When left to its own devices everything in nature happens automatically, no external input needed. Without man, nature not only carries on, but thrives. Why can’t we do the same?
I think that by mimicking nature, which is one of the main principles of Permaculture design, mankind can automate the production of the necessities of life; food, water, and shelter.
Automation has been all the rage in business and manufacturing for the past couple of decades, but we’ve barely started looking at how individuals, families and local communities can automate the production of the essentials of life.
You and I and everyone else alive today have been born and raised into a system of “making a living” where the work never ends.
Just to get the necessities of life; to put food on the table and a roof over our heads, most of us will have to work every day for the rest of our lives. At least those of us who are not already retired today.
You can work the same job 9-5 for 20 years and if you stop working you’ll soon find you can’t put food on the table and you’ll get kicked out of your home next month when you can’t pay rent.
Most people don’t think about it because this is the way things are and we’re all so preoccupied with making ends meet that we can’t think of another way of living.
But what if mankind one day could stop spending all their lives working meaningless jobs that they don’t like and we’d still have food on the table, a roof over our heads, as well as plenty of safe drinking water.
This is a future that is possible when you use intelligent design and mimic nature in food production.
Of course, there’s a big “if” to all of this. This future is possible, but only if we find a way out of our debt slavery where we can’t secure land and shelter without indebting ourselves for life.
In “primitive” cultures there was no such thing as rent or mortgages. The reason we can’t stop working today is because we don’t own anything anymore. We don’t own our homes. The banks do. We don’t own the means of production. The banks do. We don’t even own our time. The banks do, through the indebted companies that employs us. This is a topic for another article, but it’s a critical one if humanity is to take the next big step in our evolution as a civilization.
An essential component of the intelligent design that can set us free is trees – “the engines of nature” as Jay Russell Smith wrote in Tree Crops – A Permanent Agriculture(free download).
Take a nut tree for example, you can plant a tree and it might take 5, 15 or even 25 years to start producing food but when it does it will continue to produce food not only for the rest of your life but also for the next couple of generations.
What continues to amaze me is that after you’ve planted your tree, if you do it right and choose a variety adapted to your climate, then you won’t have to spend any time taking care of it aside from some light maintenance such as pruning the tree.
A tree is automated food production, and planting one enables anyone with a piece of land to take ownership of the means of production.
A tree creates passive income, and it’s a kind of passive income that anyone can create without needing a million dollars in the bank (which at present interest rates wouldn’t create much passive income anyway).
A tree increases in value every year and builds a resilient asset that can be passed down to your children and grandchildren.
Best of all? All the “income” your tree produces is 100% tax-free, as long as you eat it all and don’t sell it.
What are we waiting for? Let’s plant some trees!
