Permaculture is fascinating. I'm interested in how it behaves on a macro scale, though; what would happen to the wider ecosystem if you had a town full of permaculture lots instead of grass yards?
The idea with permaculture is that you minimize (ideally eliminate) the need for fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide imports using effective composting and crop rotation (biological nitrogen fixation) and integrated pest management (raising insects that eat crop pests etc.) and water recycling systems and so on.
Scaling this approach to tens of thousands of acres for reliably feeding even a medium-sized city seems challenging, but there appear to be some 1000-acre permaculture farms out there. However, yields are likely to be lower per acre with this approach as practices like using high fertilizer imports to allow double-cropping don't fit the permaculture model.
The big mistake we made was building large cities that required moving or reshaping the land, water, animals and plants to support large cities. There really should not be this many humans in the world, and certainly not with as many huge cities as we have. We're becoming a species dependent on a synthetic environment.
I don't think it's healthy to see the world as a struggle between the natural and artificial, because it's so hard to properly define. Humans are natural, making tools is in our nature, so is constructing shelter. I think the proper way to see the world is as this unity, humans exist within nature and act to transform it, as does every other animal species on this planet. The ecosystem would look wildly different did termites and bees not transform it for their own benefit, and similarly it is humans who transform nature in their own ways for their own benefit.
This does not mean unconditional support for human activity. Glass, concrete, and steel towers and spreading suburbs are terrible transformations of nature. They are terrible because of their destructive potential for no gain, they are unsustainable by nature, they upset the balance in a way which makes the land less fertile, less capable of supporting life in general let alone humans, and in the long term are a loss not only for natural diversity but for the human species as well. There exists a rift due to industrial agriculture where humans take from the earth and give back to it from the mountains and the bedrock while pushing waste into the oceans, which is unsustainable and which has and will lead to ecological collapses. This is but one part, industry in general, pollution, the carbon cycle, land use change and associated environmental effects, it all acts to lower the carrying capacity of this Earth in the long term. This is how I believe it is best to critique transformations of nature in this manner, because terms are easy to define, the unsustainability is scientifically provable, you have no such ambiguities as when you talk about artificial and natural as two entirely separate concepts.
This also gets you out of very bad ways of thinking. There is no "natural carrying capacity" for this planet except what it currently has. There is likely a theoretical maximum and some day we might hit it. What's clear is that we haven't hit it yet, we just fail to push the current carrying capacity by transforming nature in an unsustainable fashion for short-term benefit. You can no longer say things like "There really should not be this many humans in the world", since it's plainly not true. There are supposed to be exactly as many humans as there are, because humans naturally transform nature to support themselves. It is our own nature, our species being, to take those gifts of nature and use them to transform them, through our own labour, into products which are use-values to ourselves. This is just as it is the nature of bees to pollinate and build hives, the nature of woodland animals to eat their hives and the flowers they pollinate, and the nature of elephants to topple trees to create for themselves a grassland instead of a forest.
It is not that there are too many humans, even with our unsustainable practices this planet easily currently produces enough food for ten billion to live well-off. It is not that there is artificial and natural, to make natural artificial is natural, because to transform nature is human nature. It is our current, wasteful and unsustainable transformation of nature, no different to those transformations that took place twelve thousand years ago except in its unsustainability, which has been been sucking the life out of this planet. But as humans, we have the unique ability to both imagine and then through labour project that ideal into reality, to once again transform what was natural to something which suits our needs. Our needs are, in the long term, sustainably keeping at the very least ten billion people alive, and permaculture is one of the ways in which we can both imagine that and start to bring it into fruition. However, our own relations and structures might prevent a total change in our transformation of nature in its present state, which is why political action is as important, if not more so, than homesteading or community gardens.
Idk man, I don't think overpopulation is an issue and I despise imagining that there is something uniquely bad about artificial things and that they are somehow different from nature. They are nature, their creation is our nature, and we ourselves are creations of nature. It's only how we have in the last few millenia, really even few centuries, been doing those transformations which is the true issue.
End of insane HN rant I guess. There's obviously no infinite growth, but we're also far from overpopulation. The world is not a Malthusian nightmare, it's not that resources cause population to explode and conditions to worsen, we can see that in the richer nations of the Earth where instead resources cause population to drop after a point. We'll naturally reach our peak well within the theoretical maximum carrying capacity of the Earth, that's my point. Permaculture is one important step on that path. Neo-Malthusians and genocidal maniacs and eco-fascists disgust me to no end.
Literally, honey bees can't exist unless their environment supports them. Their way of life has to adapt to the environment around them, not the other way around. This is made obvious in a number of ways: they literally biologically are adapted to make their particular type of home, their social structure is required to support said biology, they hibernate, they're susceptible to environmental damage and pests, they depend on a symbiotic relationship with flowering plants for pollen, etc.
Humans simply don't have any such limitations. If an environment isn't suitable to them, they just change the environment (a fairly novel thing in human history), or build something to support themselves and their lifestyle, rather than adapt a symbiotic relationship with their environment. Humans can pretty much do whatever they want regardless of the environment. This makes them highly adaptable, but also means they can parasitize the entire ecosystem until there's no resources left to adapt. The further they move towards collapsing ecology, the more dependent they grow on an ecology they create artificially to sustain themselves.
Therefore while bees can continue to thrive as long as the environment supports them, the environment can only thrive as long as humans support it.
There's no reason to suggest we will hit some peak only for it to drop off. We're not like parasites that are subject to an environment; we transcend the environment. We aren't limited by it. It's possible we will simply extinguish all natural resources (intentionally or not), and then either leave the planet or die off. There are no guarantees. Unchecked human growth really could kill everything.
1 hectate per person is easy to get in any suburban neighborhood if everyone can agree that a stable healthy food supply is more important than endless lawns or empty lots.
The resources are all there, we just grossly misallocate and squander them.
First, assuming that people are growing all sorts of things, and not trying to monoculture, you will get an explosion in different kinds of insects and their predators.
Second, you should get an explosion of colour
thirdly, assuming the growth of trees, creepers and other vines, coolers daytime temperatures, and reduced winds
fourthly, and possibly more importantly, much higher water retention.