MASANOBU FUKUOKA - "THE ONE-STRAW REVOLUTION"

"Drifting Clouds and the Illusion of Science"

I've been revisiting this wonderful book. It's partly about the practical aspects of a way of natural farming, about growing rice, other grains and clover in a rotation without ploughing or using chemicals. It is indeed revolutionary, not only are the yields just as high as in traditional Japanese farming but it also eliminates a lot of the work. Also, compared with chemical-industrial farming, Fukuoka's way continually improves the quality of the soil instead of degrading it.
But I think the even more important revolution that the book describes, in his charming style, is Fukuoka's internal journey. Moments of insight, the alienation from the modern industrial consumerist approach to life, the gradual deeper understanding of natural processes, all leading to a simple life looking after fields and orchards, growing and eating simple natural food.
 It's poignant that this book has been around since the 1970's - all my working life. Fukuoka's insights have been influential, widely read and talked about yet here's humankind still entangled in the terrible web of supermarket consumerism, cars and fossil fuel addiction and the shallow information of mass media, internet and TV; the harder we dig ourselves into the industrial way of life the harder it is to escape, the situation now so bad that we are endangering all life on the planet. I've understood all that for years, I helped friends on an organic small-holding way back in 1976, and have been actively looking about and living on ecological projects for ten years. Yet in all that time I've never found people living as naturally as Fukuoka and Ruth and I still use a car and get the bulk of our food from supermarkets...
Here's some of Fukuoka's last words, "There is nowhere better than this world. Years ago I realized that we human beings are good just as we are and I set about to enjoy my life. I took a carefree road back to nature, free from human knowledge and effort."

ACCESS TO LAND - WORKING IN LIEU OF RENT

The little patch of Shropshire we're looking after

Ruth and I live and work on a beautiful hundred acre hill farm here in Shropshire, Treflach Farm. As well as acres of pasture and arable land there's a variety of woodland, from a lovely ancient area, to orchard, to recently planted mixed woodland. We're both so glad to be living out in the sticks amongst the birdsong and rustle of leaves. The access to land we have has made an enormous difference to the sustainability and quality of our way of life, though we still have a long way to go towards some of our goals.
We do some days of work on the farm in lieu of rent for accommodation and the use of the plot of about a third of an acre in the photo above. We also look after the orchard, polytunnel and veg gardens intensively and give some time to the whole farm in various ways.  I hope it's the sort of arrangement that may help a lot of people, farmers and individuals, make the transition away from a fossil-fueled destructive way of life to something regenerative.
If you think about it, everyone relies on some kind of access to land, it's just that for many of us our food, energy and stuff come mostly from elsewhere in the world. Powys in Wales only produces 5% of the food it consumes, that's only possible with cheap energy. So how do we get better access? Only a few people have the capital required to buy a small holding or farm and develop it. Farms are always short of help and will require more and more manual help as we power down. The work-in-lieu arrangement is a way for people with no capital to move towards long term low-impact living. I guess as more people work in this sort of way patterns and guidelines will emerge to help project owners and workers come to fair, practical arrangements as have been established in the WWOOF network, striking a balance between the workers being fairly rewarded and the owners getting a fair amount of help. It's sad when things don't work out and from my experience it's generally because of poor communications, people not making practical financial and work arrangements and not writing them down, and of course, personality mis-matches.
WASTE REDUCTION
This is probably our biggest success here on the farm. Ruth and I generate almost no waste. The compost loo and compost heaps recyle the bulk of our waste back into the land. Metal we recycle with the farm recycling. Glass waste, of which there is surprisingly little, we generally keep for future storage. Plastic, of which there is a lot, as we still buy a lot of supermarket food, we mostly keep, packing it up for insulation. That leaves the occasional item we can't deal with ourselves that goes to landfill. It's a far cry from living down by Brighton where the five of us put out two wheelie bins for landfill a week. That's all the whole farm produces in two weeks, including the food business.
FOOD
I'm surprised at how much time and work it's taking to produce more of our own food. Even after three years in the gardens and orchard here we're still getting loads of stuff from the supermarket. It's not just sorting out growing stuff either, there's all the storage side of things too and how to deal with the gluts of a few products that you tend to get from time to time. Ruth's been putting a lot of energy into preserving, jam making and, very importantly, brewing and wine making. Imagine the quality of life without a glass of cider from time to time...
KEEPING WARM
As you'd expect, we keep warm with a woodburning stove and logs from the farm. At least half a dozen big trees came down in the winter storms so there's plenty of fuel out there at the moment, it's just a question of chopping it up, bringing it make and storing it, which all takes time and fuel for tractor and chainsaws. I'm determined to get a better supply organised than we had last year when we were scratching about latterly and soon ran out of dry stuff. We're planning to be much better insulated for this winter too, partly thanks to our waste plastic. For the long term I'd like to burn much less and burn it at a higher temperature too as smouldering logs give out a lot of tars and toxins into the environment.

FUEL
We're keeping warm with wood but haven't escaped from fossil fuels altogether. We're still using calor gas for cooking and water heating and we're on the electricity grid through the farm's supply, though the farm does have a 20kw PV array. We have a car and still use petrol which I'm very uneasy about, especially with current events in Gaza. I wrote a post about complicity here which I don't imagine will be very popular. I don't think people generally understand just how much the whole industrial way of life is wrapped up in fossil fuel, the degree of change which is coming our way whether we like it or not, or that we all have individual and collective responsibility for everything. By all means let's protest about fracking but let's all make the transition away from fossil fuels too. So for myself that means developing small scale methane and other systems for cooking and water heating and finding alternatives for car travel. I find we have to take it one step at a time though or it just gets overwhelming.
EVERYTHING ELSE...
So what other things do our lives revolve around and to what degree can they be produced through access to local land? Shelter, clothing, medication, art, fun, it can all be done (and will have to be done) with what's around us, though maybe not as we know it now.  More soon.

Flooding down in Shropshire

A watery look to the Shropshire plain

What a strange, mild, wet, windy winter here, just a few flurries of snow and the odd frosty night so far. I know there's plenty of time for a late cold spell like we had last year but all the same it's been strange. The big feature of Jan and Feb in the UK has been the wind and rain. Here in Shropshire, we don't have anything like the flooding further South but we can see a lot of standing water out on the plain below us - and the winds howling around again at the moment.
We've had some damage to the farm buildings and several trees blown down:

Sad to see this weeping birch down, it was lovely sight on the skyline

One of the trees down in the ancient woodland, Bluebell Wood

A tree comes down between our car and Wes's - no one hurt even though Wes was in his at the time.

But to me this winter will be the Winter When Climate Change Became Mainstream. Having listened to, read, talked, written about and even sometimes done something about climate change issues since the 1970's, it's tempting to jump up and down and say "I told you so!" It's good to hear, for example, people on the radio talking sense about what to do about flooding, ie not to build Canuteish walls to keep the sea and rivers out of our houses but to do the Permaculture thing, to keep the water as high in the landscape as possible for as long as possible. We're going to need every drop of it sooner or later. Goodness me, it's even dawning on some politicians that it's a bigger issue than keeping the corporations happy. How out of their depth they are though, are there wellies high enough for David Cameron?

Regenerating Natural Wealth

First steps: revoluion in a little crate - local food, no pesticide, save money, use some of your waste to make compost... win, win, win

Listening to politicians and corporations you could think that wealth only means financial wealth. This is bollocks. There is no financial wealth that doesn’t depend on natural wealth to generate it.
Tragically, in pursuing financial wealth alone we've considered natural wealth, people and the environment as expendable, and look where that’s getting us.

This is an everyone problem, we’re all responsible for our materialist/consumerist/corpocratic system and attitudes. If it’s not what we want we can change things by our individual actions, stop buying stuff wrapped in plastic flown in from the other side of the world, start growing some food and regenerating abundant local systems that give us our basic needs for a start.

New Age practical and spiritual skills

Welcome to my handbook for sustainable living, it's full of PRACTICAL STUFF like green woodworking, eco-building, forest gardening, working with reclaimed materials, permaculture and so on, based on my personal experiences over the last seven years working at places like the Lammas eco-village and here at Treflach Farm.
It's also full of HUMAN ENERGY FIELD STUFF because we are going to need that as well when the shit inevitably hits the fan. In fact I think it's our best hope of achieving the best quality of survival for the largest number of people. So the handbook explores Global Consciousness, Peacefaring, Remote Group Energy Medicine, Biodynamics, working with Cosmic and Earth energies and all that kind of thing too.
We are moving into a New Age whether we like it or not so lets choose to guide the process towards something wonderful.

Thursday Group 17th October - Earth Energy in Cities - Trees and Us

Our Thursday Lightworkers session was focused on connecting with Earth energies and was really interesting. It feels vital to connect better energetically with the Earth but how best to go about it? I got the feeling that it's important to approach the Earth in a gentle, thoughtful, neutral, listening way. You know how unpleasant it is when you meet somebody who bombards you with their energy - I guess it's the same for trees, Earth spirits. Also I feel we need to be aware of our speed, some Earth energies have a much slower rhythm than us, we're never going to make contact with them at our usual pace.
EARTH ENERGIES IN CITIES
I never felt comfortable in most of the parks down in Brighton, it was if the Earth had been hammered into submission or driven out and I longed for some wilderness. It's wonderful to be living where we are now, surrounded by all different kinds of woodland, some of it hardly visited by people at all - an amazing opportunity to explore all this stuff. I feel every drop of rain and ray of sunshine so much more intensely than I ever did living in town. We're aware of so much life about us, especially the birds. All the same, most people live in cities and I'm sure you can still connect with the Earth there. Apart from anything else, the Earth has the potential to revert to it's natural state where you are, look how plants are making a comeback in Detroit, so it's possible to tune in with potential forest or other states wherever you are. Anyway, all kinds of life have evolved to the state they are in at the moment in a network, as grass eating animals and grasslands evolved together. When we realise that we are part of the network of life and not separate from it then we can start to rebuild true wealth, natural wealth, the diversity of life and local abundance, in our cities and in the countryside.
TREES AND US
We can have a wonderful partnership with trees. Watching everyday life here you see how much trees are part of a network. A cow comes along and eats some of a trees leaves, or scratches itself on its bark knocking off small, low shoots. A branch of a tree is blown off in a gale or breaks off under the weight of fruit it's carrying. Fallen apples are eaten by all sorts of shape and size of creature and by fungi. So when we care for trees and use their products we're doing some of these same things, pruning, eating fruit. I was pruning one of the apple trees and felt it would be a good idea to chop up some of the twigs and leave them around the base of the tree, which would happen naturally. I was so pleased when a while later I saw that there was a frog in amongst the thinnings. I would say that the trees enjoy a partnership with us, it feels as if they are happy to be useful and of course the more useful they are to us the more we will care for them.

Therapy and Ecology - Bringing it All Together

Therapy and ecology aren't often grouped together but there's so much the two worlds can learn from each other. Therapists generally focus on treating their patients, they might include their patients' relationships with other people in sessions, but how can healing not include a patient's relationship with the environment, the Earth and all life? And permaculture, sustainable living and other eco-projects most often seem to fail because of personality clashes, where people don't understand the dynamics of their behaviour and interactions with other people in their patterns and roles, where some deep therapy could really help. So that's what this blog is all about, bringing the worlds of therapy and ecology together.
I've been exploring what people are doing on eco projects in the UK and Portugal for some years, writing about it all on Ian's Eco Blog. I was developing a separate site for my therapy and healing work then realised I was keeping the two worlds apart myself... So here's everything in one place. Ruth's got me interested in Biodynamics which you could say is about working with the energy of plants and their relationship with ourselves and the cosmos, a good example of bringing it all together.