousands or even millions of more years.
Growth will end
Mathematically we know exponential growth will slow at some point. In his book, Energy and Human Ambition on a Finite Planet, Thomas Murphy shows the absurdity of exponential growth continuing indefinitely at the rate it has for the last 100 years.15 He shows convincingly that thermodynamics will stop energy use growth within around 300 years and that economic growth will also stop within a century after. These limits hold even if people attempt to colonize space (barring implausible technology like hyperdrive that either breaks the laws of physics or depends on speculative exotic physics like wormholes). But growth can stop much earlier. Modern human civilization has a lot of different needs. If any of those needs are limited and an effective substitute can not be found, then growth will slow. So it is a question of when exponential growth will stop not if it will stop.
You might find this hard to believe. Humans have been so good at continually improving their technology, that it is hard to bet against growth continuing indefinitely. It’s a reasonable point. We have had 300 years of uninterrupted growth. Why should it stop?
One way to see why growth will stop is to look at the geological record. There have been many breakthroughs in evolution where a new set of species becomes dominant. These eras of rapid change always stop at new equilibria. So maybe a better question is why should this era of rapid change, continue forever when every other era of rapid change has ended?
It is important to remember that even though exponential growth will end, evolution will not end. There can be small changes over time, that could lead to a new era of rapid growth in the future. There still will be history. In terms of the scenarios above, this means that Green Growth will end and then if we are lucky then we can spend a long time in the Great Simplification scenario until the next evolutionary leap.
Now is the time to work towards a sustainable future
Given the increasing costs of growth described above and signs of overshoot, I have become convinced that it’s time to transition away from growth towards a more sustainable future. While I do want the green economy to grow so that it can displace the fossil fuel economy, I don’t want further growth (and further overshoot) after that. Instead, I want to find a way for humans to be in relationship with other life on this planet.
I asked my kids (4 and 7 years old at the time), which would you rather have:
- a big house, lots of toys, and being able to visit faraway places whenever you like in an airplane, BUT there are very few wild animals.
- OR
- you have a small house, few toys, and you take the bus to visit people, BUT there are many wild animals and a thriving wilderness
Without any hesitation, both of our boys said they would rather have a world with wild animals. That seals to deal for me. It’s not just about me, but it’s about preserving the beauty of this world for the subsequent generations.
What direction to go?
I’ve had a variety of topics that I’ve done deep dives in over the past few years. It turns out all of these fields have ideas that could help society become more sustainable.
To shift away from this unsustainable path, we need people who are not afraid to take a different approach to life. Unschooling can help.16 It’s a approach to education where kids are allowed to explore their interests with the help of caring adults. In this kind of environment, kids are shielded from the immense pressure many young people face to do well in school, go to a good university, and to get a good paying job after. So unschooled kids are more free to follow their heart to take bold action to address big problems like climate change. And it’s not just for kids, as I’ve adopted more of an unschooling mindset, I’ve realized that it’s OK to follow where I feel called to act. I wouldn’t be exploring this sustainability path without following my interests. It’s freeing.
I’d love for humans to be an integrated part of the natural ecosystem. I believe we have the potential to be a keystone species that modifies the environment in a way that encourages rich biodiversity. Permaculture is an approach to farming that could help move us in that direction. In permaculture, farmers iteratively design a sustainable ecosystem as the basis for the agricultural system. The goal is not to exploit, but to encourage a thriving ecosystem that will allow us to thrive as well. It’s reflected by the permaculture ethic of earth care, people care, and fair share.
There are issues with permaculture. It has pushed away from academic scholarship, in part as a reaction to the influence of industry in academics. However this has led to over-simplistic claims that take away from the movement.17 But the need for agriculture that is more connected with the ecology remains. I’m interested in more evidence based approaches to sustainable agriculture, but don’t know much about it yet.
Even though I think growth should end, I still would like life to get better over time. I believe we have an amazing opportunity now to expand our common wealth. Anything that can be digitized, which is so much of our modern life, has the potential to be shared widely and benefit all. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement has shown the wonderful things that can happen when people share ideas. Much of our digital world is built on these FOSS building blocks. The free culture movement is advocating for the same kinds of sharing in the wider culture. Let’s avoid things like copyrights and patents which limit participants, and instead create a culture of sharing while also encouraging attribution. The common ownership should also extend to our social networks which currently are enriching a handful of wealthy people. It would be wonderful if we could not only participate freely in these social networks but also benefit collectively from the network effects.
To realize these kinds of cultural and societal shifts, I think we will need new ways to organize society. Currently many business organizations are controlled from the top-down. This is helpful for making decisions quickly, but allows the people who control organizations to capture the benefits. This goes against the shared wealth idea. So we need organizations with distributed control, and this requires new approaches to governance. Sociocracy is a promising approach, where decisions are made by consent. To avoid consensus gridlock, areas within an organization are split into small groups, called circles, which have the authority to make decisions about their responsibilities. Not everyone gets their preferences met, but the circle works to resolve serious objections. For larger organizations, there are many circles and they are connected through double links, one person goes to the higher circle and one goes down to the lower circle. This double linking helps to ensure that there is communication from the top-down and from the bottom-up. The end result when it is working well is distributed control. An organization like this could work well in a shared wealth environment because benefits would be shared widely.
What role can I play?
I aspire to contribute to these movements that together could help society transition to a thriving world with limited growth. There are organizations that are doing this work: The Alliance for Self-Directed Education is working to expand unschooling and other forms of self-directed education, The Spritely Institute is working to make FOSS tools for a networked world, and Sociocracy for All is sharing information about sociocracy. I’m sure there are more organizations on other areas. I’m working now to explore this ecosystem and see where I can make an impact.
I’m avoiding working for organizations that are further entrenching inequality and unsustainable growth. Unfortunately, much of the economy is controlled by such organizations. But there is an opportunity here. The current economy does not seem to be working very well for most people. These alternative movements could be the change that people are hoping to see. Ironically the sustainable economy has room to grow. But its growth will be temporary and will hopefully transition into a steady, high quality of life that is broadly shared.
Do these ideas resonate with you? Let’s talk! I’m looking to find others interested in making a difference in these areas. Together we can make an impact. And if you have feedback, advice or constructive criticism I’d like to hear that too.
- Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2020) – “Energy Production and Consumption” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-093348/energy-production-consumption.html‘ [Online Resource] (archived on May 18, 2026).
- Kaitlyn Trudeau and Helen Brush, “Global Temperatures & CO2”, Climate Central, Published online at https://observablehq.com. Retrieved from: ‘https://observablehq.com/@climatecentral/global-temperatures-and-co2‘ on June 25, 2026.
- Lan, X., Tans, P. and K.W. Thoning: Trends in globally-averaged CO2 determined from NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory measurements. Version Tuesday, 05-May-2026 05:42:49 MDT https://doi.org/10.15138/9N0H-ZH07
- Max Roser (2014) – “The global decline of the fertility rate” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-095641/global-decline-fertility-rate.html‘ [Online Resource] (archived on May 18, 2026).
- Calvo, G.; Mudd, G.; Valero, A.; Valero, A. Decreasing Ore Grades in Global Metallic Mining: A Theoretical Issue or a Global Reality? Resources 2016, 5, 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/resources5040036
- Charles A.S. Hall, Jessica G. Lambert, Stephen B. Balogh, “EROI of different fuels and the implications for society”, Energy Policy, 64, 2014, Pages 141-152, ISSN 0301-4215, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.05.049.
- Kevin M. A. Parker and Michael R. Mainelli, “What happens if we ‘burn all the carbon’? carbon reserves, carbon budgets, and policy options for governments”, Environ. Sci.: Atmos., 2024, 4, 435-454. https://doi.org/10.1039/D3EA00107E
- Greenspoon, L., Ramot, N., Moran, U. et al. The global biomass of mammals since 1850. Nat Commun 16, 8338 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63888-z
- “2024 Living Planet Report” by World Wildlife Foundation. Pdf accessed on June 25, 2026, https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-10/living-planet-report-2024.pdf.
- “WORLD INEQUALITY REPORT 2022” by World Inequality Lab. https://wir2022.wid.world/.
- Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, and Kaspar Zimmermann, “100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration”, WORKING PAPER · NO. 2023-20, Becker Friedman Institute. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/BFI_WP_2023-20.pdf
- J. R. McNeill, Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, Harvard University Press, 2016. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674545038
- Cory Doctorow, Enshittification, MacMillan, 2025. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250417602/enshittification/
- Nate Hagen, “How to think about the future part 2”, The Great Simplification podcast, episode 139, https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/139-how-to-think-about-the-future-part-2.
- Murphy, Thomas W, Jr, Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, UC San Diego 2021. https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions
- https://unschoolers.org/what-is-unschooling/
- Ferguson, R.S., Lovell, S.T. Permaculture for agroecology: design, movement, practice, and worldview. A review. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 34, 251–274 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-013-0181-6
-
8 Perennial Vegetables Gardeners Plant Once and Harvest for Years With Almost No Extra Work https://www.allforgardening.com/1799462/8-perennial-vegetables-gardeners-plant-once-and-harvest-for-years-with-almost-no-extra-work/ #credit #garden #GardenDesigner #gardener #gardening #GettyImages #hardiness #JerusalemArtichoke #KieraFaulknerJekos #LaurenCraig #PerennialVegetable #PerennialVegetables #permaculture #plants #VegetableGardens
-
We Asked Gardeners Which Perennial Vegetables Are Lowest Maintenance for Endless Harvests—They Named These 8 https://www.allforgardening.com/1765037/we-asked-gardeners-which-perennial-vegetables-are-lowest-maintenance-for-endless-harvests-they-named-these-8/ #credit #garden #GardenDesigner #gardener #gardening #GettyImages #hardiness #JerusalemArtichoke #KieraFaulknerJekos #LaurenCraig #PerennialVegetable #PerennialVegetables #permaculture #plants #VegetableGardens
-
📅 Corso di progettazione in Permacultura (PDC)
Stimolare il Regennaissance per l’autosufficienza della comunità 🇬🇧 -English below- 🇬🇧 Luogo: Gaia Terra Ecovillaggio, Rivignano Teor (UD), Italia Periodo: maggio – settembre 2026 Facilitatori: Ezio Gori, Debora Sbaiz & Carmelo Chiaramonte Accreditamento: PDC riconosciuto a livello internazionale Il corso Un’esperiINFO EVENTO
👉 https://www.progettogaiaterra.com/eventi/agenda/corso-di-progettazione-in-permacultura-pdc/#ecovillage #ecovillaggi #PDC72h #permacultura #permaculture
-
Apparently chaotic gardening that is actually quite intentional:
We are digging the greywater channel deeper after adding a charcoal & rock base biofilter. This aims to reduce soil salting by minimizing water evaporation directly from the channel and forcing the water to be pulled *up* through the soil via the plant roots. Current seedlings in this basin are getting top water but when their roots can be expected to be slightly deeper they'll be left to only seek water from the saturated soil below. Initially I wanted to optimize for a proper floodplain but now I think intentionally incising the channel may be a strategy so long as matting roots can hold the bank against rains - we'll just have to see!
The squash mostly killed off by frost was pruned back, and the volunteer plants are frequently cut back and their stems used for mulch - you can see the slight mulch layer being built from vegetation in this site. The squash is trying to put on baby leaves again but the weather has been erratic so I'm fine if it just decomposes in place and doesn't come back, another round of beans, squash, and corn has been planted nearby and if the weather is conducive to getting a head start on the season we will have much more to harvest this fall.
The other side of the basin was seed blasted and is being mulched over with animal bedding and manure.
For this season this basin holds mostly cover crops sown for animal feed or milling, but when we can afford to we will be starting a series of trees in this basin to establish more permanent cover. Ultimately this will do more to avoid soil salting and nutrient loss, but for now simply establishing roots and working on soil restoration is a good start, especially where we can get a useful yield and bring down the cost to raise our animals.
#permaculture #earthworks #greywater #RanchoDeLaLibertad #Farming #SmallFarm #FoodSovereignty #NativeOwned #Indigenous #RegenerativeAg #Gardening
-
The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite
It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.
Childe Hassam – The Island GardenYet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.
We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.
Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.
II. The Portable Climate
Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.
Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.
This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.
The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.
There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.
And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.
III. The Geometry of the Plantation
If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.
The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.
Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.
But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.
The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.
Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.
IV. The World Interior of Capital
The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.
Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.
This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.
Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.
The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.
V. The Monoculture of the Sky
We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.
This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.
The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.
This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.
VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch
If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.
The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.
In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.
The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”
This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.
We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.
Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.
VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed
The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.
Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.
The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.
In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.
#Agrologistics #AI #AlgorithmicResistance #Anthropocene #ArchitectureTheory #Art #artificialIntelligence #Biosphere2 #BuckminsterFuller #Business #ClimatePhilosophy #ComplexityTheory #DeepEcology #DesignFiction #DigitalResistance #EcologicalGrief #Enclosure #EnvironmentalHistory #Fordlandia #futureOfWork #Garden #Geoengineering #GillesClément #Leadership #Liveness #MetabolicRift #Metabolism #Modernity #Permaculture #PeterSloterdijk #philosophy #PhilosophyOfNature #PostIndustrialism #Rewilding #SpaceshipEarth #systemsThinking #Technocracy #Terroir #TheAnthropocene #TheGarden #TheKernel #TheThicket #TheWorldInterior #ThirdLandscape #VictorianBotany #WardianCase #WorldInterior #writing
-
Ce matin, j'ai fauché une partie du champs, genre 500m2 en 2 heures environs. Maintenant il pleut, ce n'est pas idéal pour faire du foin mais ce n'est pas grave, je n'ai pas besoin de foin parfait. Juste de quoi couvrir le potager et pailler à certains endroits.
Sinon, de l'autre coté de la route, 2 salles, 2 ambiances… le robot tondeuses tourne et tourne encore : biodiversité = 0.
Et toujours cette plante extraterrestre dans un coin… -
Professionnellement, je suis
#anarchitecte, co-fondateur d'une #scop #lessaprophytes qui accompagne les projets d'espaces #commun (s),#autogestion,
#32h taux plein, #paysagiste,#bricoleur, #jardinier, touche à tous adèpte du Bois, de la Terre crue et de la Paille ( le fameux BTP), #permaculture, #BioArchitecture,#habitatlegerPolitiquement je suis
#anarchiste, #zadpartout, #squat, pour l'abolition de la propriété privée des moyens de production, et des frontières #noborder je haie les fascistes, j'aime les #pirates, #ecologiesociale, #municipalismelibertaire, #ACAB
très intéressé par la #monnaielibre la #june #Ğ1 #duniter -
Professionnellement, je suis
#anarchitecte, co-fondateur d'une #scop #lessaprophytes qui accompagne les projets d'espaces #commun (s),#autogestion,
#32h taux plein, #paysagiste,#bricoleur, #jardinier, touche à tous adèpte du Bois, de la Terre crue et de la Paille ( le fameux BTP), #permaculture, #BioArchitecture,#habitatlegerPolitiquement je suis
#anarchiste, #zadpartout, #squat, pour l'abolition de la propriété privée des moyens de production, et des frontières #noborder je haie les fascistes, j'aime les #pirates, #ecologiesociale, #municipalismelibertaire, #ACAB
très intéressé par la #monnaielibre la #june #Ğ1 #duniter -
Professionnellement, je suis
#anarchitecte, #teamarchi co-fondateur d'une #scop à #lille qui accompagne la #construction de projets d'espaces #communs, #autogestion , #revenuuniversel
#32h taux plein, #paysagiste,#bricoleur, #jardinier, touche à tous adèpte du Bois, de la Terre crue et du #chanvre #reemploi
#permaculture, #BioArchitecture,#habitatlegerPolitiquement je suis #situationniste
#anarchiste, #zadpartout, #squat, pour l'abolition de la propriété privée des moyens de production, et des frontières #noborder je haie les fascistes #antifa, j'aime les #pirates, #ecologiesociale, #municipalismelibertaire, #ACAB #monnaielibre #Ğ1 -
Professionnellement, je suis
#anarchitecte, #teamarchi co-fondateur d'une #scop à #lille qui accompagne la #construction de projets d'espaces #communs, #autogestion , #revenuuniversel
#32h taux plein, #paysagiste,#bricoleur, #jardinier, touche à tous adèpte du Bois, de la Terre crue et du #chanvre #reemploi
#permaculture, #BioArchitecture,#habitatlegerPolitiquement je suis #situationniste
#anarchiste, #zadpartout, #squat, pour l'abolition de la propriété privée des moyens de production, et des frontières #noborder je haie les fascistes #antifa, j'aime les #pirates, #ecologiesociale, #municipalismelibertaire, #ACAB #monnaielibre #Ğ1 -
It's been a very busy season here at the Ranch. Sometimes in this environment it can feel like seasons are reversed: while the Northern states of the US are experiencing slowdown, we are experiencing winter & shorter days in a different way. This is our season of motion, albeit in a quiet, inward kind of way. It is critical to make use of cool days and restful nights, before the winds of spring and the brutal heat of summer force us to take rest.
With that being said, I've been sadly behind on updating this page. I hope to return soon to this online space with more pictures and in-depth musings about our work here, but for now I'll share just a few moments of work with you all.
This past week we planted an abundance of olive tree cuttings, and are crossing our fingers that they will take root even in the cooler weather. We amended more soil with horse & human manure, fed the chickens quite well on abundant scraps, and are preparing to cull our aging flock this week to open coop space to a new family of birds in the spring. The cycles of life & death, of generation & decay are so beautifully evident when living this way.
We are (finally) laying pipes for a legitimate greywater system: the grey water from the house will soon water nut trees we hope to plant soon, beans, squash, and whatever other companion food plants wish to grow.
There is more, and I hope to come back and share it with you, along with some images very soon. Finding the time to sit at the computer with our growing family and wonderful guests has been difficult, but I know that it's valuable to share this adventure and so very much plan on being more present soon.
How has this season of sacred inwardness felt for you? Are you able to take the space you need?
#RanchoDeLaLibertad #RegenerativeAgriculture #Permaculture #Earthworks #ClimateJustice #ClimateChange #ClimateAction #LandRelations #LandWorship
-
Making some elderberry juice. I threw in some green apples that fell from the tree.
I got going in the outer reaches of the yard what I call assisted #foraging. I plant some native food plants, water them enough to get them going, and then let them be on their own to grow and reseed. The current list of native edible berries and nuts:
#elderberry
#toyon
#goldencurrant
#mahonia
#Catalina_cherry
#manzanita
#lemonade_berry
#blackberry
#acorn
#PineNuts
#mesquite
It's a #NativePlant #foodforest
. Gardening for the seventh generation.
#permaculture
#GrowYourOwn -
"Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last - and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind." - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass.
[ID: Close-up of a stinging nettle plant in the forest, with purple stems and green leaves tinged with purple.]#stingingnettle #braidingsweetgrass #robinwallkimmerer #herbs #herbalism #ediblefoods #wildharvest #wildharvesting #foraging #permaculture #regenerativeag #lifeboatacademy #homesteading #offgrid
-
Another interest hashtag #introduction #introductions list:
#NewMexico #Ogapoge #SantaFe #SantaFeRiver #WaterIsLife #Birds #Plants #Medicine #Hiking #Walking #ForestBathing #NaturePhotography #Biophilia
#Countryside #Wilderness #Rewild #Rewilding #Regenerative #RegenerativeDesign #UniversalDesign #Solarpunk #Permaculture #FarmToTable #Earthships 🤩 #Environment #ClimateChange #MegaDrought #PublicHealth #SocialWork #EnvironmentalJustice #ClimateEmergency #UraniumMining #ClimateAction -
Another interest hashtag #introduction #introductions list:
#NewMexico #Ogapoge #SantaFe #SantaFeRiver #WaterIsLife #Birds #Plants #Medicine #Hiking #Walking #ForestBathing #NaturePhotography #Biophilia
#Countryside #Wilderness #Rewild #Rewilding #Regenerative #RegenerativeDesign #UniversalDesign #Solarpunk #Permaculture #FarmToTable #Earthships 🤩 #Environment #ClimateChange #MegaDrought #PublicHealth #SocialWork #EnvironmentalJustice #ClimateEmergency #UraniumMining #ClimateAction -
Now I've been here a while - doing another #introduction toot.. keep forgetting we can use lots of characters here! Currently running a community project in #YorkshireDales with a focus on #FoodWaste #CommunityFridge #Allotment #ReducingIsolation A big part of what we do is a twice weekly #PublicLivingRoom based on the idea from #Camerados. Worked for many years in analytical #chemistry #geochemistry research before retraining as a #homeopath and working a lot with #MentalHealth #Trauma .. sadly this has been really useful for doing community work. Other interests include #walking #gardening #permaculture #DeathCafe #cooking #crafting especially #patchwork #travel #festivals #reading and me and husband would love to have #goats but unlikely to happen! So will just have to manage with frequent searching of #GoatsOfMastodon hashtag. Since about 2015 been really influenced by the work of #OttoScharmer #ULab and the #ImpactHub model and especially the concept of #prototyping. Was recently described by a friend as 'a bit of a #lefty who gets shit done' and think that actually sums me up perfectly. Picture is of Ethel one of our lovely regular visitors at our #CommunityFridge
