http://blog.longnow.org/02015/03/21/lew ... -24-02015/
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Every day I visit my garden, the first thing I have to do is pick up all the litter that has been dropped or blown. One of the city planners told me that anything I can plant that would help with storm water management would be helpful. There is an abandoned house, rotting to the ground, on the lot next to one of mine. I was able to gather logs for my hugel-bed from a nearby formerly razed neighborhood, that looks like scrub-rural Georgia, until you turn around and see tall buildings within a few stone-throws towards the river. I am witnessing what de-industrialization and de-population looks like all around me, simultaneous with smaller areas of very upscale gentrification popping up out of the rubble due to laser-precision inputs of capital. It's really a very interesting place to be.Immediately after the termination of routine maintenance, nature will seize its opportunity to reclaim our urban spaces. Trash and detritus will collect on the streets and pavements, blocking drains and causing the pooling of water and accumulation of debris rotting into mulch. Pioneering weeds will first begin proliferating in pockets like this. Even in the complete absence of pounding car tires, cracks in the asphalt will steadily expand into crevices. With every frost, water pooled in these depressions will freeze and expand...Other plants are more aggressive, their penetrating roots pushing right through the bricks and mortar to find purchase and tap into sources of moisture. Vines will snake their way up traffic lights and street signs, treating them like metallic tree trunks, and lush coatings of creepers will grow up the cliff-like faces of buildings and spread down from their rooftops...Away from the asphalt streets and paved squares, the cities' grassy parks and the surrounding countryside will rapidly return to woodland.
@fiby41, sounds like you have missed the point of the book. An alternative perspective is it's an exercise in understanding how interconnected, and totally dependant we are on an increasingly fragile system of human organisation with dependence on unsustainable energy inputs, if that system takes a fatal blow, the prevailing view is, it is game over. There is an alternative to game over though, and it's surprisingly low tech, and easy for anyone with a little confidence in DIY to implement.fiby41 wrote: ↑Tue May 23, 2017 2:38 amWhy this obsession with reinventing the wheel?
It takes incredible pessimism about the world or other people to believe any of the above mentioned might happen,
And at the same time incredible optimism about yourself to think you will survive it in case it did happen,
To be preparing for this stuff.
It's like you want to be the lead character in the novel you're writing or people who star in the movies they're directing.
It's hard to fundamentally improve something if you don't have an understanding of why the current thing is the way it is. Understanding also leads to insights on other seemingly unrelated things (e.g. carburetors & fuel injection are direct descendants of perfume atomizers).