http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jethro_Tull_(agriculturist)

OK quick story....

In early washington/jeffersonian america, they would clear cut forests, and crops did okay. But once they row cropped and tilled, this broke up the millenia-old fungal networks of america's old growth forests. This allowed poor-soil crops (brassica, greens, beets, etc.) to do much better as they prefer bacteria-dominated soils. Here comes Tull with his row cropping, seed drilling, and horse tilling. The chinese had been doing it, but ehre you go, blame Jethro Tull...

Yes, permaculture is a religion, a way of being, a code of ethics that is constantly rebound to itself, but not centralized, the beautiful without the bastardly ;) 

Ha! I thought you we referencing the band!

Yes, the row agricutlure we brought to the New World has been devistating to the community of life. Further, now that it's all based on a nonrenewable resource (oil) it's even more destructive.

Much of the Americas were populated with people who practiced the three sisters guild. Corn, bean, and squash were planted in close proximity so they could work together as the rest of nature does.

Much love Tony. Thanks for responding!

Corn, beans, squash... which DO for mycorrhizal relationships and take advantage of the soil structure left behind after slash and burn techniques (which, for such a scary name, is actually pretty smart way of going about things when managing millions of acres....

I think permaculture addresses this in a few ways.

The first that comes to mind is the idea of zones. Zone 1 is intensely cultivated it then transitions to no cultivated areas at Zone 5. For me, my Zone 1 is where I've planted my three sisters (which is an odd sentence to write. ). My Zone 2 is the Raspberry and Blackberry Bushes I've planted. I don't maintain the bushes much, so that's why they're considered Zone 2. My Zone 3 is the Tree Guilds I've got in my front yard again, even less mainenance. My Zone 4 is the native grasses, herbs and shrubs I've placed under my rain barrels and another area in my front yard. My Zone 5 is an area behind my shed and around the huge Oak Tree next to my house. Those are my mini wildernesses. This type of design could be done on a city level too.

Permaculture is also about learning from natural plant communities. Not everything planted has to have a direct human benifit. What's good for the community of life is good for your food which is good for us and our decendents. Diversity of plant life is desired because of this. Also we don't want to waste our energy forcing life to grow where it just doesn't work. Permaculture focuses on highly specialized biosystem unique to each microclimate.

Learning from what people did here before 1491 is definatly a focus of mine and other Permies. That's why I'm doing the three sister in my area, Because the Pawnee, in their millenia of experience, did something similar. The Pawnee also when on two bison hunts a year, unfortuanatly, I'm only able to hunt deer locally but I do purchase local bision from a friend.

Healthy soil depends on the decomposers to thrive within it. Sheet multching is a great way to build the topsoil. Of course this is just the first step. Any good design should be self sustaining. That's why any permaculture design must have multching and nitrogen fixing plant included to honor the fungus and microbes.

I'm a little confused by the questions at the end of your post. Are you asking if it's ethical to bring a more complex ecological community to a place where it's not present?

If you are, then I would have to answer with a "it depends".

I try to keep in mind that all microclimated are different. If something doesn't work the question I ask myself is not "how can I make it work" but "Why didn't it work" it's a subtle difference to a typical mind. But it's the difference between pushing against the tide or skirting along it.

All places have a climax community. I have a need for food shelter and water, just like people did in 1941. How do I honor the natural progressions of life and still meet my needs. This is what Permaculture helps me answer.

When I first heard of Permaculture I thought it was just a sci fi version of Taker Totalitarian Agricutlure. As I learned more about it I found it to be the way Leavers actually practiced their farming. By honoring natural systems through understanding and reverence. And this is why I'm so excited about it!

Any hoo enough to respond to for right now. Thanks for responding!

Love you man! We need to hang out!

Quinn adresses this question in Ishmael also. When he discusses the law of limited competition and how we might discover it.

http://en.envirowiki.info/Law_of_Limited_Competition

The central philosophical question of the Quinn dialog is 'giving up' on the idea that humans get to live and anything that gets in their way dies. 

More centrally, it's about taking life into our own hands, and out of the hands of the gods, and beginning to make life and death decisions.

I pull weeds if they get too big or are messing with my food. I don't feel so bad about that. I pull violets and crabgrass out of my gravel driveway. I don't think violets or crabgrass people's will be overly harmed with this type of culling.

But I do begin to feel bad when I see a little caterpillar munching on my turnip greens and think about killing it, do I deny it's birthright to become a moth or butterfly? do I deprive the robin or chickadee of it's next meal so that I may a a slightly larger next meal?

What I've noticed in my garden is that the plant life responds and rewards these philosophical differences. I experience the bounty that a greater harmony with nature provides, yet I know without my attention the plot falls to the needs of other livings things.

Without my consciousness being imprinted on the garden, the seeds that birds poop out when they forage on other things in my garden will dominate. If not by my hand, pokeweed, a favorite of birds, apparently, would surely have overshadowed all my young plants. 

It seems that while life does check and balance when it comes to the grand scheme of things, land also responds to the needs of it's local life. It seems like everything is thinking and feeling and growing and living in accordance with a dominant consciousness, namely being, where the other living things shit in the woods. 

I've noticed this in the wild for a long time. I would be walking out of wet riparian systems loaded with paw paws and other mammalian favorites, then when approaching a large tree home to mammals it is surrounded by a community of life  not typically native to that elevation, thanks to the seeds that survived the mammals digestive system.

My point is there is a philosophy of untamed wilderness providing to all the community of life without care, and my experiential reality in which complex organisms vie to determine to whom one acre to the next is viable. These not only feel in conflict, my experiential reality urges me to rewrite the law of life as we have it written down. 

As Sceptic points out, and it is commonly agreed, the law of limited competition states that everyone must compete to their best ability, and not reduce it's competitors ability to compete.

But I take exception to this law especially in the case of Honeysuckle.

Let's imagine birds as a real people like you and me. Suddenly, this new product comes onto the market, it's called honeysuckle berries. You love it. The bird pundits are likening it to crack, and nearly all of the bird peoples are gorging themselves several times a year on this honeysuckle berry. Well, as it turns out, there are few bacteria peoples who prefer this honeysuckle berry and it's leaves, and all that grows in the forest now is honeysuckle because the birds, going crazy over the taste of the new honeysuckle berry, pooped it's impervious seed everywhere to ensure yet another bumper crop of honeysuckle berry. Now there is less plant life and animal life that can thrive because honeysuckle plants are the first to get it's leaves in the spring, shading out the previos complex guilds of perennials native to the area, and are the last to lose their leaves, making sure to finish off the roots of those perennials and give them no fall season.

Well, without the anthropomorphizing above, this is really happening. Since the arrival of Lonicera Mackii and others from china, our forests are being overrun and many species ability to compete to live is being choked out by the bird peoples' insatiable appetite for this berry. Humans may have brought over the chinese honeysuckle but the current problem our forests face is completely avian related.

Just a single example of how birds in fact are actively violating this law of life. 

Of course, nothing right now is 'in balance' and what we experience as 'wildlife' in north america is actually one very heavily shifted baseline. 

So in summary, what I am coming to believe is a need for a retooling of the philosophies of 'untamed wilderness' myth perpetuated by Thoreau then to Quinn today and ourselves today. 

I think without having a firm grip on our spiritual selves, we are merely actors beholden to our own limited perception. Outside ourselves and our perception of 'wilderness' there is a work being done by every living thing and our Great Forgetting has banished us to a perception of having been banished from paradise, while ironically, being surrounded by the Garden of Eatin'. 

I envision a future where we humans are confident in our actions as gods who does decide what lives and what dies.

Simply, I think the major change from the way we are today and the way people who will survive their own stupidity is a people who let a whole lot more things live and decide a whole lot fewer things must die. 

p.s. Plants don't 'fix' nitrogen, the microorganisms in their rhizosphere do, bacteria that live in association with legumes, for example, take N from the atmosphere and make it into forms plants can use. Proteins from dead roots and microorganisms break down to ammonium. These processes are often taught and chemical processes, when they are really biological ones:) 

I resonate with this. Thanks for responding.