Permaculture and the beaten path to freedom

Permaculture revisited

Here we have a good example of how a noble proposal and related information may be undermined to pose no threat to the system.  While wondering around the web for practical information about permaculture, one good source is The Permaculture Institute.  As an example (there is nothing in particular that is wrong with the PI but it is representative) of how an idea can be sterilized and be assimilated within the dominant system of capitalism.  Permaculture as a proposal of how land can be utilized in a sustainable way and not as a temporary area of exploitation till it is depleted and abandoned is something that few good willing souls may have anything against.  But in itself does not contain automatically a viable way for people to escape the domination of the economic and political system we all (almost all, or almost all who are not struggling to escape it) live under.  Some would say it does not need to, and may be a good step for people who will engage in such living to take the next step towards liberation.  This is what is troubling us and we can not see clearly.  Does permaculture have a hidden radical agenda?  Who is the keeper of this hidden agenda and who are the innocent victims who will engage in such a practice

Permaculture and water catching earth

Forest Hills farm catches rain for irrigation

Long before they heard the word “permaculture,” Forest Hills residents Terry Jo and Dave Bichell had embraced the tenets of organic gardening to create sustainable spaces on their Old Hickory Boulevard farm. Permaculture gave them the tools to overcome drought and flooding.

“Permaculture is a way of growing that uses the land to soak up and store water,” Terry Jo explained. “You use the natural features of the land and plant trees in such a way to hold water, and use plants to help nourish each other without fertilizers.”

The farm is a remnant of a historic plantation, she said, and the land had been used for pasture by previous owners. She was committed to avoiding pesticides or fertilizers, so she set out to see what could be grown on pasture land without alteration. “We grew a crop of hay for a couple of years, because at that time that was about all we could grow without using irrigation and pesticides.”

Potable water - Filtration and Purification

A report by Peter H. Gleick estimates that if no action is taken to address unmet basic human needs for water, as many as 135 million people will die from water-related diseases by 2020.  Rainwater harvesting is viewed by many, as a partial solution to the problems posed by water scarcity: droughts and desertification, erosion from runoff, over-reliance on depleted aquifers, and the costs of new irrigation, diversion, and water treatment facilities.

 

Can rainwater be made safe to drink? Yes. How safe? As safe as your well or tap water. How do you make it safe for indoor use? By filtering and purifying it. Contaminants in water may include algae, air pollution, bird excrement, and leaves, sand, and dust. Local wells have dealt with these problems for decades. Installation of filtration and purification equipment can remove these contaminants at home as well.

Why does this take so long?

The initial aim of this blog was to attract interest by other teams and collectives to engage in an organized inquiry of how to develop a set of practical solutions material for developing or enhancing an autonomous community anywhere in the world.  But goals sometimes are either set too high to achieve, or take too long to materialize.  In such cases people who may initially share them may loose interest.  The system has altered our internal clocks to work in the rhythms of industrial machinery.  This has been partly our experience here, which we would like to share without the specifics of who, where, when.  Some of us have grown to cleanse our internal clocks and are more patient in watching change take place in human terms, not in capitalistic industrial rhythms.  Some have not been able to do so and are impatient and try to force things.  While doing so what they are forcing are their ideas on other people who are unable to share them or are unable to commit to a process where those ideas can collide, blend, and evolve into a collective product.

Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals

Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process

Ian Sample, science correspondent @ The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013
 

Randy Schekman, centre, at a Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm.

Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a "tyranny" that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.

Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.

Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

The Monster is Right on Top of Us

Argentine Protesters vs Monsanto:

By Fabiana Frayssinet Reprint  

MALVINAS ARGENTINAS, Córdoba, Argentina , Dec 2 2013 (IPS) - The people of this working-class suburb of Córdoba in Argentina’s central farming belt stoically put up with the spraying of the weed-killer glyphosate on the fields surrounding their neighbourhood. But the last straw was when U.S. biotech giant Monsanto showed up to build a seed plant.

The creator of glyphosate, whose trademark is Roundup, and one of the world’s leading producers of genetically modified seeds, Monsanto is building one of its biggest plants to process transgenic corn seed in Malvinas Argentinas, this poor community of 15,000 people 17 km east of the capital of the province of Córdoba.

Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination

A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout | Op-Ed

• Print 

(Image: Bloomsbury)Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the yoke of dominion." Taking equally from Buddhism as from dialectical philosophy, Clark stresses the importance of enlightenment, mindfulness and awakening as preconditions of revolutionary political praxis. And although he implicitly seems to agree with the overall thesis of the (anti)catastrophist line developed by Sasha Lilley and company, he also affirms the productivity of a commitment to truth that squarely confronts the profoundly shocking, traumatic and even convulsive nature of such truth: the very first page of his preface acknowledges the sixth mass extinction in which terrestrial life is at present entrapped and notes the "horror" of a capitalist world in which billions go without the basic necessities of a good life. Advancing the philosophy and practice of communitarian anarchism as an exit from the depraved present, Clark dedicates much of his text to examining the anti-authoritarian and cooperative spirit of humanity, as embodied in many of the customs of pre-modern or "traditional" societies, as in the history of Western revolutionary movements. In this sense, Clark does well to distance himself from the Eurocentrism advanced by many Western radical thinkers, including social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose imprint on The Impossible Community is otherwise nearly palpable.

Simplified Sewage Community System (or Sewerage as the Brits call it)

Good public information doesn't come easy these days and many utilize it for profit and often find a way to eliminate it from public eye.  Quite often this happens with information published with public money funding academic studies for which industry later purchases the rights and patents.  For this reason when we find good information we copy it and preserve it before it vanishes.

Sewage systems and clean water access has for centuries been the largest by far source of health improvement to urban populations.  Medicine is quite overstated as a significant component of health, not coming even close to clean water and safe sewage systems, food, shelter, and working conditions.

http://youtu.be/7rD0bd5WlFk

Simplified Sewerage

This web site is aimed at giving support for the publication PC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design and it accompanying Windows based design program. Links are also given to publications on this and other low cost sewerage systems NOW AVAILABLE IN SPANISH AND IN PORTUGUESE AND IN FRENCH (as of 19 Jan 2011) see the download page 

 

Introduction

How to get the manual and Program

Simplified Sewerage Description

PC-Based Design Program

 

Introduction PC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design was published by the School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, UK, in January 2001. It is a manual and windows based design program for use in the design of the simplified sewerage system. It was published with the aim of promoting the use of simplified sewerage throughout the developing world. To quote the preface of the manual:

"Simplified sewerage is an important sanitation option in peri-urban areas of developing countries, especially as it is often the only technically feasible solution in these high-density areas. It is a sanitation technology widely known in Latin America, but it is much less well known in Africa and Asia. It is the purpose of this Manual to disseminate this technology more widely in the developing world, so that it can be used in peri-urban sanitation programmes and project to improve the health of poor communities. However, simplified sewerage is not just for peri-urban areas - it can be successfully and appropriately used in middle-and upper-income areas as well. We hope that this Manual serves its purpose of making simplified sewerage better known throughout the developing world, and that the PC-based design program contained herein facilitates the hydraulic design calculations."

How To Get The Manual and Program The manual and program are both available to be downloaded from this site.

1. The manual in .pdf format can be viewed or downloaded here and
2. Details of how to download the design program can be found here.

If you require a copy of the manual and program on CD please send a request either via e-mail to Professor Duncan Mara <D.D.Mara@leeds.ac.uk> or via post to this address:

Prof. D Mara School of Civil Engineering University of Leeds Woodhouse Lane Leeds LS2 9JT UK

Note that there is a limited supply of printed manuals and CDs. Simplified Sewerage Description Simplified sewerage is an off-site sanitation technology that removes all wastewater from the household environment. Conceptually it is the same as conventional sewerage, but with conscious efforts made to eliminate unnecessarily conservative design features and to match design standards to the local situation.

November 17th 1983 ... rewinding 30 years of constant revolution

If we only loved one thing about the Zapatistas it would be the clean refreshing feeling that comes in their writing.  Inspired by ideas of Europe and by the ideas and struggles of native people instead of producing through a dialectic blend even more complexity for us to digest, they create from 0 something new and simple.  Instead of complicating what for centuries seems too complex to implement, they implement what it was so simple to implement to begin with.  But as every major human discovery has in the past, the notion of "why didn't I think of that before", for 30 years they are continuing to discover new ground and content so fast that we must forget what we are and what we do in order to comprehend the significance of their discoveries.

Here is a sample of what we are (and probably failing) trying to convey:

Original source from the jungle

nov192013

REWIND 3.

REWIND 3.

Here we explain the reasons behind this strange title and those that will follow, narrate the story of an exceptional encounter between a beetle and a perplexing being (that is, more perplexing than the beetle) and the reflections of no immediate relevance or importance which occurred therein; and finally, given a particular anniversary, the Sub tries to explain, unsuccessfully, how the Zapatistas see their own history.

November 2013
To whom it may concern:

WARNING – As noted in the text entitled “The Bad and Not So Bad News,” the writings that preceded that text had not yet been published. Ergo, what we are going to do is “rebobinar” (that is, “rewind” the tape) to what should have appeared on the Day of the Dead. Having rewound, you may then read in inverse order the inverse order in which the texts will appear and that way you will…hmm…forget it, I’ve even managed to confuse myself. The point is that you get the gist of the “retrospective” perspective. It’s as if one is going in one direction but later returns to see how they got going in that direction in the first place. Got it? No?

Building a Home with the Earthbag Technique

Step-by-Step Earthbag Building
by Owen Geiger http://www.instructables.com/id/Step-by-Step-Earthbag-Building/

This Instructable explains each main step of construction for building vertical earthbag walls. Videos on my Earthbag Natural Building YouTube channel demonstrate the process.

For those who don’t know, earthbag building uses polypropylene rice bags or feed bags filled with soil or insulation that are stacked like masonry and tamped flat. Barbed wire between courses keeps bags from slipping and adds tensile strength. The final plastered walls look just like adobe structures. Thousands of people are now building with bags to create their dream homes, home offices, shops, resorts, rootcellars, storm cellars and survival shelters. Non-profit organizations are building schools, orphanages, emergency shelters and other structures.

I got involved with earthbag building when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Southeast Asia in December, 2004. As the director of Builders Without Borders at that time, I searched all available affordable, sustainable building methods and decided building with bags was the most practical. They’re flood resistant (used for flood control), earthquake resistant (passed an ICBO shake table test), bullet and blast resistant (used for military bunkers), and now engineer and code approved plans are available. Just search for earthbag house plans on the Internet.

Gold, Copper, Iron, Petroleum, Uranium, Water, and now Bitcoin

The world has gone mad or what we thought as sanity is not really

far from madness?  This is how silly their value system is that one does not really need to dig mountains, melt ore, have vaults, and make laws and rules to create value.  One can seat on their PC and harvest/mine coins that are not made out of any matter, use them to buy and sell material goods and services, and get wealthy collecting those virtual coins that no state and central bank in the world regulates.  Yes, gold coins are just as silly but cost lives and do tremendous damage to the land their harvested from.  The question we ask is not whether such a currency can replace other currencies or be used as a universal currency for international trade but whether this "value" system is as silly as any of capitalism's value systems. 

Here we have a description and summary of what this late madness of virtual currency is by a globally respected economics journal "The Economist".  The longer this phenomenon lasts and the longer states are unable or unwilling to control and repress it the more the traditional value systems prove their irrationality.  Thousands, millions maybe, died in battles and wars over gold and other resources so states and the elites behind them can maintain domination over land and lives.  For what?  For regulating, usually to their benefit, the accumulation in wealth, power, and control, based on a virtual and irrational value system.  Bitcoins have reduced

Another Kind of Revolution

November 06, 2013

Another Kind of Revolution

The Mapuche’s Struggle for the Land

by JOHN SEVERINO

In the aftermath of the inspiring popular uprising in Argentina at the end of 2001 and the battles that blocked neoliberalism in Bolivia from 2003-2005, the Left came to power in governments across South America—most notably in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia—in a series of electoral upsets that were quickly hailed as revolutions. In hindsight, these victories prove to be less than convincing. The new revolutionary governments institutionalized social movements, turning them into mere appendages, they continued cutting down the rainforests and displacing indigenous peoples in the name of progress, they supported free trade agreements, used paramilitary or police forces against student demonstrators, expanded the exploitation of gas, oil, and coal, and imprisoned dissidents. Business as usual.
The cynicism of these new governments should not have come as a surprise. True revolutions do not happen overnight, and they are not delivered by politicians. The kind of transformation that ends exploitation, misery, and the destruction of the environment, and that allows people to organize their own lives and fulfill their needs in freedom and dignity comes about in an altogether different kind of way.

The treacherous world of modern scientific practice and its industrial use

Here is a piece from an essay that relates the experience of a scientist within the industrial scientific complex.  Science has evolved to a tool that is isolated from society to have value only to large scale private industrial institutions.  Its funding comes from public taxation and "humanitarian" organizations, but its product is funneled to private industry.  This is an example of how those from above load the burden of their cost to further develop their machines of exploitation, on those from below who are ultimately the objects of exploitation.

Urban Farm Collective Grand Dekum Garden

Urban Farm Collective Grand Dekum Garden

---

    The Burnside Arts Trust recently partnered with Portland’s Urban Farm Collective to sow good seeds in the Grand Dekum Garden. Resident artists
CircleFace and N.O. Bonzo spent a week in the sun painting a small garage located on the property with a mural to celebrate the joyous growth in the garden around them. We were fortunate enough to have local artist Dhestoe come to contribute his phenomenal talent. Each artist dedicated time and energy to the project to actively promote Green Spaces within our city. We all believe in the power of community gardens to build neighborhood relationships, beautify developed areas, and promote positive environmental use of space.

Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy

The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community

           

FRED TURNER

           

Published in Technology and Culture, July 2005, Vol 46 Pages 485-512

           

                                

In 1993, freelance journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and with it defined a new form of technologically enabled social life: virtual community.1 For the last eight years, he explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay area bulletin-board system (BBS) known as the Whole Earth  Lectronic Link, or the WELL. In the WELL s text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy. For Rheingold, these relationships formed an emotional bulwark against the loneliness of a highly technologized material world. As he explained, computer networks like the WELL allowed us  to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology. 2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one another practically and emotionally and  rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion. 3

               

Land Degradation

Author: Dr Eureta Rosenberg

What is it?

The experts disagree on how to define land degradation and associated processes such as desertification, but as an issue it is not difficult to understand. Land degradation occurs when the economic and biological productivity of land is lost, primarily through human activities. This can happen, for example, when:

• Fertile soils erode away,
• Indigenous trees are removed,
• Alien plants invade an area,
• Farm land is used for housing,
• Soils become salty through poor irrigation, or
• Soils are degraded by acid pollution and heavy metal contamination.

The loss of productive land obviously affects farming and rural communities. As the land degrades, more fertiliser, machinery and supplementary feeds are needed and the cost of production increases. Small-scale, subsistence farmers are often unable to meet extra costs and even large-scale, commercial farmers can find that farming becomes impossible. As a result, farm workers and others may be forced to move to towns and cities, only to face unemployment and poverty.

Principles of Water Management for People and the Environment

Michael Acreman, Freshwater Management Adviser to the IUCN, Institute of Hydrology, United Kingdom

Water, the Environment, and Population

Water is the lifeblood of our planet. It is fundamental to the biochemistry of all living organisms. The planet's ecosystems are linked and maintained by water, and it drives plant growth, provides a permanent habitat for many species (such as 8,500 species of fish), and is a breeding ground or temporary home for others, including most of the worlds 4,200 species of amphibians and reptiles described so far. Water is also a universal solvent and provides the major pathway for the flow of sediment, nutrients and pollutants. Through erosion, transportation and deposition by rivers, glaciers, and icesheets, water shapes the landscape and through evaporation it drives the energy exchange between land and the atmosphere, thus controlling the Earth's climate.

Apart from a few minor chemical processes, water is neither created nor destroyed, it only moves from place to place and changes in quality. The total amount of water on Earth is 1.4 billion cubic kilometers (km3), but only around 41,000 km3 circulates through the hydrological cycle, the remaining being stored for long periods in the oceans, ice caps and aquifers. Furthermore, the renewal rate provided by rainfall varies around the world. In the Atacama desert in southern Peru it almost never rains, whilst 6,000 millimeters (mm) of rain per year is not uncommon in parts of New Zealand. In any one place rainfall also varies from year to year.

Lou Reed gone

A very sad Sunday this Oct. 27th 2013, our beloved Lou is gone!

R.I.P. Lou Reed, Velvet Underground founder, dead at 71

Lou Reed, the founder of Velvet Underground who later embarked on a successful solo career, has died, according to Rolling Stone. He was 71 years old.

Update: Reed’s physician, Dr. Charles Miller, told The New York Times that he died from liver disease. Reed received a liver transplant in May 2013 and had been receiving treatment up until a few days ago. When doctors told him his condition was no longer treatable, Reed returned home to New York City, where “he died peacefully, with his loved ones around him,” Miller added.

In the days following his surgery, Reed’s wife, Laurie Anderson, revealed the severity of his condition in an interview with The London Times. “It’s as serious as it gets. He was dying. You don’t get it for fun,” Anderson explained. “I don’t think he’ll ever totally recover from this, but he’ll certainly be back to doing [things] in a few months. He’s already working and doing t’ai chi. I’m very happy. It’s a new life for him.”

Land capacity and Oil yields

In a previous article on how much land is needed to grow so much food a list of oils was included but olive oil was not on the list.  So we inquired on similar information and found this other article of useful information but the units are not similar.  As we have some knowledge of physics this is not a problem.  A Kg is equal to 1000g and a hectare is 10000sq.m. so you can divide by 100 to get your figure in Kg.100sq.m of the previous article.

We thank the editor of journeytoforever.com but as we do not believe in ownership but in sharing we will not bother with copyrights or do we consider reproduction of good information as theft, except if it was used for profit from it.  This is definitely nowhere close to any of our intents or goals, quite the opposite, to help create a world as far away as possible from profit, ownership, theft, social control, and exploitation.

Enjoy the information while it lasts free and accessible.  Create hardcopies and manuals of what you believe may be of use for you and your community, use responsibly.  This is our tool to autonomy and freedom. 

What is Communalism?

The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism

by Murray Bookchin  -- September 18, 1994

Seldom have socially important words become more confused and divested of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two centuries ago, it is often forgotten, "democracy" was deprecated by monarchists and republicans alike as "mob rule." Today, democracy is hailed as "representative democracy," an oxymoron that refers to little more than a republican oligarchy of the chosen few who ostensibly speak for the powerless many.

"Communism," for its part, once referred to a cooperative society that would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in which each contributed to the social labor fund according to his or her ability and received the means of life according to his or her needs. Today, "communism" is associated with the Stalinist gulag and wholly rejected as totalitarian. Its cousin, "socialism" -- which once denoted a politically free society based on various forms of collectivism and equitable material returns for labor -- is currently interchangeable with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political spectrum has shifted ideologically to the right, "anarchism" itself has not been immune to redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism is being divested of its social ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy, an emphasis that is draining it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite individualism -- marked by an advocacy of lifestyle changes, the cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and even an embrace of outright mysticism -- has become increasingly prominent. This personalistic "lifestyle anarchism" is steadily eroding the socialistic core of anarchist concepts of freedom.

Incredible Edibles! – Great “Grains”

Republished from http://blogs.extension.org/mastergardener/2013/02/25/incredible-edibles-great-grains/

Incredible Edibles! – Great “Grains” 

Looking for something interesting and tasty to try in the vegetable garden or landscape this year?  Are you looking to add delicious fresh ingredients to your meals?  It’s time to take a look at some uncommon plants that can have a big impact in the garden and on your dinner plate.  There’s a whole world of fantastic fruits, glorious grains, verdant vegetables, and more that can bring excitement to the garden.

Think about experimenting this year and grow something new and unexpected.  This week, we’ll be taking a look at specialty “grains” that can find themselves a home right in your own home flower or vegetable garden.  These plants are used much like our cereal grains (corn, rice, oats, wheat, etc.), but are, in fact, broad leaved plants.

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) and Amaranth (Amaranthus sp.)

We’ll talk about the first two together since they are closely related and have similar care characteristics.  Quinoa (pronounced Keen-wah) has been consumed as a staple in parts of South America for nearly 5,000 years and is just now becoming popular in the US.  Some reports indicate that the growing demand in developed countries is increasing the price of the staple in its native regions.

The seeds, when cooked, have a creamy consistency and nutty flavor and are often used in salads or cooked pasta/rice dishes.  It is also ground into a gluten-free flour.   It is popular because its tasty flavor pairs with its impressively high protein content.  It is a wonderful addition to the garden because the seeds come from impressively showy flower heads that make a striking addition to the flower garden.

Quinoa & Amaranth can feed the world.

Republished from DailyKos Mon Mar 10, 2008 at 01:00 PM PDT

Amaranth can feed the world..

by Demfem

Amaranth grain

This is a diary which will try to bring to the attention of those that are interested in food resources a grain that may well be what saves the human race from starving to death. It is an ancientt grain, grown by early American civilizations. The article linked above, one of many that I will be using, says

Amaranth has a long and interesting history in Mexico where it's been grown and harvested for thousands of years by the Mayan and Incan civilizations. The Aztecs believed Amaranth had magical properties that would give them amazing strength.

Because it was important culturally to the Aztecs, the conquistadors did their best to eradicate it. Fortunately for us, they were not entirely successful. I say fortunately because it may be the grain that saves us from mass starvation on a global scale.
More below the fold..

Amaranth is a very interesting plant. It will grow just about anywhere, under conditions that would kill any other food plant. It needs a little water when planted and can do without until harvest if necessary. Amaranth will grow in poor soil, in rich soil, and in rocky or clayey soil that other crops will not grow in.
Mixed with corn flour or meal, amaranth flour or meal, is a complete food for humans. It has all the proteins and amino acids the human body requires for maintenance.
Amaranth is also a dual crop, the grain is a foodstuff for people, the stalks and leaves combined with corn stalks and leaves, are a complete feed for livestock. It can be fed in round bales or as silage.

Amaranth puts nitrogen back into the soil naturally, eliminating the need for artificial nitrates which run off and pollute the water ways. A field can be kept in good shape by rotating amaranth with corn without adding any artificial fertilizer.

We are simply republishing this article and we are in search of similar.  We have to eventually cross some of this information with other sources for validity.

Living off the land: How much land?

Posted on Saturday, May 5, 2012 by Thoreau | 3 Comments

Suppose that you can no longer rely on any consistent source of food, other than what you can grow on your own land. Your stored food supplies have been exhausted. Some disaster has wreaked havoc with the commercial food supply. How much land would you need to grow ALL of your own food? For this particular article, I’m setting aside the question of raising your own chickens, fish, goats, cattle, pigs, etc. For the sake of simplicity, let’s consider how much land it would take to grow a complete vegetarian diet, per person. Now I’m not a vegetarian, but I eat a fairly healthy diet, and if the necessity arises, I’d adapt.
Certain assumptions are necessary to this type of calculation. For example, we have to estimate the total calories per day per person, and the percent of calories attributed to protein, fat, and carbohydrates. [Technically, what we call 'calories' are kilocalories (kcal).] The USDA nutrition labels assume 1800 kcal per day for an adult woman and 2200 kcal per day for an adult man. So the average is that ubiquitous 2000 kcal diet figure found on so many product labels. I suggest that this figure is ridiculously low for anyone who is growing all of his or her own food, largely by manual labor. My target for kcal per day is 2740, which is one million kcal per year per person — a nice round figure, and plenty of calories for a non-sedentary lifestyle. If you think that my numbers are off by, say, 10 or 20%, you can easily increase or decrease the final tally by 10 or 20% to get a result that you prefer.

Our policy on comments published and comments rejected

Sort note on commenting by way of an example.

http://www.essayist.in/2013/10/just-make/

On this article, Just Make Me Do It, we submitted a comment as follows:

<<  This piece seems to tie well to our piece of time and energy, buyers and sellers of, http://socialphysicsinstitute.blogspot.gr/2013/07/work-energy-time-buyers-and-sellers-of.html
Time is a physical parameter to just about anything in the universe that is non-static, which means everything.  Life is bound by time at a level different than the one individually perceived, but definitely not endless, or startless.  As long as people are preoccupied with prescribed activities they are easily controlled and dominated by those that set the rules of the activities.  Only if they were to occupy the rules can they alter their activities.  Collectively they may be able, if they organize well, to take control of the rule making process.  But they have to take the initial time off to do so.  Usually only those that can afford this luxury would experience this joy.  But they are also the same who are least likely to change the rules.
"“Freedom is participation in assemblies, the ability to discuss and then decide. It is a collective freedom that we conquer. We decide about our way of life. Nobody thinks for us. The collective governance thinks but does not decide for us. The supreme authority is the assembly."

 From the Zapatistas' school of freedom >>

Counter-Infrastructure School of Autonomy

In recent weeks we have been discussing and researching ideas on infrastructure as means of dependency and extortion of especially the lowest social strata.  This inquiry begun from questions and suggestions sent by readers of this blog.  What we will attempt here is a brief introduction to the dialog that has started between us and those in contact on the subject and we will gradually incorporate our perspectives into one document that will be the product of this discussion.  We strongly believe that this is the way it should be done.  From the bottom we come into the same level and organize equally amongst us to produce something of value to all.

We don’t want your American dream!

We don’t want your dream, we want ours.  Don’t enforce your dream on us or we will fight you away!

Let’s be frank.  It is your American dream we don’t want,

- we want everyone’s different and self defined dream, the ones you can not sell to us

We don’t want a huge house full of automation,

- we want a little home full of rational simplicity

We don’t want a huge car on a huge highway, over huge bridges and tunnels, for hundreds of miles every day,

- we want simple clean transportation to the few places close by and once in a long while to visit some faraway place of interest, even if it takes too long to get there.

We don’t want huge dams and pipelines, artificial reservoirs, and chemical treatment plants

- we want clean local water from natural resources

We don’t want mass produced industrial food

- we want to locally grow clean, sustainable, organic, authentic, fresh food

We don’t want machines made out of strange dangerous metals from deep inside earth and billions of tons of toxic waste pumped through the fields around your mines,

- we want simple machines made of already plentiful recyclable materials that would last for generations

Comments and dialog

For those of you who have something to say about what you read here please write.  We have no interest in preaching with our ears shut.  We are interested in discussion and a dynamic formation of new ideas that are a product of collective input not individual expression.  We wish we had answers and solutions for everything  but we don't.  We are learning ourselves, hence the reference to education, learning, sharing, solving, failing, and best of all learning from failure.

We have also accumulated a ton of practical information and resources that deal with the problems of daily routines of autonomous collective living.  We are trying to find a way to separate and classify information (documents, audio-visual, manuals, etc) but it is harder to do than we originally thought.  we welcome contribution to this are as well.

The only ideal we have in mind and a priority is to add towards solutions and not criticize others' proposals.   We are not bound by any other "idealism"!  No flag no symbol!

1968 : A chronology of events in France and internationally

1968 : A chronology of events in France and internationally

A short chronology of the events which swept France in May and June 1968. Starting as a student revolt, the events culminated in mass workplace occupations and a general strike of 10 million workers.
Followed by a short international chronology.

May 68 - 40 years on

It was a festival without beginning or end; I saw everyone and no-one, for each individual was lost in the same enormous strolling crowd; I spoke to everyone without remembering either my own words or those spoken by others, because everyone's attention was absorbed at every step by new objects and events, and by unexpected news.
— Bakunin, Confessions
May 1968 has entered into legend - to the point where when new waves of struggle break out in France young people get irritated by the inevitable comparisons to 68 that are aired in the media. The 2006 anti-CPE movement is only the most recent example. Yet May 68 was the most advanced movement of an exceptional year of struggle that remains a high-point of the post-WWII era. Hopes and possibilities were raised high - yet the revolution never came, even though the idea of revolution (though often limited and confused) was a part of the general ferment and atmosphere in a way that seems extraordinary now, looking back from where we are. Our times are in many ways the era of counter-revolution that followed - the outcome of the defeat of the struggles of the 1960s and 70s, when 'the social question' dominated life to varying degrees.

The end is near

La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived

Testimonies > La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived 

Friday 18 January 2013, by zadist

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]
 

La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived.

You are sleeping, this is a dream.
After an hour and a half on the road, we arrive at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. We park in a small parking lot, across from the town hall. A graffitied road sign loudly proclaims “ZAD”; we are not very far.
If, regarding urbanisation, the acronym ZAD means “Zone d’Amenagement Differé”(Zone of Deferred Development), for us it takes different meanings. The 2000 hectares upon which Vinci plans to build an airport and companion road network have been re-baptised “Zone à Défendre” (Zone to Defend) by the project’s opponents. This project will not be realised. The project’s opponents already are envisaging the future and the possibilities of putting their desires into practice. Coming from a defensive position, they now fight “for”, for a “Zone d’Autonomie Définitive” (Zone of Definitive Autonomy).

The Effective Extremist Collective

... they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored ...

"First, social-psychological studies of small groups show that "moral exemplars" -- those who stand outside the general consensus and at first are labeled as "extremists" -- can often be very effective, but with one important qualification: they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored. Thus, the trick for any social change agent is to be just extreme enough to be an "effective extremist."

Second, historical case studies of social change show that a very small number of highly organized and disciplined people, drawing great energy from their strong moral beliefs and supreme confidence in their shared theoretical analysis, can have a big impact."

What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change
by G. William Domhoff
March 2005

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html

Debating with an expert - Zygmunt Bauman

Part 1 of Zygmunt Bauman Interview 
http://essayist.in/2013/04/de-familiarize-and-familiarize/2/

"And that all suggestions of scientists and experts possessing such (future-prediction) powers thanks to their professional training are in my view fraudulent!"

Although I read the second part first (Escaping Inside Utopia) and then started reading this first part, second, I couldn't move past this sentence without reacting and commenting.
I can predict right now, based on available data and prediction modeling based on research methodology of which statistics is a tool, that as I write this, it is dark and later it will be bright and the sun will rise from the East.  I claim to be neither a scientist nor an expert, but I challenge ZB to call me fraudulent within the next 24hr unless he is currently living in the Antarctic, in which case the sun will only come up late September.  An other prediction of the future.

Brief thought on the physical status of the universe and life

If one is to assume scientific modeling of how can life be possible, what spectrum of physical conditions can host life on a planet, is correct, then it is easily deduced through the statistical probability and the estimated size of the known universe, that life is possible in billions of planets.  The possibility of two or more to be in such proximity as to be able to have contact is small but not negligible.
But what is life?  Human life, humanity for example, is a life.  A single form of life with a lifespan that is not yet defined, but due to the possibilities of transferring elsewhere and if it is not achieved before the planet's destruction from physical or artificial causes, this lifespan is finite.
So, why would we be interested in this?  We are just cells within one organism, humanity, and she lives on and on and it is made out of us.  She coexists with other organisms often in competition for existence.  We should study her health condition and her health needs and work collectively to improve her condition.  And she is getting sick.  We should seek the solidarity of good willing cells and organize to destroy the effects of the cells that cause the illness.  It is our only duty and only cause for existence as cells.
Did you listen?  It is the sound of your world that is crumbling.  It is the sound of our world that is surfacing on planet earth.

From:  the students of the Social Physics Institute

Did you listen? It is the sound of your world crumbling. It is the sound of our world resurging

Communiqué of the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee – General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, Mexico
 

December 21, 2012

To Whom It May Concern: Silent march in Chiapas 12.21.12

Did you listen?
It is the sound of your world crumbling.
It is the sound of our world resurging.
The day that was day, was night.

And night shall be the day that will be day.

Democracy!
Liberty!
Justice!

From the Mountains of Southeastern Mexico,

For the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee – General Command of the EZLN

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos,

Mexico, December 2012

The system of education is the education of the system

Zapatistas Showcase Their Autonomous School System to the Nation and the World

Refusing Government Money or Teachers, Indigenous Communities Have Built More Schools and Educated More Children Than Ever Before

By Amber Howard
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

January 6, 2007

When the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials) began the public phase of its struggle on New Year’s Eve, 1993, it made eleven demands, one of which was “education” (the others were: work, land, shelter, food, health, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace). Thirteen years later, they have seen that demand met as never before in the highlands and jungles of Chiapas. But it was not the Mexican government or any other institution that complied. They did it for themselves.

Foto: D.R. 2007 Gerardo Osuna

Whereas prior to the rebellion in these rural lands of Mexico’s poorest state schools were few and far between, Zapatista communities have built new ones, trained teachers from their own ranks, and widened the scope of what kind of education their children receive. And they did this without accepting a peso from the government. On December 31, 2006, thousands of Zapatistas and visitors from throughout Mexico and the world met in the mountain town of Oventic for the Gathering of the Zapatista Peoples and the Peoples of the World, where an entire session was dedicated to “The Other Education” and civilian authorities from throughout EZLN territory explained what they have done, and what they still hope to do.

The suicidal organism and the cells

A response to an article by Nilesh Chatterjee & Dharmendra Singh from http://essayist.in/2013/07/playing-hot-potato-with-mother-nature  also reproduced here as http://socialphysicsinstitute.blogspot.gr/2013/07/playing-hot-potato-pass-parcel-with.html

Through the training in the "individual sciences", medicine and psychology in specific, one may fail to see the forest past the trees.  This training focuses on the individual, its behavior, its development, its health, its illness, its death.  If humanity was viewed as an organism, we are unsure of when it was born/created/transformed, but it is an organism that has survived on earth for many long years, centuries, millenniums. Unlike some other organisms that were born and died, like the mammoth, the dinosaur, etc. (how is our Panda doing today? feeling a little dizzy? it must be a side effect of the life support system!), the human organism has grown, concurred, and dominated the earth and all other organisms, except a few, HIV for a example.

It may be close, or past the point of sustainable growth and domination and it will need to readopt to survive.  This can not be done by individual training, behavior modification, influence, sensitivity, or brutal force.  If it is done partially and not in totality it would be like cancer, where some cells seem to have different programming than the rest.  Cells are born, live and die to maintain the organism.  They must have a common programming for the organism to survive.  Either an external force to the organism must alter its genetic encoding, or the organism must be forced to realize its discomfort, its pain, its  threat, and adopt to the environment to survive.  Unless, the majority of the cells can realize this urgent need, turn against the few cells and organs that drive the problem of maintaining humanity's path, and in an organized manner KILL or AMPUTATE the organs and cells that are not willing to adopt.

Playing Hot Potato (Pass the Parcel) with Mother Nature

Reproduction from the essayist.in

Playing Hot Potato (Pass the Parcel) with Mother Nature

By Nilesh Chatterjee and Dharmendra Singh [July 2013] 

A recent (June 2013) World Bank report titled: ‘Turn Down the Heat: Climate extremes, regional impacts and the case for resilience’, says that South Asia, with India at its centre, will experience a temperature rise of two degree Celsius. This will happen in next two to three decades; much before the expected date of 2050. This will lead to major climate crisis causing widespread food shortages, prolonged droughts, unprecedented heat-waves, more intense rainfall and flooding, threat to energy production, and most importantly water scarcity.

******************

Do we need more evidence to argue that the Earth’s environment is getting polluted and degraded? Probably not.