Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

civilization 2.o 19
after planting. Chickens, pigeons, turkey, geese, ducks, rabbits, sheep, and
a dairy cow all contributed droppings. They were fed from the farm once
there were enough trees and plants growing to harvest regularly without
overtaxing the system.
Within the first year the soil and well water began showing a marked
decline in salinity and the garden areas had significant increases in growth.
Pests were minor and largely controlled by the farm animals. The combining
of plants and animals brought about the integration of farm inputs and
outputs into a managed ecosystem of continuous production, water
conservation, and soil improvement. In less than a decade a permacultural
balance had been achieved, with lessening inputs and improving outputs.
Chris Nesbitt and Geoff Lawton are permaculturists. They are
concerned for the fate of the Earth and they are trying to do something
about it. The greatest challenge for them, however, is not growing food.
That is the easy part.
The Challenge
Geoff Lawton is fond of saying that all of the world’s problems can be
solved in the garden. His obstacle is not gardening; it’s not even switching
broadscale agriculture from ‘conventional’ (using chemical salts, herbicides,
pesticides and machinery to derive the greatest dollar profit) to organic
(marking ‘profits’ not in dollars but in the health and continued productivity
of the soil food web). The greatest challenge is in changing the growth
paradigm away from Civilization 1.0 – Fossil-fueled Industrial Globalization
– to Civilization 2.0 – ‘Glocalization’; a steady state economy characterized
by stable (and in the near term rapidly declining) population size.
Col. Edwin Drake’s remarkable discovery of a way to pump rock oil in
the Seneca Nation permitted homo to dramatically accelerate Civilization
1.0 because of the sudden cheap supply of both energy and industrial
chemicals. That innovation arrived precisely at the moment when coal
smoke and horse manure were imposing severe constraints on both city size
and war mechanization. With an ERoI of 30:1 to 100:1, petroleum allowed
human eco-niche expansion to assume an exponential trajectory. Heck,
we even aimed for the stars.
Mathis Wackernagel, Donella Meadows and others have calculated that
Earth has been in deficit ecological spending ever since 1989-1990, adding
stress and diminishing resilience with every passing year, so that by 2050,
at present rates, we will be 34 planet years in debt (see graph).
Looking ahead on the exponential economic decline curve, we can see
that a seven percent decline rate would mean halving every 10 years. A
decline in our liquid fuel availability at a seven percent rate would halve what
is available to automobiles by 2020, and for that matter, halve production of
automobiles. Absent organized rationing, it would likely halve production
of tractors and fertilizers, and so, in all likelihood, halve available food
production by that year. It would halve heating fuels, halve electricity, and