Food Health Work Soil (in reverse order) Getting your shit together

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First off, I have been here before, got pissed off with process, left, and now am coming back to share solid insight and process based on my own interim work, work of doing, having done, and haviing no doubt about continuing in the doing of same.

In 2008 I got Crohns disease my time in Edgeryders was a morphed up, healing, and reaching out, of creative capacity; in a muddle of sick and post multiple surgery period during which my surgeon constantly reminded me of ‘mortality issues’. It took 3 years to learn what to eat, and another 3 to learn the truth of ‘you are what you eat’ , and at this stage I would assert that you are also HOW you eat, as in - how you supply sustenance to self and kindred.

2016 was the first year since 2008 that I was not hospitalised, and going strong since, the reason for this has been the slow acknowledgement that “we are the soil”, or in more precise terms, our health depends on the bacterial ecology of the gut and this depends on the health and bacterial ecology of the soil (all of which is ‘the ancestor’ if you think about it deeply enough). Food shaped food , grown in chemical soup, with only 3 of 62 micronutrients, will not cut it.

In 2014 I secured the first 8k of funding from Plunkett and Carnegie on their Growing Livlihoods Program, we started in March of 2015 with a quarter acre under 6 foot of mess and brambles, littered with litter, broken glass, and surface detritus. Beneath all of that though, there was a gold untouched by the chemical agriculture model whose manure had come from organic fields during the 300 year history of its use as an urban kitchen garden.

Today, based on the near-basic-income of a post surgical disability allowance from the government, with passion, hard work, reasonable communication skills, and a whole lot of help in the driving of it, we have a beautiful space, feeding participants in our ‘food commons’ , and working projects with the community mental health centre, intellectual disability groups, schools, rehabilitative care clinics, and the general public. We also run research trials with DIT’s Engineers Without Borders on biochar, built 9 biodigestors on the island in 8 days with nat-geo explorer TH CULHANE, welcomed OS Ecology inventor Daniel Connel for wind turbine workshops, grow food for conscious creativity events, started a local cottage market to support small scale producers, initiated a local inter green schools program, a community woodland, a community garden in a neighbouring village, an ecotouristic bee project, education and training with the national education network, etc.-and-ting.

So far we raised over 20 k for what is a relatively small project, now three urban and social gardens, and are looking to greater heights for the work to come on what will be our residential site at Tullanisk, a three acre walled garden with four bedroomed house, space for a yurt, and rich earth to bring to fruition in the service of the land, it’s people, their health, resilience, and joy in what will otherwise be hard times for a country importing 98% of their vegetal foodstuffs.

A point on the why…Within months of the Normans coming to Ireland it is noted that “they became more irish than the irish themselves”. In effect, your consciousness is cumulative and you contain billions of ‘individual’ life forms (there is no such thing as individual but for the whole you see). The normans ate from the soil, and became of the land. This is health and rectitude. The modern human is disconnected from others, from true self, from the land via work and food, and from the earth and all of its depth thereby.

For quite some time I have urged the tech community to put down roots. To date I have figured out the techniques of doing this, both practical, having trained with the legend Jim Cronin for 9 months, and structurally through time on the Community Land Trust research and development group at the Royal Institute of Architects, Ireland. I currently work with PJ FITZPATRICK, a leading software and app developers and former high finance exec. whom I met in hospital the last time I was there, me for post surgical rehydration, he to have his bowel removed, a process I had been through years earlier.

There would be no such things as Crohns, IBC, colitis, etc if not for our building into the world the shortcomings of our own nature. These are centralist, they deny the value of untramelled nature and simple work, they demand privilege and power over submission to the greater order of this earth, and they will get us all in big trouble in the very short term. We have open and honest work to do in which we take long hard looks at ourselves and what we are at, take the self-protectorate lens off, and begin to do what, and as, needs be done.

Things team Edgeryders might note - a ‘venture’ was the name given to the expedition of the ‘adventurer’, who formed a ‘company’ of mercenaries, and continued to plunder the material resources of others for their own and their masters profit. Those who ‘invested’ in the ‘shareprice’ of such ‘ventures’ divided amongst themselves the spoils of these journeys of rape pillage and murder without thought of the moral ‘externalities’ protected in the eyes of the law by ‘royal patent’. I am not a venturer, nor a company-man, nor an investor, nor do I want any part of it all as one cannot build white houses of black bricks. By your admission of having ‘some ideas about non-extractive business models’ you openly acknowledge the extractive nature of your current setup. Intellectual and creative resource is little different to the material.

While this approach exists, I will take no part in the doing. But if you can approach the Regenerative, and as principle of action, then I will work with you, and train your growers in the how and why of the soil such that they might feed you as you do your thence good work.

We have site and situation for the training, and it is not only how to x, but as anything connected deeply, it will ever be how to x in relation to the entire alphabet of the present predicament. We also have partners through which to engage higher order structural approaches.

Contact me directly at birrgrowery@gmail.com

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The title of ‘Getting your shit together’ comes of the Celtic tradition wherein the place in society was a position of ‘care’, a word which was also the word for an adult - Aire.

A child who needed care only, was a boh, a mid-boh needed care but also cared for the animals as a herder, and for the land by collecting the manure for the winter pasture. At this time the land measure unit translated to “enough grass to feed three cows”. When the mid-boh had collected enough manure to fertilize the soil of the winter pasture, and 'enough grass to feed three cows’ then, and only then, were they granted stewardship of land, cows, and were given the right to marry eachother, whereby their duty of care was extended to the whole Chlann, and they became an adult, Aire, a carer.

The Ard Aire, were the elders, ‘high carers’, who passed on the rites of the mill, forge, the technologies of the time, and the sacred rites of inauguration of settlements, coronations, and ceremonies of the sacred and celebriate.

In this society, this culture, of the land Ériú of the western seaboard, one’s place in societal station was based not on extraction, but upon the extent and number to which care could be extended by the nobility and ultimately the minor king, of any given Tuath, or parcel of land, and it’s Chlann, or family.

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You seem to be doing good work, @eimhin, and it’s great news that your health has improved so much. I wish you continued process along this path, or any other that you may choose.

I cannot speak for Edgeryders, or anyone else really. But I find it hard to believe that any human cultural tradition can lead to living in harmony with nature. We belong to a species that has driven the megafauna to extinction wherever it touched land – and we are not speaking of modern adventurers with guns, but of hunters-gatherers with spears. That, according to the latest interpretations of archaeological evidence, existed in an almost constant state of warfare to keep density below one person per square mile (reference one, reference two). That has an innate preference for in-group individuals (“those like us, not those others”), demonstrated by research on children as young as six months (this is the biological kernel of racism and discrimination – and we all have it). This is rape, not harmony. Extraction, it seems, is at the very core of our species’s success. Non-extractive homo have gone extinct. We are the descendants of the best slash-and-burners.

As for ecology, nature thrives wherever man leaves it alone. The Chernobyl radioactive disaster area, just about human technological folly at its worst, has thriving wildlife, with lynx and bears and bisons and wild horses (wild horses! In Europe!). This has led elder ecologist Stewart Brand to suggest that mega-cities are the greenest solution for hosting homo sapiens. If you love nature, he says, set her free… of your presence.

This in no way diminishes the usefulness of what you are doing. Of course there is much practical knowledge to be gathered from living from the land. But it seems more likely that care beyond the family and the band is a modern invention. I will look for it in the future, not in the past. Good luck to both of us!

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Ugo Mattei, a compatriot of yours , writes about an ecological legal order. The Brehon legal tradition, prior to its abolishment via the tanning case, was an ecological legal order, where the trees were divided into three classes in the forest, the nobles, the commoners, and bushes, they had status, based on their function as preserves of the life of the forest upon which the people depended. In a short few hundred years of common law the great forest was levelled to smelt iron ore for weaponary and to build the ships of colonialism. This push came from more ancient compatriots of your homeland, it is perhaps not surprising that you share a certain fatalism.

We live by our enstructured values and beliefs.

In the present we see efforts being made via the common legal tradition to revert to common legal practices. It is not a yearning for the past, but a recognition that the future without change is grim death at scale. It is also a recognition that the separatist extractive and self interested ego, in the pursuit of one or another form of power, is a prevailing feature of the detriment.

Only a fool denies that he needs to eat, and that the food must come of the land, and that the quality of each are important to one’s well being and survival. That said, the world has ample evidence these days of such foolishness.

In the Daoist tradition the sage immortal is often found riding backwards on a donkey through the mountain villages. The children laugh and ask, ‘why are you travelling, facing backward on the donkey?’ - “It is not me”, replies the sage, “but rather that the donkey does not know where it is
going”.

To know where one is is the key to taking appropriate next step. To know where one is, one must know how things have come to create the conditions of the present. Things ever come into being by the same process and as such cycles can be observed in the evolution of things. And so, as such, it is wisdom to look backward, as one moves forward, the ego is a donkey, it does not know where it is going.

Care beyond the self beyond the family or band is hardly a modern invention, though I appreciate where you are coming from. The Avalokitsevara details the 37 principles of the bodhisattva, an ancient acknowledgement of the spectrum on which all things find themselves. To one side pure nefarious self interest, to the far extreme on the other of bodhisattvic altruism. The distinction is one of practice, by which one comes to disidentify with personal as self, and take responsibility for all
of creation, through the lived medium of self; that is, for practitioners. For the unpracticed life there is apparent separation in what is inherently unified, and an evolution from there of Lila, the will to live play breath bleed and die unto new life.

Either way for us we want to live, with some degree of wellbeing, and this requires basic sustenance. You have posed a fatal argument, basically that our nature is unchangeable and that we are fucked in the greater scheme of things, and while I agree to some extent, I can choose how I live. It is not by personal choice that I experience the breaking of the normal bodily function, near death, healing, and the change that that requires. I wish for others that they see the problem now as it is, and choose to heal, without the global invention of dire necessity. In the meantime, conscious of the prevailing stupidity, it is wisdom to be prepared, and practiced in resilience on behalf of those short of insight.

Good luck to us all.

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Oh, I don’t think we are doomed to selfishness and extractiveness. In fact, we have made massive progress on so very many fronts. I just think such progress, and most of the progress to come, will come from looking ahead. I am just saying there are no white bricks. Our hands are covered in blood. Our tribe elders have killed and maimed and enslaved and raped and messed up the planet as a matter of routine, whatever the tribe.

“In ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentiful and important that they come to function as currency” (source). That does not mean Ard Aire were not high carers, as you say, but it does raise the question of caring for whom. Similarly, 5th century BC Athenians had an advanced democracy and was based on slavery. In either case there is no contradiction, because Irish and Athenian slaves were not considered to be people.

Did I ever tell you I used to be a professional folk musician? I do understand the pull of tradition, of rootedness, of your place in the world. But I refuse to let myself be blinded by it. Humans, I want to believe, can still build a non-extractive civilization. But its bricks will be black, almost without exception, and there will be blood in the hands of the builders.

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That means radioactive waste is an effective tool for ecological restoration :grin: I can imagine a new movement of somewhat radical environmentalists … scary haha …

But seriously: interesting discussion here! I largely agree with Alberto that there’s an ecological guilt of humanity throughout history … it just wasn’t that bad while people didn’t have all this tech to amplify their actions.

One new thought: what’s relevant is only the net effect on nature. The good (repair, cleanup and restoration) can always offset the bad, except for cases of species extinction. So while humans destroy parts of the earth beyond recognition, other humans may find ways to create ecological diversity in other parts beyond what nature could do if left alone. Think ecosystem restoration work, and then something on top: ecosystem creation. If the net effect of all humans is positive for ecological diversity, no reason to grieve about humanity’s very existence on Earth.

That is of course far off, but I found it an interesting approach to the problem. Because it’s just unrealistic to regulate everyone into not harming nature. The same applies to climate change: if a part of humanity would care to (profitably!) remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that the other part of humanity is releasing there – problem solved.

I’m not yet done with thinking how that could be done practically, mainly saying this as a new way to think about countering ecological destruction. But it’s not completely unfeasible: think CO2 concentration technology and lots and lots of seawater greenhouses in desert areas. The CO2 enriched air inside the greenhouse makes the plants grow faster (which is the most important property of modern greenhouses, but currently done with a natural gas burner). The products are fruits, nuts, vegetables, and biomass, which would be partially charred and partially composted to create long-term stable soil with lots of carbon in it for even more such greenhouses …

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St Patrick himself was a slave. The colonialists shipped women in their thousands from Galway bay. Today people put their creative attention into processes that enrich others without say in conducting the value created.

My great great great grand father on my father’s side was overseer at the workhouse in this town. In that direction the castle and Demense have played a founding role in their survival this last three hundred years. On my mother’s side, the family of the Éile (Claim) of Laois, the Finlays, or Finliath, and the medical family of Callanan, Ui Chuilenáin. It is perhaps an accident of chance that the current head of the Opus Dei is an Ui Chuilenáin, as the philosopher king Córmaic Ui Chuilanáin was the Bishop of Cashel before him in the 9th century. The Church at that time was hereditary, primogeniture, passing to the eldest son, as clergy still had the right to marry. Apparently it was the strength of the Irish church that was the cause of the decree forbidding marriage in the second lateran council of the mid twelfth century.

My g-g-great grand father would have overseen lists I have dug out of a century and a half of pigeon shit in the corner of an upper floor room, burnt out just last month, at the workhouse here in Birr back during the famine. They detail the imports, tea and sugar from Calcutta, sweet cream, grain, cloth, and so on. There was a cape buried in there too. No ordinary garment, though partly decomposed. i wonder was it his? Was he a good man? … My father would march down the hall, enter, draw the curtains sharply, open the three stacked windows methodically, one by one, then tug the covers from the beds into the hall, saying in a measured tone, “your breakfast is on the table, there’s Work to be done.”

…

Córmaic was a man who caused the Roman Catholic Church great difficulty in his interpretation of the faith as he saw it lived by his ‘flock’. His people were clergy, and were afforded the benefits of the church as the fruit of their labour, a labour in good Faith. He could not be argued. Odd to think the lengths to which an institution might go to rid themselves of a particular bloodline, and the scale of time they gather into their reckoning! :wink:

There were also the O Dempseys and the Lálors, of which was one Patt Lalor, repeal MP, father to James Finland Lálor, a man always sickly, who spoke and wrote against the tithes and markedly stirred revolutionary foment in his time. The tithes were payments extracted by the clergy from farmers and tenants, 10% of their earnings paid in kind by a metric not of their own making. The people squeezed, revolted.

In Ireland the land is important, I know it, still, and deeply. I respect that we live of it, that soil, as you call it, is ancestry. Science says much the same, life lives, and dies, and this brings new life. You walk atop all you once were, all you are, all within and without of You who live eat and breath it, I get that. Most forget, even here, most forget. I forgot, and it damn near killed me.

Without soil there is no life, it is your ancestry , if you deny it, you deny your existence, and as such will cease to exist. There is no future that disrespects it’s source of life.

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Last week we had a group from Enginhttp://www.ewb-ireland.org/eers Without Borders in to demo their biochar kiln (they also trialled in Nepal for 6 weeks at a permaculture farm that produces coffee Matthias). The week before at Cloughjordan Ecovillage I met Albert Bates, author of The Biochar Solution, (The Biochar Solution – New Society Publishers)which lists the products, science, and strategies regarding the use of biochar to return us to the known normal levels of atmospheric carbon by the charring of wood, turning the carbon to its recalcitrant form, and thus taking it out of the ‘labile’ cycle whereby organic matter rots, releasing it’s carbon as atmospheric carbon which returns to the earth with rains recompiling organic matter in 12 to 15 year cycles. Biochar stays in the soil as structure, and as Willem Reich points out in the Bion Experiments, when you add potassium to char, with bacteria, you get the breakdown of said char into vesicular structures which form the basic food stuff for bacteria and microorganisms, hence biochar is both a form of capturing carbon, and a super food for soil biology.

So yes, I agree, regenerative approaches are there in evidence, and can be developed. Biochar also can serve as a sand substitute in concrete and has a number of superior properties, including that it floats, for example. It can be used in paint, when mixed at 1% to 99% silage it reduces methane output in cattle by 35%, and improves digestion and immunity, reducing need for antibiotics, used as bedding it suppresses ammonia formation so no ammonia smell, it can be used with plastic in recycling composites, and as a paint, among other things. Fascinating stuff.

I find that inoculation, or as Albert calls it, ‘microbialisation’ of the char, works well with digestate from our biodigestor. All that surface area means lots of oxygen and so the anaerobic bacteria die off leaving a foodstuff for the bacteria in the compost heap where we keep the char for a couple of weeks before putting out on the soil. We hope to go no-dig next season, with the six inch cover layer in biochar altogether.

Partners to the project include DTC , the development technologies in the community research group, based in ireland at DIT, as one node of a global network. They have no pilot site for their technologies. [http://www.dit.ie/dtc/]

Another is WWGS world Wise Global Schools, the post primary education partner to irish aid. They are looking for a site to teach dev Ed to teachers , young people, and life long learners.
http://www.worldwiseschools.ie/

The third partner is the Irish Heritage School who work with placement programs for service learning in a network of universities from the US, EU and Australia. Faculties include community development, anthropology, archaeology , heritage, and sustainability. [http://irishheritageschool.com/]

I think it’s a good setting to do things. We are also working with Tom Stewart on the Pilgrims and Pathways bid as part of the Galway 2020 capital of culture thing, hence primed for unMon-esque type things.

Re-Gen all the way. Millennials are not as useless as the intergenerational vampirist make them out to be :wink:

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Matt! Please, reconsider. The incentives here are perverse. You know how Anthony says that no one is searching for a cure for diabetes because selling the treatment to contain it is too damn profitable? Now imagine the same company were allowed to cause you diabetes, and then to sell you the drug that keeps you alive. You might say “Well, the person is alive and well with the drug, so their health has been restored. All good.” But no, all is not good, because the guy with the formula now holds your well-being, maybe even your life, in their hands. Power dynamics has shifted. It’s like working extra hours to buy the car that allows you to work extra hours so you can buy the car.

Economically, with this solution, you can never get to robust commons, because someone is constantly destroying them.

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Hey @eimhin, have you read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn?

Your post deeply resonates with me. I consider myself fortunate to not have developed any jarring health condition, though my early years of consumption would have. It’s been pretty clear to me through the practice of permaculture and keyline design that these techniques hint at a deeper perspective that human’s can and probably should be integral in the ecosystem, and to separate the human from the environment is a product of trying to control risk and uncertainty that our agricultural ancestors probably didn’t know would cause invisible and intangible issues, one of which would be ailments of the microbiome, another I would argue is climate change.

I do hope to link up with you at the festival. Here in New York, we at www.biospherex.org are practicing at the intersections of food production, cultural relearning/rebranding, and urban rural ecologies. I’m personally a bit too obsessed with my microbiome, might be a disorder at this point, made worse by the rise of “biohacking” and sensationalist media. More fermenting though, ALWAYS MORE FERMENTED FOODS!

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I personally would really push back on this sentiment @alberto, but I can very much see where you are coming from. Perhaps when I see you in person we can do a discuss more.

On here, I would suggest that through certain lenses, the best slash and burners of all time is one way to frame it, but we conceptualize a “non-extractive” homo would take it too far. I would argue that our human social abilities enables us at a group level to shape this world dramatically, but always, ALWAYS, subject to the laws of physics. Slash and Burn was one such technique, and one a planet with less than a million humans, it’s practice probably weren’t dramatic because the biomass and ecosystems of Earth could accommodate and might even have anticipated, needed this human phenomenon to occur for other life to emerge. This is not some sort of veiled “destruction breeds creation” American Neo-Conservative agenda, though I can see the overlap, this is one part of a larger history that has been for the most part erased from our collective consciousness. What I would call standard narrative. Slash and burning at different scales/different times produce different results, and it was one of many techniques used. We are also the best reforestors, animal migration pattern enforcers, hunters, seed spreaders, etc etc. America is a place where the story of human’s actively managing and ensuring huge biodiversity and thriving has been suppressed, this is the story of the Indigenous people’s who were largely decimated by the arrival of small pox. With the second wave of European immigration occured, they happened upon the most lush forests and largest Bison herds (due to decades of no culling) that this concept of “Pristine Nature” emerged, an environment free of humans (which it never was) that, I would argue very strongly, is retroactively framed by our dominant industrial complexed history to confirm the myth that makes what we do possible: Humans are inherently opposed to the ecosystems that sustain us.

Nothing could be farther from the “truth”, and we will definitely get into this, I’m pretty “Post-Truth” at this point, we choose the narratives we represent, But one major vein of our work here at Biosphere(x) is to recover fragments of these forgotten narratives to counter the notion that “where humans go, megafauna disappear.” Causation, Correlation depend the frameworks that inhabit us when we are exposed to this phrase. I would argue that megafauna are still around, though I would love to have seen Giant Sloths and Giraffes outside of central and southern Africa roaming, it is systems, not humans, which has led to the unprecedented extinction events, as well as collapse of microfauna habitats around the planet. Humans are vessels, what organisms inhabit them? Besides the billions of gut bacteria along for the ride @eimhin, I can see certain ideas coordinating millions for certain end goals. It’s these ideas, which has scaled beyond anything before, which presents to challenges for us. Human Nature is not as malevolent or anti-nature as we see on movie screens or read about in standard narrative fiction/non-fiction/journalism (My opinion is that there is far too few attacks on the systems that drive us to short sighted progressions, we have names for them such as capitalism, patriarchy, totalitarian agriculture etc etc, but these suggest a compartmentalization of the issues, where as the memetic organisms are as multidimensional as you or me, and the problem is they are invisible to our eyes for the most part) Our will to survive and reproduce is not a sin nor commendable, but it’s universal intra and extra-species. The fact that humans within our culture of industrial complexes has been able to replace like 80-90% of the biomass on the Earth’s Surface with ones of our choosing is Disturbing to no end~ but the feed back loop that causes this isn’t inherently part of our nature. If you need examples of human beings who don’t live in the shadow of our culture and practice ways of life completely integral to their environments, I would consult with anthropologists, since I’m not one.

This is not a call towards “primitivism”. There are very real reasons why the stories of humans living as one with nature aren’t common. They don’t scale well in the face of disease and military/economic pressures our culture has more than enough of. I would say that’s the challenge, how to navigate and repurpose suppressed and non-scalable views for the future which really really needs them.

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I am not sure where we disagree. Of course extraction on this scale means destruction. Everyone sees it. @eimhin expressed an idea that the way of the trader chosen by Edgeryders (“fraternitas merchatorum”, as @lasindias would no doubt put it) is tainted by capitalism, and “you cannot make a white house with white bricks”. I agreed with him that the way of the trader might be tainted, but then all ways are, ancient Irish ways and Irish laws no more and no less than others. We need to build a white house, and all bricks are black.

So, I advocate looking at any tradition from a healthy distance, and building this house with bricks from the future, rather than from the past.

Sure, happy to talk in person in Brussels. Looking forward to it, in fact! :slight_smile:

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