The way we all will be farming after 2012?

Now when half of Russia is burning with heat and wildfires, Pakistan is drowning in the worst floods in its  history and the sun’s activity is frighteningly  increasing, more and more people start believing that something dramatic can really happen to the Earth by the end of 2012. Scientists warn us we should be prepared for many more natural disasters to come, even in the areas when by now nothing serious has ever happened…

It becomes obvious that all our plans, especially connected with money and property can vanish in one day, and nothing material will really survive when a true natural disaster hits our homes. Hopefully not. But what if yes?

Well, how can we get prepared for that? Apart from the spiritual level, which definitely helps one to survive: I remember one interesting work on Nazi concentration camps saying  that people who had been better spiritually off survived easier, and the ones who had the best health but were materialistic broke down the first. A lot has been already said and posted about the need of personal spiritual transformation…will not repeat here.

Supposing many of us will really lose “everything” but save lives, what shall we do? Obviously we would have to get “back to the roots” and start with handwork, primitive building construction and farming.

Some time ago I posted about my dream house which – by accident, of cause! 🙂  – is exactly the one can easily built with own hands (see here). My family is panning to start a training pretty soon.

But a house is not enough, we have to eat something. How to grow food if none of us has ever done it before? (I guess that’s the case with most of modern people). Here comes another handy concept which works wonders in Austria.

Sepp Holzer is an oustanding modern farmer who created a fabulous wonderland of abundance and beauty on the family farm in the Austrian alps, at elevations where things should not grow, but he has always trusted only his own knowledge and experience from working with nature, so things grew.

At one time he thought to go to Agriculture school and learn from the experts. He applied the professional training on his farm, and most everything died! He says “we complicate everything, we make things so complicated they don’t work anymore.” He observed that commercial agriculture makes plants dependent on humans as they become addicted to the growth chemicals and pesticides. So basically that carrot and apple you ate grew up in a drug addicted home! “It’s not life supporting nutrition, it just fills your belly… nutrition should be your medicine.”

For each landscape, in every climatic zone, says Sepp Holzer, whether in a fertile river valley or in a moderate climate, whether in the Tundra or in the desert, there is always the possibility to cooperate with nature, to guide her and to cultivate something that suits the land and its inhabitants. In this context Holzer’s Permaculture is not a method which offers the same procedure for every situation. On the contrary, its core lies in the observation of nature, in putting ourselves in the place of other living beings and through this understanding from within, realizing which are the healing measures that make sense in the given situation. Sepp Holzer: “The book of nature always tells the truth; we just have to learn to read it.”

Holzer calls his approach PREMACULTURE. Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies. The intent is that, by training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals can design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society’s reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that is identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying Earth’s ecosystems.

While originating as an agro-ecological design theory, permaculture has developed a large international following. This “permaculture community” continues to expand on the original ideas, integrating a range of ideas of alternative culture, through a network of publications, permaculture gardens, intentional communities, training programs, and internet forums. In this way, permaculture has become a form of architecture of nature and ecology as well as an informal institution of alternative social ideals.

We have visited his farm last month as learned lots of interesting and easy things on real farming. It is indeed possible even for a modern person to lean and try it out.

Just in case 🙂

LOVE, axinia