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

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(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.