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Comment by spraak | Hacker News Reader

There's an episode [1] of Bill Mollison's Global Gardener series that addresses this well.

[1] I don't know of a link to watch it, but this blog post explains it well enough: https://permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasis-am...

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Came here to post this. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xx078x_global-gardener-2-ar...

Bill's work often gets overlooked because it's "low tech," but that's a feature, not a bug.

Thanks for sharing that!

Because you can't feed NY or SF with 'hippy-feel-good-low-tech'.

You really could. Permaculture is much more productive in the long term than the current dominant agriculture methods.

At $9 per pound of tomatoes? I think the claim that it can, and do so affordably needs a reference to somewhere it actually does.

Then please reference what you mean by $9 per pound for tomatoes and the connexion to permaculture. Most likely you're mistaking permaculture for something else (e.g. "organic") or drawing unsubstantiated conclusions

The problem is, conventional agriculture can't feed NY or SF in the long term. It is a system in the process of destroying itself (which is all that the word "unsustainable" means, after all).

Expensive tomatoes are preferable to desertification of the continent (which is what the deforestation, soil loss, and overgrazing due to agriculture cause). What do you think shutting down North America's water cycle will do to the GDP? Compared to paying more for groceries (a tiny sliver of GDP), it's an economic no-brainer.

Thank you for explaining that

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