LESSONS OF THE PIRAHA

DON'T SLEEP THERE ARE SNAKES
I've been re-reading a brilliant book, "Don't sleep, there are snakes," by ex-missionary and linguist, Daniel Everett.

He goes to live with an Amazonian tribe to learn their language, so that the bible can be translated for them, and so that they can be "saved". His story tells how, far from his Christianity saving the tribe, he came to realise that their philosophy and way of life was far superior to his own:
"I have never seen people facing so many difficulties, with so much grace: it deeply impressed me."
They were happy, lived in abundance, no one ordered anyone else around and they had no fear of death anyway. In the end they "saved" him and he became an atheist. Their saying, "Don't sleep, there are snakes," to each other at night time, is a reminder to be personally resilient and alert to the dangers around them. They only sleep in snatches of a couple of hours at a time.

They live by hunting, gathering, fishing and tending a few simple crops. They gather nuts to trade for the few things they don't make or harvest for themselves: eg machetes and some clothing. Their language is fascinating, they don't have words for numbers or colours, it can be whistled or hummed, and it's based around their immediate experience rather than the past or future.

SO WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE PIRAHA?

These are a people whose kind of way of life has been going on for millions of years without damaging it's world - unlike ours, which has already half destroyed the world after just 250 years. As we make the transition, like it or not, from an industrial way of life to something sustainable we could learn:

• To regenerate the natural wealth in our locality so we can live mainly from that
• To live simpler lives with as little stuff as possible
• To co-operate without hierarchies

And we could hope to learn to live, like them, happily in the present moment.

Carbon Sequestration for Gardens and Farms

..."we now know how much carbon can be stored and that it could give us enough time to transition to a low carbon society"...

Glomalin and Mycorrhizal Fungi at work - pic from Soil Carbon Regeneration site

I've been doing a bit of research on a key focus for One World Future Farm, Carbon Sequestration, (separate page here). Here's a few articles which I've found really encouraging:
LIQUID CARBON
In an article in Resilience here, Adrian Ayres Fisher describes the process of carbon sequestration by plants acting with mycorrhizal fungi. Carbon leaks out of plants' roots into the soil - why would they let this happen?
..."like canny traders, plants use the liquid carbon, or “root exudates,” as a kind of exchange medium, which they trade to mycorrhizal fungi, bacteria and other microbes not only in return for nutrients such as nitrogen (those free-living bacteria get their own carbon fuel by living in association with growing plants) and phosphorus, but also the wide range of other nutrients plants need to help fuel growth. In fact, in healthy soil plants get 85-90% of nutrients they need through this carbon exchange. In the process, vast networks of mycorrhizae form in the soil, connecting plant roots with nutrients they couldn’t otherwise access." Synthetic fertilisers simply switch this process off. A good read.
ECOLOGICAL GARDENING
Here's another great article, more on the disaster of synthetic fertilisers and how to wean ourselves off them.
And here's an article about a visit to Eric Toensmeier's home where he's been exploring just how much carbon can be captured in a home-scale garden.
I'm really looking forward to getting started in practice with all this! Please help us get off the ground, and back onto the ground, with a small donation - One World one pound at a time - thank you!

PETROL! Demonstrations and Sums...

There's some crazy stuff going on in the world... here in the UK we have the Extinction Rebellion movement, peacefully demanding that governments take urgent action against climate change and mass extinction...

A brilliant peaceful movement - how would we react to a 25% fuel price rise though?

 ...while in France we have less peaceful demonstrations against the price of petrol and diesel. Macron has increased taxes so that people will be encouraged to switch to electric cars, the French are now paying £1.30 a litre.

0.03 pence for the equivalent of an hour of human labour! that's far too much!

SUMS - WHAT'S A GALLON OF PETROL WORTH IN HUMAN TERMS?
I knew that petrol/diesel is a very compact form of energy and cheap for the power that you get out of it so did some sums to see what we're getting in terms of the work that a human being can do. It's a very rough calculation, please check it yourself, partly because it's hard to put a figure on how much work a human being does, how many hours a week they're going to do etc, but I worked out that when you buy petrol it's the equivalent of buying human labour for £0.03 pence an hour. To put it another way, if you got a job pushing a car, how far do you think you might be expected to push it for £1.30? Would you pay £1,500 for a gallon of petrol? (That's its equivalent value at minimum UK wage in human terms). Sums and more petrol stuff here.
THE UNDERLYING ISSUE..
...is transport. That's mainly powered by fossil fuel worldwide and there's no practical strategy for any transition to completely renewable powered transport anywhere. We have lots of renewable electricity here in Scotland but our lives still revolve around using petrol and diesel for moving us and all the stuff we consume about. It's so ridiculously cheap in terms of the quantity and portability of the power you get out of it that it's difficult to make an easy transition away from it.
ONE WORLD FUTURE FARM
So that's why making the transition to zero fossil fuel is a key issue for us. The post-oil way of life is very different but we intend to show that it can be done.

Free Remote Group CranioSacral Energy Treatment 15th Nov 2018

FOCUS - HEALING FOR GAIA

Photo from the Gaia Trust

I host these remote group sessions every Thursday, more about them here: for tomorrow's session I'm going to focus on healing for Gaia. It's easy to forget in our busy lives that we we're clinging to a wonderful rock, one huge organism on a crazy journey through an immeasurably more huge and unfathomable Universe. What's the best way for each of us to use our time towards the radical changes we need to make?
Please support our project here, thank you!

!! WE CAN DO IT !!

As one of the newspaper commentators wrote recently, we are the first generation to realise that our industrial way of life is threatening all life on Earth, and also the last generation that will be able to do anything about it.

The problem is our industrial way of life...

It's the eleventh hour, the world is changing fast around us, many of us feel or are actually trapped in an industrial way of life, but many of us can be part of the solution. Ruth and I and our friends here in Perth, Scotland are launching our One World Future Farm project today on 11.11.18 and invite like-minded friends all over the world to help us get started and to learn with us as we put our plans into practice.
THE PLAN...
Our basic plan is to buy a farm and to develop a complete post-industrial way of life there which:

• regenerates natural wealth
• provides our needs and incomes through that
• creates homes for ten families for every one family that lived there before
• makes the transition to zero fossil fuel use
• captures excess carbon from the atmosphere
• demonstrates what can be done locally so that successful patterns can followed globally

HELP!
Ruth and I have no money to buy a farm let alone to develop it so we are asking for your help to get started. We expect we will need something in the order of £1 million, large amounts are welcome but small amounts are most welcome too. We would love people all over the world to feel a part of our project - £1 for One World!

11.11.11.18 - Declaring Peace with Nature

There's a poignant moment in one of Bill Mollison's films when he says, talking about the array of machines, fuel and chemicals used in industrial agriculture, "When did we declare war on the Earth?"

"When did we declare war on the land?"

So I suppose 11 am on the 11th of November 2018, a hundred years since the end of the First World War, would be the perfect moment for humanity to end its war with Nature. In 2018, at last it seems to have become generally understood that continuing our industrial way of life will lead inevitably to environmental catastrophe and mass extinction. But what do we do instead?
We are a group of friends and families living in and around Perth, Scotland, who are developing a project based on a peaceful, regenerative approach to living and working on the land. Within our group, we have a wide range of practical experience of living and working on many different eco-projects in the UK and Portugal, and have an understanding of the basic patterns of working with Nature. We'll be using this blog to set out our ideas, and to chart our progress. We believe, and intend to show, that there is a healthy, fulfilling post-industrial way of life which can regenerate natural wealth, provide people with their basic needs, occupations and incomes, while capturing carbon and making the transition to zero fossil fuel use and zero waste production.
Please help our project along with a donation here, thank you!