Food Not Lawns Anyone?

Let's face it, who really likes to have to cut grass and waste time & fuel? Some grass is nice, but big lawns are really not a good idea. Mowing grass? Not me! I have better things to do, things that can produce food. Food Not Lawns has evolved among some permies from earlier Food Not Bombs ideas, simply because the nation is divided on the wisdom of using warfare to solve what amounts to human spiritual problems. As long as this is the case, Gandhi-style peace is not likely to occur. Why? The problem is complex, and UP does not pretend to have all the answers, but for those of you who disagree with Vic's take on omnivorism as a mere survival measure diet, a reading of Harry Braun's book on oil to hydrogen economics - The Phoenix Project - has convinced us that politics will be the last human forum to get the permaculture solution. How can those professionals lead where they do not understand the problem fully yet, much less the solutions? We the People need to do it ourselves, but without a strong hemp-based economy, how is the capital to come to do so? Even the gods & goddesses of old would fear to try and answer that question for humanity.

So where does that leave us mere mortals? Stuck in the burbs someplace, probably, waiting as per usual for something truly akin to progress to occur. Recently, I was working a day in the burbs at a Nestle' paper recycling plant that was busy turning old newspapers, ad supplements, mags & even old classics like Don Juan & Gone with the Wind into kitty litter. The obsurdity of this so disgusted me, that I quit the job at the end of the shift. Had the Nazis not burned books in German streets back in the 1930's? Now, people kill trees only to make them in cat shit litter or firewood for heat! Think of it. Something is bad wrong here. A bad set of priorities I would say. Now the people in the burbs, the middle class, create the demand for the supply of so much paper waste. Why cut trees, when hemp is so much more efficient to make paper out of? Because we so-called free Americans are not legally allowed to produce the best alternative, hemp biomass, to make paper and either hard charcoal or hydrogen from. The wealthy are not about to educate the consumers, that would hurt their huge timber, oil & gas and coal profits too much. So what gives?

Energy, resources & warfare are connected at the hip bone, as is the medical society to biological & nuclear warfare and its vast cancer virus profits. The military industrial complex poisons us all - including our own soldiers - and then the medicals profit from it. Works nicely, doesn't it, for some, somehow, well, not really much at all when we consider how absurb our economic system really is. The problem is we are using the wrong commodities for almost everything.

Leftists like Chavez and Bolivia's new government is popular with the workers and indigenous peoples in Latin America for promoting the nationalization of big oil companies and at least making basic social services available. Democrats are increasingly in vogue in America too, even Ted Kennedy and his bomb making state. Seeing as several states that don't want to mow down their own forests have industries that make ammo, war supplies or bombs, do the Food Not Bombs people from Boston really think they can outcompete the churches for the charity food & soup kitchen business, especially when the literature they hand out hardly turns the tide against bomb hurling governments, militaries, and guerrilla groups? Probably not, but like most activists they think it is good to feed the masses, at least in the cities, but what about in the non-leftist suburbs? As petroleum runs out, the following scenario from Braun's book will play out. The suburban dilemma and its connection to the omnivore landscape with its lack of permaculture and a lack of plant and animal diversity is a national security issue virtually ignored by the Bush-Cheney-Saudi cartel. As we watch the boundaries of our towns stretch farther and farther, and people spend more and more on gasoline & diesel fuel, many people are asking: How Far Can We Go? Sinkholes begin to appear. Tornadoes wreck the burbs yearly. Taxes rise. Oil prices rise and so too will food prices, sooner or later. For now, they are highly subsidized, so the industrialists look good to voters at elections times. Yet the fact is, their system is in meltdown status, with the clock at about 11:58, according to author Braun. Call him a doomsayer, but there sure a lot of them these days.

How big can a town get? What can our airports & roads handle? How many buildings can we build on the landscape before it literally caves into the underground water rivers that exist, honeycombing out our ever shifting planetary surface? Why are scientists not asking the weird questions like this? Why does the media ignore the industrial hemp to hydrogen scenario so completely and then claim to be objective about renewable energy, when many of us know the corporations that own them are censoring them? Why has our government become so corrupt and useless? Why does it take years for a injured worker to get disability assistance? Why is healthcare in such a mess? The answer is that the global capitalist economy stinks and state communism stinks worse.

The social needs and cultural needs of humans are not likely to change, but the way we all live and think about life needs to. Much of the world is increasingly at war. Why? People are fighting over land, resources, old animosities, religions, racist beliefs, but at what point do we all stop and think about how hemp biomass could supply us all with fuel, food, and hydrogen to make the shift from an oil economy to a hydrogen economy as fast as possible? Why are vested interests so entrenched in the government systems that elections are being rigged so profiteers can keep destroying our home planet, its many species, and perhaps even we humanoids in due time?

We need look no further than the average suburb in Missouri, in New York, in Beijing, Bombay, New Delhi, in Berlin, Paris, London, Rome, or in Palestine or Nairobi, to see that suburban growth is not merely a capitalist or communist proposition anymore. Its a planetary issue! Ecological sustainability factors greater than economic survival are coming into play as our planet fries in its own industrial gases & toxins. Food Not Lawns is about localized food forest permaculture production much closer to home than most people suspect, but what do most suburban home & coal plant builders still want to do? They come in, tear down most of the trees and destroy the local ecosystem, then they build cookie cutter houses & power plants that will consume energy, lots of energy, pollute the air, soil, and water, and all that will make a very few elitists very rich. That is an immoral condition on a planet where 75% of people are hungry, starving, malnourished and diseased, and where the other 25% are only marginally better off. Do we have our priorities incorrect?

Food Not Lawns addresses peak oil emergence and oil depletion factors that force us all to look at hydrogen fuel technology as a possible solution, possibly the best one we have as a planetary group of humanoid primates who are rapidly wiping out other primate groups due to overdevelopment & pollution of habitats. The origin of the hydrogen industrialist humans so prize is the sun, and industrial hemp is the most efficient methane factorization plant to convert the sun fuel to hydrogen - without destroying the planet in the process. Genoicide, biological warfare, or nuclear holocaust can only be avoided if we all learn to work the hemp together worldwide to settle and keep people on their lands and to build soils so that hemp can meet this need for protein, essential fatty acids, biomass, methane and hydrogen fuels.

There is a problem however. Religion. Religion fears anything being more valuable than God, Allah, or whatever. This can stifle economic progress. As growth expands exponentially due to global corporate capitalism and consumerism, the suburbs will only grow, and more and more people are either going to be displaced by global climate change disasters, errant economic shifts of capital, nationalist or fundamentalist politics as per usual, or by fascism and its kissing cousin, terrorism. Fear drives these violence-oriented events and movements, and the reason crime & war thrives is due to a fear of loss of wealth, power, status, energy, food, water, materials, etc... so we must address the need for a grassroots grown egalitarian citizen democracy at a worldwide level. This will require far more cooperation among people than the aggressive competitions of the past. Otherwise, humans have one possibility - extinction!

Who would Food Not Lawns people be? Food Not Lawns advocates are often permaculturists. Some are in urban areas, but most are in rural areas, not in the typical suburbs. We might call them agroburbs, pieces of land from 10 to 25 or more acres of land which is terraformed to store water, the essence of life itself, and the source of hydrogen, of course. Grasslands with forest potential is the best land, if the soil is rich & fertile, tilled by massive river systems and tributaries. This is why Central African genoicides, and the Congo Wars is now such a dilemma for all of us, for as Africa goes, so will the entire future of humanity.

Harry Braun describes the dilemma for we in the West, but if the West is to prosper, it needs to learn to treat Africa with more respect in the future for several reasons:

• depletion of the ozone layer that shields us from deadly cosmic radiation. the loss of this layer means the eventual destruction of all conventional agriculture worldwide, meaning that only permaculture type food forests seem to have a 50/50 chance to survive the technocratic future the Big Oil concerns wish to give us. This is one theory.
• when food production disintegrates, society will collapse, and social stability could disappear in a matter of days or weeks. global economies will die, replaced by local ones that will have to relocalize quickly
• as food prices skyrocket, so will energy prices, and billions of people would starve in a few months time. the opposite could be true as well.
• oil prices or supply would be a minor matter of no importance very soon.
• water would become more vital than petroleum, coal, or gas

The last bullet on this list shows us why the CIA and the U.S. & UN governments have tried to destabalize and control Central Africa since World War II. Why the wars, the AIDS pandemic, and mysterious virus warfares of the late 20th century? Germany! The United States! German scientists learned how to make syn gas, aviation fuel, and rocket fuel from both hemp biomass and coal in the late 1930 to early 1940's period. Realizing that the Russian hemplands were too hard to take by force, and the American/Canadian/Mexican lands too far away and too vast to subdue by military force or economics, the German industrialists and their secret society industrial pals in America turned their eyes to tribal Central Africa rich grasslands and water rich Lake Victoria in Chad. This is why wars began to occur not only over existing oilfields, but also over water, for the Germans knew that they needed both a lot of water and a lot of land to produce the necessary biomass to produce hydrogen for industry and to do that they wanted to control the existing petroleum & other industrial resources of the world. China had hemplands too, so an alliance was formed with Japan so that the sleeping dragon could be attacked by the fascists at a distance, and Italy was to be an ally so the Nazis could more easily jump off to Ethiopia and into the heart of darkness - as many called it - the Congo region. Why? Central Africa holds the richest grasslands and resources anywhere in the world.

The Ebola virus, the Marlburg virus, AIDS, and all the new viruses of today were designed by the medical research labs of over 50 western universities for military applications for the purpose of global genoicide. How honest science became biological attacks on Africans, and wars the global CIA spawned have not come for no reason, nor has the mistakes and tests done on American, Russian, and European technicians. To steal land, it is often easier for an imperialist nation or covert action group to trigger or commit genoicide, than it is to invest in expensive trade, education, and a biomass infrastructure, but this is what we must do, to mobilize a massive war-like campaign worldwide to save our planet from senseless destruction as we shift from oil to hydrogen. Without a hemp biomass based economy, there is no other workable alternative to fascism and that is the human dilemma on Earth today. Until we deal with this issue of most grave importance, such a large-scale mobilization as people accomplished in World War II, real progress is not possible. War is a copout, an easy way out for the super rich in the short run, but a miserable mistake for one and all in the long run. Today, as a result of that copout, the nations around Lake Victoria live in poverty and squalor, far removed from the rich permaculture lifestyles of their peaceful nomadic shepherdic and agricultural tribalism of old. They can thank global capitalism and fascism for the burden they now bear. How can any so-called Christian nation have allowed this to have happened? How can any so-called Islamic nation have allowed this to happen?

What does any of this genoicide and biomass business - hemp included - have to do with food or lawns? Much in every way. Wasted land, wasted space and water conservation are tied to about everything we see happening in the world agricultural & energy news of today. Having rejected tribalism, suburban style consumerism & omnivorism is basically consuming and polluting the planet's resources at an alarming rate. Unrestricted, this is a virtual guarantee of war and more war, and with so many military & corporate profits at stake, there is little hope of Food Not Bombs doing more than feeding disaster victims or a few urban hippies & anarchists. What is really needed even more is a massive media campaign to awaken people in the suburbs - the middle class worldwide - to the need for permaculture, appropriate technology and water harvesting systems in their yards.

Healing the Wounds of Global Fascism

UP is admittedly a radical permaculture group. However, we are forced by the urgency of the failure of world think tanks to address this issue to take a perilous stand. Without more government restriction of corporate activities which have led to a global fascist elite forming, there is little hope of turning the tide on global climate change and ecological destruction. We make no bones about it, we go beyond the need for fresh water conservation which is increasing in the western United States, in Australia, Asia, and in Central America and Africa, to the idea that we see why the technology-oriented German people did the economic things they did in the 1920's & 30's. It was a matter of survival in the minds of many Germans, but it was the Nazi social solutions that were rank failures of the human spirit. Genoicide is not the answer, cooperation is. However, Germany's finest scientists got one thing correct, very correct: They realized long ago that technology was doomed without strong agriculture, and during a global climate shift, agriculture may not survive without technology. The secondary idea of a small elite of discredited German researchers not connected with Nazi methods, was that the ancients understood that hemp was deeply linked to the ancient mysteries of energy and science. The ancients developed massive permaculture civilizations based on canals, water management systems, and permaculture type eco-agriculture. As a result, ancient civilizations lasted far longer than the more wasteful Classical period civilizations. Water, soil, enzymes, and hemp means a source of hydrogen-based cold fusion product known as hydronol is possible. Research will reveal this powerful fuel in due time.

Something else, probably a series of nontechnical events, happened at some point in ancient history, however, and the global climate changed. Technology may have gotten out of control and caused that climate shift, no one really knows all the facts, facts beyond the various antediluvian theories have been lost because many of the ancient records were either lost in the Great Flood period - or were later destroyed by fearful monotheist religious states who wanted to either ban or repress technological development among more highly developed African or Arab human populations. Who could blame any of the racial groups for taking the positions they did, or that they hold to today? No one race is too blame for this misunderstanding, the mess we humans find ourselves in today. Yet too many people are deluded and have forgotten that the most sacred spiritual law or commandment of all religions is for humans to be good stewards of the Earth. How is making war or deadly forms of violence a good moral imperative for Earth survival? Human survival? Species survival? The answer is that it isn't. Money has become the false God of humankind, and this is a doomed pursuit. This is why we have much of the religious crusading we have today, with people taking sides according to their religious ideals and cultural traditions. Fact is, we all want to survive, it's just that some are more willing to lie and cheat and steal to make a profit and others are more willing to kill and die than others for whatever their reasons. Once the two twains meet, civilization is doomed. Thus, we have wars & terrorism. Permaculture building and sharing, difficult work as it may be, is the solution.

The question is, how are we to save our precious oxygen producing forests, create oxygen producing food forests, save the suburbs, and end wars if we continue to act like idiots, raving primates in a global ecology that is basically a glass house? Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is pretty convincing. He probably should be America's next president, but everyone of us can start a permaculture food forest or a peak oil emergency self-reliance group where ever we are, whether city, burb, or rural areas. UP started as one person. We can all think about how we consumer things and why, and how we could reduce, conserve, recycle, and make the shift to hydrogen energy before it is too late. This war on ignorance is and must be the next war that any of us can fight. Gandhi was right.

We should all get our hands in the dirt and grow something at least once in awhile. Then we will understand. That is where it all started - not way out in outer space.

Let's end the fear campaigns and the wars, so we can get on with saving the planet from human insanity. We are calling all saints to come forth and do their part, flawed though we may be, at times like these.

- Ed