What’s most critical to ensuring a future of abundance for all? Hint: don’t look up, look down.

Thanks to Keith Johnson, of Renaissance Farm and permacultureactivist.com, for the pointer to this video.

This movie trailer illustrates what used to fill me with despair, how we are destroying our topsoil, and thus the basis of all life. Then, I took the Permaculture Design Certificate course, and learned about lasagna gardening. Voila! We can build soil. We can remediate soil that has been ruined. We can even turn deserts into food forests.

Ergo: we can save the world.

Google “no till gardening” or “lasagna beds” for articles and youtube videos illustrating how we can utilize layers of organic matter of all kinds to build new soil. Plus, we keep mulching the tops of already built beds, creating more and more soil, which then serves more and more as the vital nutrient matrix for vegetables and fruits and grains to grow . . . On and on.

Here’s one:

We can even build beds on top of impervious, impermeable surfaces, like parking lots, or roads! I like to imagine interstate roads as ribbons of permaculture . . .

Anyway, see for yourself how much easier it is to build soil than to till soil. Also, when you till, you break up important microbiotic structures, which then have to start all over again. Plus, saving or getting organic matter for lasagna beds is a great illustration of how “All waste is food.” Organic matter is food for worms which then make soil! On and on, how much we’ve forgotten and have only to remember, to re-member, put ourselves together again as human children of Mother Earth. She’s waiting for us. Is 2013 the year when we turn the stupid, wasteful, polluting, Earth-destroying industrial system of agriculture around?

You yeah, and if you really want to get your mind blown, if you really want to realize why permaculture is the wave of the future, check this out, Sepp Holzer’s mountain side farm. What Holzer does on a mountain, we can do in our back, front, and side yards, our parks and neighborhood commons, our downtowns. . .

Imagine, walking along, eating lunch from fruit trees growing over the sidewalks. Imagine grazing, on dandelion greens, plantain, lamb’s quarters, other edibles that we call “weeds.” There is so very much for us to learn and re-learn. Let’s do it together. Let’s go.