The Miseducation of

( Black Sapote)

Today I went with my boy J to the food forest that he’s working on with this other dude named Dave. J was an incredibly adept and surprisingly knowledgeable teacher. I learned great deal from him about forest management and tree surgery.  It was all very lovely minus the frequent and arrogant interruptions of the Dave person. The Dave person was a student of Peter Andrews( who was the best bud turned rival of Bill Mollison the father of Permaculture.) He had so much things to say right now…Wait I was thinking of Lauryn. But anyway he was complaining a whole bunch about permaculturist doing too little. He gave me the creeps and kept like touching me. I put on my, “Fool! I don’t know you” face and moved closer to J. I’m no expert on anything, but I do know my environmental theory and he was so dooms-dayey. After picking a butt-load of fresh fruit we all headed to the rain forest. There, the Dave person and I had a friendly conversation about the ominous ”Answer to the problem.” His solution of course was to shrink the population down to a billion. Mine of course was to eat the wealthy. Haha but for real, I suggested a maximum on land ownership and of course a complete redistribution of natural resources. Iono, these things are hard for me because I always put poor people before the environment. I love talking and thinking about sustainable solutions to poverty. Those which reduce government and market dependency for poor people and gives them the tools and very much owed resources that  allows them to take control of their own fate. Ie. permaculture. That’s why I’m here.

He was completely on that nature for natures sake thing. Which is fine, there is enough room for all of us in the arc of environmental justice, we need not all have the same way of going about change, but we def need to lift each other up and stop fragmenting the movement. Anyway, he advocated for complete conservation of the natural place, while I argued that effective management could produce far greater biodiversity and sustainable outcomes in a forest. I gave him the example of the Page Ranch in Arizona. Where through sustainable logging and other ecological practices one man was able to increase the biodiversity of his forest well beyond that of the conservation forests. I know this is some real hippies stuff but humans ARE NOT parasites on the body of the planet. I think we were made this intelligent not to exploit the earth but to be her steward. Humans can rapidly facilitate biodiversity in what takes hundreds of years for the earth to do on her own. Not only can we facilitate biodiversity, but we also have the tools and the resources to create nutritional abundance above and beyond what industrial agriculture can ever hope to offer. I guess I’m pessimistic about our political economy but optimistic when it comes to human nature. Like that scene in The Dark Knight when the Joker expected the folks on the Ferry to blow up the convicts and vice versa and the the tough guy from the convicts tosses the detonator out of the window. When push comes to shove, people are good. Iono. I really believe that. I think the Dave person thought I was really smart. Yo, I’m putting in those hours. I got a lot of things to learn but I refuse to believe that man was a curse onto the planet. Nope.  Anyways, today was awesome because when I got home, The Canadian made Indian food and the Italian made this potato and egg dish that reminded me of my grandma.