[permaculture-oceania] opportunity to comment on drought issue...

[kdawborn]

Hi All, 


Below is info from The Age newspaper's Opinion section - Your Say. The first
part is the paper's invitation to respond on the issue of drought. The
second is the comment I submitted. Currently there are about 80 responses,
some of which make for interesting reading. I encourage you to add your
voices!


Cheers,


Kerry Dawborn


The relevant address is:


 <http://blogs.theage.com.au/yoursay/archives/2006/10/bushfire_season.html>
http://blogs.theage.com.au/yoursay/archives/2006/10/bushfire_season.html 


The big dry


As temperatures soar, the threat of major bushfires looms in regional
Victoria and on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Tell us about your bushfire experiences and give us tips and thoughts on how
we should prepare for summer.

Are you suffering through water restrictions or threatened by the impending
drought?

Send pictures and video to scoop at theage.com.au or 0405 THE AGE.

My Comments: 

It's time we started living and thinking as if we are part of nature,
instead of somehow independent of it. Nature does not produce wastes, only
resources to be used by some other part of the system. Niether does nature
produce monocultures of lawn, or cabbages, or rice, or cattle. Instead,
everything exists as part of a complex multi-level system, such as for
example, a forest. I'm no biologist, but as I understand it, forests create
their own water cycles, retaining humidity by transpiration of plants, and
prevention of evaporation. 

Surely it's well past time we remembered we are part of nature, and begin
mandating the highest level of water harvesting, storage, multi-use and
where appropriate and sustainable, recycling, in all aspects of our urban
and rural settlements from high-rise buildings and commercial buildings to
our dog kennels, garden sheds and chook houses. And instead of monocultures
of lawn, sparsely planted gardens, or acres of carrots, cabbages or cattle,
let's turn to and learn how to work with multi-level systems - urban
food-forests or ornamental forests for soul-food, and farms that combine
different enterprises in the same space, benefiting from and helping
conserve and use efficiently, the same water. Fruit trees may be easier to
harvest in rows with machines, but the same land and same water can support
other food plants, or animals as well, providing a yield not only of food,
but of living mulch, milk, eggs, meat, natural pest control, and much more. 

These are just a few examples; there are many more. The answers are there
but we have to be prepared to let go of things we might be used to doing,
but which aren't helping. Lets recognise and embrace our creativity, and
have a bit of humility. We need to admit that many things we've been doing
have created the problem, or at least made it worse. How ironic, that the
hardest thing to change may not be our gardens or our farms or our houses or
highrises or our urban and rural settlements, but our minds... 

*	Posted by: Kerry at October 12, 2006 09:05 PM 

 

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