Humble Bee in the City: Finally, a Solution.

I arrived home from Toronto on August 5th, and enrolled for a course on permaculture offered at the U of S as soon as I landed. The course was from August 8-21 and ran us 9-5 everyday of the weeks! As with most other experiences in my life I came away with a new set of friends, and a new skill to continue developing.

Saskatchewan's newest permaculturalists! (...and Guelph's)

Permaculture is a way of designing landscapes so that they are able to sustain themselves more easily with less of a human element. Although we design mainly for the needs of humans, permaculture focusses on humans being one point amongst many within the complexly inter-connected webs known as ecosystems.

Here are some many principles I got out of the course:
- Earth Care
- Human Care
- Return of Surplus

Earth care - although the Earth isn't a sentient being, we really should take time to recognize it as a living body and take care of it as one as well.

Human care - to me this point means taking responsibility for your own life, and the lives of your children, in ways that ensure future security and self-sustainability. This means getting rid of destructive habits to your surrounding environments as we depend so much on nature for food, materials, water, and shelter. Not only that but it is caring for what you are putting in your body, be it food, air, water or medicines.

Return of surplus - this makes sense. Think about it - we take and take from the Earth, and what do we give back? We return garbage wrapped in plastics and chemicals, we throw away food and let it mould and rot away, and we flush "waste" to some sort of treatment plant (often open waters). Instead of taking and not returning we need to be replenishing our soils with the same nutrients we strip it of. This can be done by composting our organic items including humanure.

***Side note on humanure

Before you turn away with disgust I think you should consider what is more gross - wasting billions of litres of drinkable freshwater every day on flushing nutrients down the toilet and then recycling that water by treating it with unsafe amounts of chemicals not meant for human consumption at the levels we consume them. This current system then leads us to having to use intensive synthetic chemical fertilizers on our food that has numerous charges on our health and bodies as well as the air we breathe...or collecting the nutrients our body can't access and composting them so they are in their plaint available forms and can cycle again to feed us! It is pretty obvious that our western culture needs some desensitizing to what we find unacceptable!