Permaculture Video Worth Watching...

This video is long - about an hour - but definitely worth it. It is extremely well done, with beautiful cinematography, done by a professional wildlife photographer.

I was especially struck by the juxtaposition of images of plowing the same field for the first time in the 1980's with the way it looked 20 years later. In the first, thick rich black dirt, flocks of birds swarming around devouring the critters in the soil. Twenty years later, the soil is greyish-brown, dead, nothing living in it. You need chemical fertilizer, made from oil, to get it to grow.

Then, too, the permaculture garden, showing land that produces twice as much food as a conventionally-farmed farm - all for 10 days maintenance work per year, and one day a week to work it (primarily for harvest) - made an impression.

It leaves you with the sense that we kicked ourselves out of the Garden of Eden. It wasn't God doing it, it was agriculture. So then the power in agriculture is not in producing more food, so that we can have a higher population and greater separation of labor (specialization) as we were always taught. The real point of it was to reduce the amount of food to the degree that it could be locked up; and then people could be coerced into working for food, enabling the consolidation of wealth and power into a power elite - the pharoahs, kings, Bushes, etc.

Of course, making the case for that would take a book, and I don't have time for it. So I'll just leave it at that. Watch the video. It's worth it, and it talks about issues of today, not the historical theory I'm pulling out of my hat.