Peasant
A person practising small-scale, mixed, energy-efficient, fertility-conserving farming designed chiefly for local subsistence. It is integrated into local culture. It is the defining practice of the community. This model of agriculture, however, became briefly obsolete as the market economy, with its abundant cheap energy, enabled a different one to develop which did not need to supply its own energy and sustain its own fertility.
Peasant farming is a skilled and efficient way of sustaining food production within the limits of the ecology. It is an eco-ethic, sustaining the measured synergy with nature that we find in Taoist philosophy. It has the five properties of resilience.
But it has a flaw. It is highly productive, so it yields a surplus, and this is a tempting resource for the gradual evolution of an urban civic society, with its unstoppable implications of growth, hubris and trouble.
Is there a way of learning from that dismal cycle, and sustaining, instead, a localised, community-based, decentralised society, without the seeds of its own destruction. . . ?
Related entries:
Lean Economy, Lean Food, Intentional Waste.
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