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How do folks like this? Knepp's big evolution

Could easily be filed under ‘Spirituality and Consciousness’ too.

Of course, what we see here is that tiny minority of hereditary land ‘owners’ who still have large pieces of land under their personal control, via the inheritance laws.

But of course, there’s nothing to say that a suitably-aware eco-socialist government couldn’t do what these folk are doing, much more widely, with many smaller holdings aggregated - voluntarily, as willing cooperatives of previously-desperate smaller farmers - into large enough areas of contiguous land.

This is a form of permaculture. Though it could produce MASSES MORE useful, sustainable, and cash-earning products than it does already, if it were run just a little more along the established lines of experienced permaculture practitioners.

I imagine that Martin Crawford at Agroforestry Research Trust, and Mark Shepard at Restoration Agriculture Development - amongst many other veteran, good-living-earning permaculturists - can make useful suggestions for further growing the heavenliness of Knepp - whilst at the same time making it even more economically-viable, by making it even more copiously productive; and all in land-revering, reverently-Gaian ways.

Btw, this landscape typifies an ecological form which I’ve always felt fits most appropriately into Britain; and which is also something close to my idea of paradise-on-Earth: what I think of as a patchwork of ‘glades in the forest’…

Aka ‘Pied Beauty’ (see below, at the bottom)

The long time love of my life has just come back from a trip - funded by her better-off brother - to Kruger Park in SAfrica (yes, I know! PamperedTwentyPercenters still indulging in inessential indulgences, even in the current shitstorm; true! :blush: ) about which she - a deep-dyed Gaian - has been dreaming for most of her life.

The chief, profound impact on her was the truly revelatory experience of being amongst a climax ecosystem, full of all kinds of animals, including all the big predators, which made for a wholly different mind-set about how to move about in it.

As she tells me, it was a hugely vivid realisation of how proper, seriously-revered ecosystems are supposed to be. Something which both of us have known all our lives, through study and contemplation of these things, but which we’ve actually lived amongst virtually never.


https://www.agroforestry.co.uk/



Pied Beauty

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
[S]he fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him [Her].

[RhG’s impudent tweakings…]
Please forgive my desecrations of Hopkins’ verse; but it seems necessary: shifting his obsessed effort to drown his own homosexuality, and be a good Catholic, over towards uncomplicated reverent, happy worship of Mam G; whom he clearly loved.

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PS: the Knepp vid was harvested from a btl over at Off-G; does have some usefulness, you see… :slight_smile:

I’ve always been fond of GMH. Felix Randall is probably my favourite.

Spent a few days in KNP (at Sabi) and in an adjacent private reserve. It’s amazing how quickly the wildness becomes normalized, but major caveat: we had air conditioned rondawels with running water etc to go back to.

The whole concept of “land ownership”, when you think about it, is utterly bizarre.

The glades in the forest vision sounds not only idyllic but probably was a model that worked for a long time. What went wrong? Maybe it worked too well? Accumulation of surplus, putting grain by as insurance against a lean year, this allows some time off from ‘work as life’, population expansion, creation of material culture, hierarchy, aggression…?

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That’s exactly the process, K. Mythicised in the story of the Fall, and the Expulsion From The Garden. We know we did something wrong when we stopped being gatherer-hunters, and we’ve been trying to atone for it ever since. Dolphins are savvier, as Douglas Adams understood…

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