May be its time to start a blog.... yet another article to read

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Permalink Reply by Ian on June 10, 2008 at 12:53pm

Another good piece you have found for us John. Maybe you should start to use your blog.
Thanks
Ian

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Permalink Reply by ilex on June 10, 2008 at 2:12pm

Monbiot has written a lot of good stuff, but this piece is one of his best. Thanks very much for linking to it.

And yes, John- you truly seem built for blogging!

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on June 11, 2008 at 10:39am

Well, this article gave rise to another burst of anxiety. It's so true that peasants are despised for their independence -- I mentioned something similar to this a while back to Roger as KGI grows,etc., that there will be forces moving against growing one's own food to the extent KGI promotes, powerful forces.

Mother Earth News used to flaunt advice on bartering, well the IRS created a lot of anxiety around that, since money isn't exchanged, taxes can't be collected, so you are supposed to add a value and tax it yourself. And that section of the magazine disappeared.

And if big business can convince us that doing anything for ourselves is bad/inconvenient/unhealthful, etc., etc., they profit. They've managed to convince people that fast food is "cheaper" than cooking it ourselves even though the math doesn't come out that way at all.

We're talking about the underground economy here, aren't we?

Banks want to give out loans and collect interest and/or foreclose and resell. I've heard stories here in Idaho of banks insisting farmers borrow more than they really need or want in order to prove up on properties (new bigger houses, fancier barns, etc.) and make them worth more for resale at foreclosure time. It's quite a racket.

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Permalink Reply by John Walker on June 11, 2008 at 11:01am

Arundhati Roy, the Indian author and activist has stated that' With Empire, what we (as those who do not rule) don't realise is that they (who rule) need us more than we need them" The corollary is also true that those in power don't realise how much they need us. This is not quite true, obviously, cecil Rhodes knew how much the working class could be taxed, hence the colonisation of Africa, and the Romans also knew how far the could push (decimation only took 10%, much less that the 20% charged on some credit cards). Maybe the elites of pax Americana have forgotten these lessons.
So underground we go....

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on June 11, 2008 at 11:23am

And if we announce that we are underground, are we truly underground? Can we actually maintain?

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on June 11, 2008 at 11:26am

And the whole issue about land. It used to be that "poor" people lived in rural environments and at least could grow their own food and hunt and fish and be "backwards" intellectually, maybe, and unsophisticated by urban standards, but now those havens have been taken away as well as we are now a service economy with people living in horrid little cubby hole apartments, slum lords, etc., or in places where chickens and gardens are forbidden for landscape sake and considered eyesores. Now that gardens are "hobbies" the economics are skewed even further.

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Permalink Reply by Kate on June 15, 2008 at 4:13pm

I haven't read all of that article yet John but what I have read is that the small producer gets more food per hectare and why this might be so. The small producer knows his land and can grow exactly what is right for each tiny piece of it. In my vegetable garden, for example, I know how much sun each section gets at various times of the year. I know that some bits have deeper soil, or more rock or are at the top or bottom of a slope, and so on. I can therefore plant exactly what I know will do best in those micro-climates because I want a little bit of lots of different things and I am not trying to grow 1 big crop.I can grow lettuce under the broccoli, I can grow leafy things like Asian greens in the shadey patches and I can grow okra in the hottest parts. Evidently there is a new buzz word for this - mozaic farming - and I heard about it on the radio recently as if it was a great new idea! I nearly drove off the road in my desire to tell the radio how bloody obvious is that! Mozaic farming = just plain old-fashioned common sense, something that is not that common anymore, it seems!

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Permalink Reply by Penelope on June 15, 2008 at 4:24pm

Micro climates. The people in the Andes have been "mosaic" gardening for who knows how many millennia. It doesn't take long for methods, ideas, practices, etc.,e tc., to disappear -- just one generation of cell phone addicts can erase centuries of eco-knowledge.

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Permalink Reply by Maya on June 16, 2008 at 7:19pm

Large farms started out being a way to feed more people through volume and higher-yielding crop varieties. From there they moved to attempts to become more efficient (straighter rows with room between for larger machinery, etc.) in order to produce more for less. As the soil became depleted and petroleum and labor prices have risen, the goal of more production has become a matter of sheer quantity, rather than yield per acre/hectare as “farmers” struggle to meet payroll, keep up on machinery payments, maintain and fuel said machinery, and have some sort of income so they can, ironically, buy the food for which they can’t provide the time and field space. What a wacky world.

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