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chelidonFor those of you interested in permaculture, there's a lot of good info scattered throughout this site. Enjoy!
And there's a good Yahoo group focused on self-sufficiency and Peak Oil issues here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2/ Warning, it's quite high-traffic -- I had to set my subscription to "digest" and I still get a couple of mailings each day.
When even National Geographic does lead features on Peak Oil and alternative energy, it's time to take notice: Future Power: Where will the world gets its next energy fix? This is a follow-up to a piece from last June 2004, End of Cheap Oil.
And there's a feature on the ups and downs of living on a socialist commune in Tecumseh, MO (excerpt only, full text not online): 65760: Not Quite Utopia Um, yeah. There's a reason so many communes, utopian projects, and group living situations fail, good intentions notwithstanding. You have to have effective, functional social structures and processes, and you have to be very careful about who is involved. There are some personality characteristics which work well in a real full-time community, and others which do not. The cultural social environment we're in now, which tends to fragment us into smaller and smaller groups, and which trumpets the primacy of the individual, and selfish needs, is not very adaptive to sustainable community life. While a lot of us sometimes talk about living in intentional communities of various types, most of us in the western world have little to no experience in doing so. My limited personal experience shows me that it takes a lot of hard work, and finding new (or alternately, very old) ways of living together and treating one another. The sociology of extended, group and intentional communities is something I've been looking at.
I've also been reading some practical discussions about how much fertile land is necessary to support one person, and from the collected wisdom of people who are doing it, with proper soil maintenance, while there are ways to cut corners, and it can vary widely by region, and what you choose to plant, it looks like you need somewhere around a minimum of a 60' x 60' plot per person.
Examples (From "The Sustainable Vegetable Graden" by Jeavons and Cox):
Pinto beans = 5,475 square feet
Hard Red Spring Wheat = 5,840 square feet
Irish Potatoes = 1,570 square feet
mmmm, potatoes... ;> Multiply that 60' x 60' figure by the number of people in an average city/suburb, and the amount of fertile ground within easy transportation range of the people there, and you start to see the kind of shifts that will be necessary if it ever becomes impractical to ship food in from all over the world.
And there's a good Yahoo group focused on self-sufficiency and Peak Oil issues here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RunningOnEmpty2/ Warning, it's quite high-traffic -- I had to set my subscription to "digest" and I still get a couple of mailings each day.
When even National Geographic does lead features on Peak Oil and alternative energy, it's time to take notice: Future Power: Where will the world gets its next energy fix? This is a follow-up to a piece from last June 2004, End of Cheap Oil.
And there's a feature on the ups and downs of living on a socialist commune in Tecumseh, MO (excerpt only, full text not online): 65760: Not Quite Utopia Um, yeah. There's a reason so many communes, utopian projects, and group living situations fail, good intentions notwithstanding. You have to have effective, functional social structures and processes, and you have to be very careful about who is involved. There are some personality characteristics which work well in a real full-time community, and others which do not. The cultural social environment we're in now, which tends to fragment us into smaller and smaller groups, and which trumpets the primacy of the individual, and selfish needs, is not very adaptive to sustainable community life. While a lot of us sometimes talk about living in intentional communities of various types, most of us in the western world have little to no experience in doing so. My limited personal experience shows me that it takes a lot of hard work, and finding new (or alternately, very old) ways of living together and treating one another. The sociology of extended, group and intentional communities is something I've been looking at.
I've also been reading some practical discussions about how much fertile land is necessary to support one person, and from the collected wisdom of people who are doing it, with proper soil maintenance, while there are ways to cut corners, and it can vary widely by region, and what you choose to plant, it looks like you need somewhere around a minimum of a 60' x 60' plot per person.
Examples (From "The Sustainable Vegetable Graden" by Jeavons and Cox):
Pinto beans = 5,475 square feet
Hard Red Spring Wheat = 5,840 square feet
Irish Potatoes = 1,570 square feet
mmmm, potatoes... ;> Multiply that 60' x 60' figure by the number of people in an average city/suburb, and the amount of fertile ground within easy transportation range of the people there, and you start to see the kind of shifts that will be necessary if it ever becomes impractical to ship food in from all over the world.
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Date: 2005-07-22 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 05:16 pm (UTC)the dream was just very interesting...very much revolving around this post. timing and all that
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Date: 2005-07-22 05:29 pm (UTC)Timing is everything, ah-yup.
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Date: 2005-07-22 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 08:09 pm (UTC)