[Scpg] New Simplicity Book and thoughts about Footprints and Local Food

Thu Aug 28 16:29:38 PDT 2003

Radical Simplicity:Small Footprints on a Finite Earth, by Jim Merkel is due
out in September.  He and Erica/Rowan are the ones who have been working on
experimenting through the Global Living Project with getting a person's
footprint down to actively using 1 acre per person (out of 5-6 acres per
person in the world) to supply all of one's needs.  They figure that using
an acre a person is a person's fair share, and that leaves the other 4-5
acres for other wildlife and plants.

(I'd like to ask about what other people think of the possibilities of one
acre per person at the bottom.)

Info about the book is here
http://www.newsociety.com/radsim.html
Isn't that an intriguing photo for the cover of the book?

and they also have posted the foreword by Vicki Robin which is here
http://www.newsociety.com/radsim_for.html

Info on the Global Living Project is here
http://www.globallivingproject.org/

Info on footprints and a list of how a big a footprint the citizens of
various countries have is listed at
http://www.globallivingproject.org/footprint.html
And at the bottom of the page are two links where you can calculate your own
footprint.  I found that it was interesting to calculate it for current
conditions and then go through and calculate it a second time as if I had
already made changes that I am working on.  It's intriguing to see the
lessened footprint with the changes.

There's a footprint list with more countries listed at
http://www.rprogress.org/programs/sustainability/ef/efbrochure.pdf
though it doesn't list all the countries of people on the LIM list.  It
shows a wide spread of 24 acres of use in the US per person compared to 1.4
acres in Bangladesh.  To me it's instructive to look at countries which are
using 6 acres or less per person, particularly those where most of the
population is reasonably healthy.  Most of them have generally
low/appropriate/humanpowered tech life styles, sustainable small farming,
and localized economies.

I think that working toward a goal of supplying your needs from actively
using 1 acre of land per person average is a very intriguing goal.  By
working hard at it, the Global Living Project in their experiments with a
variety of volunteers over several years has managed to get a footprint of
3.2 acres in the Summer and 4 acres in the winter.  When I was looking at
their procedures it seemed to me that they could have lowered this by
growing a much larger percentage of their food on their property.  I asked
them about it, and they indicated they felt that it was important at that
point to support
the local economy more through local food purchases.  And I could see where
this
would work if your neighbors who grew some of your food maintained a small
footprint and bought some of their food from you.  So this would reduce your
footprint across the group average. But I think that if each person/family
grew more of their own it would help reduce the footprint and increase the
sustainability.  I think the social interaction and integration with the
local economy could be maintained with smaller amounts of items being
bought/traded.

At the present though I am looking at things more from a viewpoint of
integrating permaculture and footprints with people perhaps owning 3 acres
per person (and the other 2-3 per person used for public places, roads,
preserves,
and with chunks of forest kept intact as nationally or group owned forests).
And then I think the object would be to try and get one's permaculture 1-3
zones on 1 acre and zones 4-5 on the other 2 acres.  And here's where 20-50
families might leave their 2-3 less used zone 4-5 acres per person all
together in the middle or on one edge of the village, or ringed in a
greenbelt as an intact forest.  And a family of four for instance could have
their kitchen garden nearest the house with a family  orchard beyond that,
and their woodlot beyond that.  And then their woodlot might run up to the
edge of the intact forest area.

If you'd like to design a small farm for your family based on actively using
1 acre of land per person, in addition to design info from all the various
permaculture books, the Jeavons book on How to Grow More Vegetables
(etc) Than you Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than you Can Imagine, 6th
ed has good info for estimating yields of vegetables, fruits, some nuts,
some
grains, some compost, and some nonfood items.   If anyone knows of books
that have similar info for fuel wood, furniture wood, more grains, more
compost, more fiber, more non food items, eggs, honey, beeswax, and/or oil
production, I'd appreciate learning of them.

Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman has helpful info for growing a wide
variety of cool weather vegetables to size in the fall and then holding them
in a double insulated unheated greenhouse for harvesting as needed.  This
makes it possible for people to have fresh vegetables all winter, reduces
the intense pressure and energy needs of preserving the fall harvest.

I'd be interested in hearing how people would design their acre or a family
of four's four acre chunk(or whatever your real or ideal family
configuration might be) to produce 90+% of their needs.  I'd also be
interested in things you might do differently to make this possible such as
using cloth napkins rather than growing the fiber for paper ones, etc.  I'd
also be interested in how feasible you think the one acre strategy is.

Sharon
gordonse at one.net

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