[Pil-pc-oceania] Relocalisation

[petra.kahle at haztech.com.au]

Robin, 2 quick answers below, PEtra.

> Thanks so much Petra for the link to ISEC, what a wonderful site and I
> hope to get through many of Helena's articles over the next days and
> weeks.  It continually amazes me how many of these non-profit
> organisations who have been doing wonderful work for decades just keep
> cropping up, in ISEC's case they have been operating for over thirty
> years offering sane solutions in this arena and yet this is the first
> I've heard of them.  Delighted to hear that Helena believes in
> permaculture as one of the solutions but I guess it's a media fact
> after all that good news is no news.
>
> This week also I've just read a book that was published in 1962 when I
> was in high school.  Of course I have heard of it many times since I
> became interested in permaculture but hadn't made it a priority to
> track down a copy and it was finally put directly into my hands last
> week.  Silent Spring by Rachel Carson should be on the reading list for
> every high school student I reckon.  These "mistakes" must never again
> be made but this is a furphy of course, they are not mistakes as such
> and they are still being made as we speak.
>


> Two quick questions:  1) how many people were in the audience at the
> event you attended?
about 50, mainly from Borderlands, Friends of the Earth and Permaculture
Melbourne

and 2) how many believed that modern agriculture
> is more efficient at producing food than other systems?
rough guess: perhaps 5


>
> If the answer to the second question is as I suspect, ie. none, can I
> ask:  what do we think we have achieved almost 50 years down the track
> from the DDT disaster documented in Silent Spring? and why are we still
> consuming food sprinkled with poisons?  Ever more toxic substances are
> being applied to our foodstuffs while insect pests, weeds and diseases
> develop resistance to chemicals previously used, where and when will
> this end?  If people think agricultural science or GM technology will
> solve more problems than it has created in the last century they are in
> fantasyland.  DDT and the chlorinated hydrocarbon family of chemicals,
> now known to be present in varying proportion in every living thing in
> every corner of the globe, act mainly on the liver.  The newer more
> deadly organo-phosphates however act on the nervous system and so it is
> easy to see why depression is predicted to be one of the pandemics of
> the 21st century.  My personal theory is that we must have altogether
> lost the plot already.  Do we have the same ability as the arthropods
> to develop resistance/immunity to being fed poison in small quantities
> requiring ever increasing toxicity in this ongoing attempt to
> exterminate ourselves?
>
> With apologies for getting off topic to the max but it is all linked as
> you are no doubt aware and I had to get that off my chest.  Look
> forward to hearing other people's opinions.
>
> Luv & peas,
> Robyn