Comment by johnpowell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnpowell | Hacker News Reader

I bought this book at a place called "Hungry Head Books" in Eugene Oregon in 1997. I was working as a projectionist at the time and pretty much had to kill 30 hours a week in the booth. This was before wifi or cell phones so I would buy a few books each week and just sit on the carpet and read while the projectors did their thing.

I was not a fan of the hippies. I lived on 15th and High (that is not a joke) when Jerry Garcia died. The hippies were lost for a bit so they flooded 13th in Eugene until they found Phish and moved on. It was horrible. I'm more of a punk rock guy.

But this book really got me going about permaculture. To the point where it was all I would talk about when I got drunk at parties. And people hated me for it. I guess I know how the bitcoin guys feel.

But I found out my aunt and uncle owned about a hundred acres near Klamath Falls. And they were cool with me doing whatever out there. Tons of lumber and there was already a well. So over a summer we built a cabin with working plumbing and a septic tank. And by cabin I mean the unibomber would have considered it a downgrade. We had no clue about what we were doing.

But it was fun to camp out and build something, even if it was shit. That was about as far as we got. There is now a rotting log cabin out there.

I think permaculture has more to do with culture than it has to do with agriculture. What I mean by this is that agriculture has become, nowadays, the increasingly scientific study of how how to produce the highest yields for crop types that have the highest return on investment for that area. The naming conventions of how practices are done do not influence the practices themselves.

The reason why I bother to make this point is because there are many terms in the agricultural scene that are marketing terms ("organic", "bio" and even "free range"). They are marketing terms because they are not well-defined; they are well-defined only up to sticker restrictions. For example, if you buy "orangutan sensitive palm oil", do you have any idea what that means? Can we know that they don't cut corners? The term "organic" is especially dangerous, because of its connotation to organic vs. inorganic chemistry and the loss of information when converting between the technical definitions and cultural perceptions.

In Southern Africa, almost all game meat biltong is free-range, hormone free, pesticide free and yet it is not marketed as such, because those properties are a given! In contrast you'll have eggs in the same grocery store that are labelled as "free-range", because the chickens are in housing that can be physically picked up and moved around.

This is a really insightful take. I’ve read a lot of books influenced by Mollison, and they’re all heavy on the agricultural side. Finally reading the original and it’s clear that as you say, it’s more about the whole cultural system — community, etc.

With everything that’s been happening, I’ve been thinking a lot about “resilience”, and how it really begins at the household level and goes upwards from there to community, state, country.

[Think of how individual houses being prepared enough to weather a months-long emergency leads to a stronger community, where emergency resources can be targeted on the most vulnerable, etc. Contrast with our current predicament of on-demand everything.]

It’s really interesting to go back to “first principles” in this context, and get a new appreciation for what Mollison was trying to do with Permaculture.

Fun fact: the phrase “permanent agriculture” goes back to a book from the 1930s called “Tree Crops”. It contains a great quote by FDR:

“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”

Can recommend you read some of David Holmgren's works then -- he's very deeply considered the culture and principles side of the work he and Mollison pioneered.

Note that he went and actually applied permaculture at at Melliodora.

>The term "organic" is especially dangerous, because of its connotation to organic vs. inorganic chemistry and the loss of information when converting between the technical definitions and cultural perceptions.

In the United States, "organic" in the context of food is not a cultural perception, it is an FDA-regulated certified word with a very strict definition and penalties for misuse.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/national...

There's a guy who's a convicted felon in the US for misrepresenting conventional as organic:

https://thecounter.org/organic-food-fraud-usda-doj-randy-con...

Wow, that's terrible the path that he chose but aside from that, I am glad to see legal precedence laid out for this because I know damn well others are trying to be bad actors about this.

People I trust to know these things have always said the USDA-certified Organic label is pretty legit.

My issue with the USDA-certified organic label is not that their label is not well-defined, but rather that the definition is not necessarily in line with 1) what you expect healthy food to be or 2) what the most sustainable approach would be or the most recent research suggests.

To give you an example, weather driven modelling in conventional agriculture has the potential to make a massive difference in, for example, pesticide application. But if you use less pesticides as part of your daily routine, that does not mean that you have the right sticker or label to represent your produce and your incremental improvements. The reason why I say this is that pesticide should be applied at a very precise point of the target organism's life cycle, but it is not always possible for the farmer to do it without considerable new added effort.

Thanks for a cool read! Love permaculture too, and will never be a farmer either, I'll stick to coding. But you might consider taking up writing!

Heh. I lived there at the time, as well, and the Eugene punk scene had a particular charm! Given that I sometimes hung out with a couple of film projectionists we probably chatted at some time (:

Anyway, same experience with this book. I ended up on a remote farm in alpine Europe in the 00's and otherwise seem to have retained much of the lessons after all these years.

I found this book in the "Books for a Change" book shop in Charing Cross Road back in 90s. I loved the diagrams.

A lament for that book shop, and for all the many book shops on Charing Cross Road which have closed down.

Hope you at least get as far as planting out some fruit and nut trees and other high value trees? With any luck some of them will have survived til now. If you go back, maybe your food forest is already full of mature trees.

Eugene and K Falls - good representation of the two extreme poles of Oregon. My daughter just got a room a couple blocks from your old haunt, assuming UO opens up again...

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