 Kay Baxter All photographs © Craig Mackintosh |
The more I learn about living simply, about permaculture design, about seeds and gardening, about food, nutrition, animals and about health and the regeneration of our soils and our own DNA, and about epigenetics, the more I realise our challenge is all about "stepping back into that circle of coevolution".
We are beginning to understand how the life in the soil communicates with, and helps to grow, strong and healthy plants and animals. We are beginning to understand how nutritionally dense food (plants and animals) communicates with human DNA to create healthy people. We are starting to get a glimpse of how healthy people can have the ability to complete the circle and communicate with their own environment in a way that benefits and strengthens the whole.
We are an expression of the sum total of all the energy transactions we are, and have been connected to. We are an expression of our very own environment!
It is easy to see how destroying the queen bee, which has been created by the hive as a whole as part of the process of coevolution, and replacing her with one of our own design or selection, removes that bee hive from the process of coevolution, from the process whereby the bees change in relation to their own environment, to retain their strength.
It is also easy enough to see how genetically engineering seeds, or even creating F1 hybrids, does a similar thing. It removes the seeds from the ever changing process of coevolution with their own environment.
It is easy to see how choosing to inseminate our dairy herds from a narrow range of bulls, selected for maximum return to shareholders, takes our dairy herds out of that process of coevolution where things evolve in a way that strengthens the whole.
I’m increasingly aware that we do the same thing when we buy or eat food that comes from somebody else’s environment (eg. China), when we eat processed food that our bodies can not ‘read’, or food that contains ingredients our bodies can not ‘read’ (like industrial vegetable oils), or even simply when we eat devitalized food that is not in season or nutritionally dense.
Now is the time to redesign our lives (using permaculture design, and other methods like Holistic Management) back into that age old process of coevolution with our environment.
The internship programs run by the Koanga Institute are about giving students the experience and skills to redesign their lives. Students can choose from several specialities (Garden, Seed and Food Production; Nursery, Orchard and Food Forest; Herbal Medicine; Small Farming; Processing, Preparing and Cooking Nutrient Dense Food) where they will receive mentoring and spend the majority of their time. We aim to do it differently, creating a positive response from the environment, and a stronger and more resilient whole!
To learn more please see our website: www.koanga.org.nz/internships.
Further Reading:
- Letters from New Zealand – Koanga Sows Seeds of Change
- Letters from New Zealand: Villages for the Future — a Look at Bob Corker and the Kotare Ecovillage
Top-notch Kay! By remaining truly adapted to the whole you speak of will we remain!
Keep up your amazing work.
Owen
It’s a small nit and I certainly understand and agree with the context in which you are using “creating F1 hybrids” but I think that it’s also worth pointing out another context. Naturally selecting plants for taste, vigour, disease/pest resistance, beauty, and so on and so on starts with creating an F1 hybrid. When you find characteristics that you want, stabilizing that F1 hybrid turns it into an open pollinated plant. Maybe it even becomes a heritage plant if people like it enough to keep growing it year and year. Of course, as a horticulturalist, you knew that but not everyone does.
Keep up the good work. Keep expanding the horizons of permaculture.