Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community
Heather Flores
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Throughout history whole societies have committed ecological suicide using the very same tactics we employ today: namely, a highly productive agriculture based on short-term profits, a dependence on hierarchical systems for essential resources, and an arrogant disregard for environmental stewardship. The current trends of depleted groundwater, climate change, and destruction of the aquatic environment (so necessary to renew the water cycle) tell us that we too travel down the very same road of ancient civilizations before us, toward extinction. But first—and soon—will come the day when clean water is still available, though only to the elite few who can pay the price. One out of twenty people relies on privately owned water”
“Permaculture is not just about the elements of a system; it is also about the flows and connections among those elements. You can have solar power, an organic garden, an electric car, and a straw bale house and still not live in a permaculture. A project becomes a permaculture only when special attention is paid to the relationships between each element, among the functions of those elements, and among the people who work within the system.”
“We should address the problems of scarcity and pollution as crucial points of action rather than opportunities for profit and exploitation, and protect and conserve our regional water supplies as if our lives depended on it, which they do.”
“The sad reality is that we are in danger of perishing from our own stupidity and lack of personal responsibility to life. If we become extinct because of factors beyond our control, then we can at least die with pride in ourselves, but to create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality.”
“The Monsanto Company views the global water crisis as a multibillion-dollar business opportunity. We see big problems—it sees big money. Monsanto’s Robert Farley admits, “Population growth and economic development will apply increasing pressure on the natural resource markets. . . . These are the markets that are most relevant to us as a life sciences company . . . in which there are predictable sustainability challenges and therefore opportunities to create business value.” 8 Monsanto foresees profits of sixty-three million dollars by 2008 for water ventures in India and Mexico, and other companies are riding the dusty bandwagon to the tune of more than three hundred million a year in these two countries alone. 9”
“Primitive people used about a gallon of water a day for drinking, cooking, and washing. Today in the United States the average person uses, per capita, twelve hundred gallons each day for basic needs such as food, washing, and drinking. This does not include the hidden water uses in energy, material goods like clothes and cars, and industry, such as the sixty-five thousand gallons it takes to make a single ton of steel. 4”
“Permaculture stems from a triad of ecological ethics: First, care for the earth, because the earth sustains our lives. Second, care for the people, because we are people, and because people are the primary cause of damage to the earth. Third, recycle all resources toward the first two ethics, because surplus means pollution and renewal means survival. By allowing these three primary ethics to provide a foundation for our garden, design, and community work, we can move toward our goals of a peaceful culture and a healthy human ecology.”
“Our world is being destroyed, in the final analysis, by an extremely misguided notion of what constitutes a successful human life. Materialism is running rampant and will consume everything, because its hunger will never be sated by its consumption. Human life has become a cancer on the planet, gobbling up all the flows of matter and energy, poisoning with our waste. What can stop this monster? Nothing. Just this: walk away from it. It is time, indeed time is running out, to abandon the entire edifice of civilization/the State/the Economy and walk (don’t run!) to a better place: home, to Paradise.”
“If you can’t find a place for something, maybe it doesn’t belong onsite at all. No matter how useful an item may seem, if you don’t use it, consider letting it go. Open space provides room for new ideas, and someone else may need just that item for a special project. Sometimes surplus stuff represents things you think you want to do with your life but haven’t made the time for. Perhaps it’s time to admit to yourself that you may never actually restore that old Chevy truck, and maybe you’d rather have the driveway for a greenhouse instead.”
“I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. Yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition. —”
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Book Keywords:
relationships, connection, permaculture, ethics, environment, ecology
