| What follows is a small book that summarizes what I have learned from living my life. I would like to elaborate that while I wasn't visibly overgrazing with the goats in Maine, one of the reasons I stopped was that it was a very slow degradation of the land. The goats weren't mine, but my parents, my mother had/has and small business selling milk, and that was the rub. Nutrients were leaving the place and not coming back. With around 7-10 goats milking it wasn't a huge loss, but it adds up over time. My brother had been milking cows, a much bigger operation, with that you could see the land going down much faster. He believed in organic methods, as did I, but I came to see much of that as being flawed. The cycle wasn't being completed, just returning the animal manure wasn't enough. And the operation also wasn't sustainable from the angle of making hay, we were using tractors, heavy machinery. I experimented with a scythe -major amount of work, and thought about getting a horse drawn sickle bar to work, but even the economics of that looked suspicious to me. Lots of iron in that old horse drawn machinery, would you really make that much iron and mold it into machines if you were doing it with sustainable forest harvesting? The horses must eat a large proportion of the hay made, too. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that what we needed was to deal with animals that lived in the area naturally. In the wild, many animals migrate north and south, this seems to me like it could be done easier than making hay, in many places, but again, current human population and thought patterns prevent such solutions. In the book I talk about this more. Basically, herding, hunting and gathering are the most efficient ways to live, and very little has changed about that, regardless of all our knowledge of biology and technology. Cain has done his best to kill Abel whenever possible, but he is really killing himself in the long run, and never really succeeding in killing Abel in the short run, because Abel is hiding in his genes, and pops up now and again. Me, for example... Original Location: http://www.synearth.net/harmony.html Here is another extract from the end:
The Principles of Harmony
--a brief abstract-- 1. People are interdependent to the point that we die without each other. 2. Since we must have a society, that society should be efficient and sustainable. There are two basic patterns of society, that of fixed hierarchy, and that of partnership. The latter can be shown to be inherently more efficient than the former. 3. Efficiency should be measured in terms of energy, not money. 4. Sustainability should be measured by balance of resources. Too much energy used taking resources tips the balance away from sustainability, i.e., resources are used faster than they renew. Too little energy used will also not be sustainable, as people will not get enough to live on. 5. As an interdependent species, reproduction of humans should not be the private decision of individuals or couples, but a consensus decision of society, based on collectively gathered information about the balance of resources. 6. Ignoring or being unaware of basic principles can bring weakness, instability, confusion, and death. Survival in humans is of the fittest society, as no individual human or couple is fit to survive. People have instincts that often instruct actions different from reason, but instinct is blind to changed conditions, and can cause extinction of species that cannot adapt. |